Earlier this month Kayla from BooksandLala (one of my favorite BookTubers) posted her annual “Choosing My Next Read | Scavenger Hunt Decides My TBR” video — this scavenger hunt sounded so fun that I wanted to try it this month, and me being me, decided to find a way to turn it into a blog post!
Truthfully, I’m not totally sure how this will work from vlog to blog format, but I thought it would be fun to try. So, in this post, I’m going to take you through the scavenger hunt with me and we’re going to find out together what my next read will be, and let me tell you…it’s a process to get there! Let’s get started!
Prompt #1 — Grab your favorite book. Go to the acknowledgments, and the first name you see, find a book by an author with the same name
Of course, when I hear “favorite book” I automatically think of M.L. Rio’s If We Were Villains, so my first step was to head over to my IWWV shelf (yes, there is a whole shelf just for IWWV) and grab one of my copies.
Opening up to the acknowledgments, the first name I saw was Arielle, but guess what? I have no books written by an author with that name, so I went to the next name I saw which was Christine
And of course, a Christine was nowhere to be found. We’re doing GREAT so far! I do have lots of Agatha Christie, but I feel like that doesn’t count. So, back to the book we go.
I decided to look a little further down the page and saw the name Madison and…nothing!
Are you on the edge of your seat yet? Well, the next name I saw was Natalie and I do have a book written by an author with that same name!
This led me to Stone Blind by Natalie Haynes!
Prompt #2 — Pick something on that cover and find another book with the thing in the title
Well, that was a process, but we got there eventually! So, prompt #1 led me to Stone Blind by Natalie Haynes. I’ve had this book on my TBR for well over a year now…I was actually gifted a copy for my birthday last year, and I started it towards the end of 2023 but wasn’t in the mood to read it, and decided to do a soft DNF and now I’m just waiting for my mythology obsession to come back in full force and then I’ll probably read it.
As this is a cover prompt, let’s take a look at this cover:
I love this cover; I think it’s gorgeous. The colors are beautiful (that greenish teal? Yes, let’s have more books with this color on them, thank you) — I like the teal with the gold and dark green, I just find this to be a very aesthetically pleasing cover. We’ve got snakes, a face, vases, and leaves, so there are a lot of options here!
The first book on my shelf that caught my eye was Daisy Jones and the Six by Taylor Jenkins Reid, and decided to just go with that one since it has a face on it and it took long enough to find Stone Blind, so I wanted to go with the first book I found that fit the prompt 🤣
Prompt #3 — Go to page 50, line 5. Pick a word from that line and find a title with that word
Did I get distracted rereading my annotations? Yes, yes I did. Anyway, it turns out there isn’t technically a page 50 in Daisy Jones and the Six, because page 49 is the start of a new section and then you flip over the page and it’s blank.
I thought about just doing page 51, but then the 5th line was just “[Van] Nuys, California”,
and I know for a fact that I don’t own a book with either of those words in the title, so back to the bookshelves we go!
Above Daisy is my copy of Cover Story by Susan Rigetti (highly recommend if you haven’t read it, you can check out my review here), which also has a face on it! I also love that this cover has other face silhouettes in her hair, which kind of gives off the same vibe as the snakes for Medusa’s hair (well, at least it does to me anyway).
Well, guess what, this one wasn’t more helpful than Daisy, because page 50 of Cover Story happens to be an email, and the 5th line just says “HR”
annnnnnnnd back to the shelves we go, this time to pick up the book directly beneath Cover Story, Ophelia After All by Racquel Marie
We finally have an actual sentence on page 50! Huzzah! Page 50, line 5 of Ophelia After All reads: “They bounce softly around her face in symmetrical coils”
When it came to picking one of those words for the next prompt I wanted to go with softly because I thought that would be a great word for this, but apparently, I own no books with the word softly in the title! The next word I chose was around, and once again, nothing! The next word I chose was face, and I do have a book with the word face in the title. Yellowface by David Henry Hwang!
Prompt #4 — Find a 5-star read with the same colors on the cover
Prompt 3 led to me Yellowface by David Henry Hwang, which is a great play, I highly recommend it. Now, for this prompt, I’m supposed to find a 5-star read with the same colors on it. My copy of Yellowface, unsurprisingly, has a yellow background with black text (we’re not counting the blue “signed copy” Drama Book Shop sticker), so now, I need to find a 5-star read that has black and yellow on the cover. (photo of Yellowface)
I headed over to Goodreads to help me with this one since I didn’t feel like going through ALL of the books on my shelf for this one. The first one I saw that had a lot of black and yellow on it was Macbeth by William Shakespeare, but for the next prompt I don’t think Macbeth is going to help me in any way, so I decided to keep scrolling. The next 5-star read I saw that had black and yellow on the cover was The Starless Sea by Erin Morgenstern!
Prompt #5 — Find a book with the same number of pages (hint hint, Goodreads is your friend)
The Starless Sea is an absolute win and such a stunner of a book — I want to reread it soon as it’s been so long since I last read it! However, it’s pretty long at 494 pages, so let’s head over to Goodreads and see if I can find any other books I own that have the same number of pages.
