If you’re reading this, I am hip-deep in the newly released DLC for Animal Crossing: New Horizons. If I miss a post or don’t read as much this month, this is why. This is a game that I have managed to play almost every day for over a year and a half, and I still haven’t put as many hours into the game as some people I know. It’s crazy. I do be loving Lucky, though. He’s my favorite villager. Well, him and Raymond.

Anyway, you didn’t come here for a treatise on AC: NH. You came here for First Lines Friday!

First Lines Fridays is a weekly feature for book lovers hosted by Wandering Words. What if instead of judging a book by its cover, its author, or its prestige, we judged it by its opening lines?

• Pick a book off your shelf (it could be your current read or on your TBR) and open to the first page
• Copy the first few lines, but don’t give anything else about the book away just yet – you need to hook the reader first
• Finally… reveal the book!

The Lines:

“I haul my sister’s luggage down the stairs, letting the suitcase strike every step. The noise reverberates into the house and joins with the echoes of thunder in a foreboding rhythm. Nevertheless, I feel a sliver of pleasure whenever I drop the wheels onto the undeserving hardwood.”

Intrigued?

That Way Madness Lies: 15 of Shakespeare’s Most Notable Works Reimagined Edited by Dahlia Adler

West Side Story. 10 Things I Hate About You. Kiss Me, Kate. Contemporary audiences have always craved reimaginings of Shakespeare’s most beloved works. Now, some of today’s best writers for teens take on the Bard in these 15 whip-smart and original retellings!

Contributors include Dahlia Adler (reimagining The Merchant of Venice), Kayla Ancrum (The Taming of the Shrew), Lily Anderson (All’s Well That Ends Well), Melissa Bashardoust (A Winter’s Tale), Patrice Caldwell (Hamlet), A.R. Capetta and Cory McCarthy (Much Ado About Nothing), Brittany Cavallaro (Sonnet 147), Joy McCullough (King Lear), Anna-Marie McLemore (Midsummer Night’s Dream), Samantha Mabry (Macbeth), Tochi Onyebuchi (Coriolanus), Mark Oshiro (Twelfth Night), Lindsay Smith (Julius Caesar), Kiersten White (Romeo and Juliet), and Emily Wibberley and Austin Siegemund-Broka (The Tempest).

Apparently, I just like short story collections. You can’t tell me, or my pocketbook, otherwise. Is this book on my TBR for this month? Nope. Do I want to read it? Absolutely. Sigh. The things I do to myself.