Hi everyone! I was nominated for the Sunshine Blogger Award by the lovely Emer over at A Little Haze Book Blog – thank you so much!! 😊 Anyway, if you aren’t already following her, I highly recommend you go do it now, because she’s one of the kindest and most amazing people in this community!!

What is the Sunshine Blogger Award?

The Sunshine Blogger Award is given to those who are creative, positive and inspiring while spreading sunshine to the blogging community.

How does it work?

• Thank the blogger(s) who nominated you in a blog post and link back to their blog.
• Answer the 11 questions sent by the person who nominated you.
• Nominate 11 new blogs to receive the award and write them 11 new questions.
• List the rules and display the Sunshine Blogger Award logo in your post and/or on your blog.

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Questions set by Emer:

1. What is your favorite bookish trope?

Ooh, I have a lot! But one trope in particular that I am an absolute sucker for is when people pretend to be something they’re not / disguise themselves in order to gain access to places denied to them. Like when a girl disguises herself as a boy to become a warrior or gain access to education, or when a royal pretends to be a commoner so they can sneak out of their palace and see what is really going on in their kingdom. I absolutely adore these types of things, so if you have any good recommendations, let me know!

2. What is your favorite song / album / playlist right now?

I listen to most of my music when I’m in the car, so ever since the pandemic started and I no longer have to commute, my consumption has gone down drastically. But I’ve recently become reobsessed with some of my old playlists – one song I’ve particularly enjoyed is Bleeding Out (Imagine Dragons). I’m seriously asking myself how it ever disappeared from my radar!

Also, I’ve been listening to Hilary Hahn’s recording of Bach’s Partita II on repeat because I’m practicing that at the moment. It’s kind of depressing though, because my version sounds even more abysmal when contrasted with her epicness….

3. What has been your favorite read of 2020 so far?

The How and the Why by Cynthia Hand! It follows an adopted teenager searching for her birth mother, and it was just absolutely amazing! If you aren’t already tired of me pushing this at you all the time, you can check out my review here!

4. If you could live for a day in the world of any book what book would you choose?

I want to go to Hogwarts, obviously! But as a witch, please! Seeing a moldy old ruin with a “No Trespassing” sign because of Muggle protection spells would probably be a waste of this opportunity. So, alternatively, I also think it would be pretty neat to visit the Castle from the Septimus Heap series!

5. Pizza or pasta?

It depends on my mood! (And, let’s be honest, on restaurant happy hours 😁). Right now, though, I’m leaning more towards pasta.

6. What are your feelings on loaning books to friends and family?

I do it all the time! I love having more people to talk about the books with, and I’ve almost never had bad experiences lending something out. Plus, often people will loan me a book of theirs in return, which is very convenient when you live in a country where your fellow English students have more English books than libraries do…

7. How do you feel about writing in books, or purposefully breaking book spines, or dog-earring pages?

I hate it! Except the breaking spines part, which I wouldn’t do on purpose, but don’t mind when it happens. Writing in books is probably the worst, because I re-read a ton and would get super distracted from the story if there were notes on the page. I always refused to do this in school and would rather copy really long passages onto a separate piece of paper so I could annotate them there. I know. I’m weird.

However, I don’t mind at all when other people do any of this stuff! If you love to annotate or dog-ear your books, that’s really cool!! It’s just not for me personally.

8. Which do you find easier to write, a book review for a five star rated book or one for a one star rated book?

One star, probably 😁 With five-star books, I just never feel like my mediocre review-skills do the amazingness of the books enough justice. However, I must admit that I write a lot more full reviews for the books I liked than the ones I didn’t, just because those are the ones that I really want other people to pick up, too. In fact, I think I don’t even have a full review for a one star book on here – the lowest rated ones (Absalom, Absalom and Bayreuther Abgründe) were both for two-star reads…

9. What is the post you are most proud of on your blog? Share a link to it.

The posts I’m definitely the proudest of are the ones featuring my own writing. I put way more effort into them than anything else, though I know they’re also what interests my readers the least 😉 However, if you’d like to check any of them out, I recommend Psychopath or The Stars in the Sky, which are my favorite short stories out of the ones I’ve written so far.

Also, some of my more reading related posts I really like are 25 Bookish Facts About Me (it was so hard to come up with 25 things about me that were even mildly interesting lol), My Bookish Pet Peeves (this was the first post I at least tried to take semi-decent pictures for), or my Crimes of Grindelwald review (I loved getting to be a full-on nerd in this one). Those are actually all from the time before I made this blog available publicly (for a long time, only my real-life friends had access because I was so terrified of putting myself out there 🙈), so most of you probably haven’t seen them yet.

10. If someone was starring in the film of your life, who would you cast as you?

I honestly have no idea. I feel like I’d need someone who could really nail my klutzy awkwardness and overenthusiastic adoration of math. Maybe McKenna Grace could play the kid-version of me – she did do the mathy geekiness justice in Gifted… Though if they truly want to do this right, I guess they should kind of look like me and be fluent in German and English. And they should at least be able to properly fake their violin playing, if they can’t play themselves. If you have any actor suggestions, feel free to leave them in the comments 😉 I don’t think the matter is very pressing, though, since it’s highly unlikely any movie about me would be interesting enough to make it worthwhile for producers. And if they do, I think it would probably be best to focus on my cats rather than me anyway – they’re total crowd-pleasers!

11. Novelty socks or novelty t-shirts?

Both, obviously! Though in public settings where you’re expected to be professional, I’ll have to admit that novelty socks are better, because you can just sneakily wear them anyway 😊

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And that’s it for my answers! Thanks again, Emer, for coming up with these questions and tagging me – these were so much fun to answer!

I nominate:

• Althea @Althea Reads
• Sam @Dear Bookshelves,
• Elaine @Elaine Howlin
• Evelyn @Evelyn Reads
• Line @First Line Reader
• Angela @For the Love of Books
• Maisy @Hawthorn Book Reviews
• Madeline @Mad’s Books
• JJ @notesbyj
• Sofia @Soph’s Book World
• Abi @The Knights Who Say Book

Obviously, you only have to do this if you want to, so no pressure if you don’t! And if you already did this at some point, I hope you don’t mind getting a different set of questions – feel free to take your time answering!

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My eleven questions for those tagged:

1. What is an interesting non-bookish fact about you that most people don’t know?
2. Has your opinion on a book ever changed as you got older? For example: Is there a book you used to dislike that you now love, or a book you adored but fell out of love with?
3. Which fictional food would you love to try someday?
4. You get to resurrect a fictional character of your choice, but in order to gain the energy necessary to restore their life, you have to kill a different character. Who would you save and who would you sacrifice?
5. Do you ever feel second-hand embarrassment when reading? If yes, name a scene that really made you cringe!
6. If you could have one item of clothing from a book, what would you pick? Be aware that any magical properties won’t transfer to our world.
7. Do you speak any other languages? If so, what is one unique thing about them? If not – are there any languages you would like to learn?
8. What is your biggest bookish pet peeve?
9. What would you like to see more of in books?
10. What is the first book you ever read by yourself?
11. Recommend a book that you think doesn’t get enough love!

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And that’s it for today! Let me know what you thought of my answers and whether you agree with me or not 😊 What would your answers to some of these be? Let’s chat in the comments!