Honestly, I thought this one was going to be difficult, but it turns out that Our Violent Ends by Chloe Gong is exactly 494 pages! Truly, this was the easiest of all the prompts since picking my favorite book to start this whole thing! Let’s head onto prompt 6!
Prompt #6 — Flip open to any page. The first name you see, find a book by an author who shares that name
Oh god, this prompt scares me for multiple reasons. This was already so hard with the dedications prompt, and the names in Our Violent Ends are not the most common authors on my shelves, I can tell you that much! But, let’s try it and see where it leads.
I flipped to page 208 and the first two names there are (unsurprisingly) Juliette and Kathleen.
This is now another instance where my books owned spreadsheet comes in handy because I don’t want to search all 500 books I own trying to find one of these names. Let’s see if anything comes up (I am going to accept different spellings of the names if either comes up!), and I am not at all shocked to see that I do not own any books written by authors named Juliet/Juliette or Kathleen. I have a lot of books with the name Juliet/Juliette in the title, but none written by someone with that name. Back to the drawing board here!
This time I flipped to page 94, and there were no names there so I went to page 95.
The first name I saw was Juliette again, but since I just did that I decided it didn’t count. The next name I saw was Edward, so let’s see if I own a book written by someone named Edward (I also think this is unlikely, but let’s see!). It turns out, I do have a book written by someone named Edward! And that book is The Complete Book of Les Misérables by Edward Behr. This scavenger hunt taking me from a Romeo and Juliet retelling to a book about the development of Les Mis is so on brand for me, I can’t believe it. Okay, onto prompt 7!
Prompt #7 — Find another title with the same number of letters
And here is where it gets tricky once again. The Complete Book of Les Misérables has 30 letters in it, and now I need to find a different book that contains 30 letters in the title…why is this scavenger hunt doing this to me? Well, I do think that I’d be able to find a book that has that many letters in the title if we continue looking at my non-fiction theatre reads, however, I don’t think that’s going to help me much when it comes to the prompt after this one. So we’re going to check my fiction shelves first and see if there’s anything that has 30 letters in the title.
I found multiple books that had just a little over 30 letters, Everyone in My Family Has Killed Someone by Benjamin Stevenson, The Mysterious Case of the Alperton Angels by Janice Hallett, The Very Secret Society of Irregular Witches by Sangu Mandanna and The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo by Taylor Jenkins Reid, which surprised me because 30 letters feel like a lot, but hey, what do I know?
The next book that I thought might be 30 letters was The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes and you cannot imagine my disappointment when I realized that it was only 29 letters. I counted it 3 times to make sure and was disappointed every time. So I went back to my non-fiction theatre shelf and it turns out they all are either too short or too long…
Since the closest I could get was 29 with The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes, I decided to just go with that, so onto prompt 8 we go!
Prompt #8 — Find a book with a similar cover
I’m glad that it ended up being this book for this prompt because I have the new Scholastic UK editions of The Hunger Games series and I am absolutely in love with these covers, I mean, look at how gorgeous they are!
I love the orange and yellow with the green leaves, and the snake and the mockingjay — it’s just so stunning! I’m going to focus on colors and see if I can find any books that I own with orange/yellow covers, with a touch of green and maybe a bird on it. I might be able to find something similar. I searched my red/yellow/orange shelf and while they’re not super super similar, I’m going to go with The Seven Year Slip by Ashley Poston!
Both books have orange and yellow on the cover, with orange being the dominant color. The Seven Year Slip also has leaves and some little birds! I’m gonna call this one a win!
Prompt #9 — Flip to a random page. Point at a word, and find that word in a book title on your TBR shelf
And now it’s time to do the prompt that is going to determine my next read! Ah! I’m excited and scared, let’s do it!
Okay, I randomly opened the book to page 210 and the first word I pointed to was mafia
…well, I know for a fact that I don’t have a book on my TBR with the word mafia in the title, so we’re trying that again (but staying on the same page).
The next word I pointed to was motioned, so let’s see if there’s a book on my TBR with the word motioned in the title. As I predicted, motioned was nowhere to be seen, so we’re trying again. Hopefully, the third time’s the charm.
The third word I pointed at was you and I know that I have a book with the word you in the title on my TBR, so…
Prompt #10 — Read
That means that my next read will be Alone with You in the Ether by Olivie Blake!
Cue the screams and cheers besties, I am FINALLY going to read Alone with You in the Ether! We are not gonna talk about how long it’s been on my TBR, we’re not gonna talk about the fact that it’s an Olivie Blake book and I haven’t already read it, we’re just gonna be excited and celebrate the fact that it’s finally going to be read.
I’ve truly heard nothing but great things about this book and it’s one of my 5-star predictions, so I’m excited to read it, but like…no pressure or anything! That may actually be why I’ve put it off for so long, but I’ve really wanted to get to it, and now it’s finally happening! To quote Glinda from Wicked, “Let us be glad! Let us be grateful!”
And there you have it! I had a lot of fun while doing the scavenger hunt, and I hope that translates to this blog post. I thought it would be fun to try something new, and I may try it again at another point this year because it led to me picking up a book that’s been on my TBR for a long time!
Have you ever tried something like this to help you pick your next read? If you haven’t before, do you think you’ll try it now? Let me know in the comments. Until next time! 💜
