Hello, yes I know I’ve missed a reading roundup – my apologies for that. I’ve had a lot of shifts at work and was working some crazy hours over the last few weeks. Also I had a virus which left me rather run down. Also, there were some great season finale TV shows on – Game of Thrones and Outlander – which I really wanted to watch. Also LEGO Star Wars: The Force Awakens won’t play itself. Anyway, enough excuses. Right now I’m in a kind of reading slump. I have many, many books in my TBR, but none of them are taking my fancy. Don’t you just hate that? I have hopes that Snow Like Ashes by Sara Raasch may help ease me out of that slump. Since my last roundup, I have managed to finish a few books, and consign one to my Did Not Finish pile. Sorry The Crown’s Game, you just didn’t grab my interest fast enough. The books I completed were Paper and Fire by Rachel Caine, for which you should have seen a full review go up earlier this week, Stealing Snow by Danielle Paige, one of the ARCs I received at BEA 2016 and…
Good morning. This week I’ve been really unfocussed in my reading. I’ve dipped into several books, but not finished that many of them. It’s been a crazy busy week for me at work, which hasn’t helped. OK I admit it. Any free time I’ve had I’ve spent playing Lego Star Wars: The Force Awakens rather than reading. Those games are addictive. One book I did finish and enjoyed was His Majesty’s Dragon by Naomi Novik. This is the first in the Temeraire series in which the Napoleonic Wars are reimagined with dragons. I loved the concept, characters and themes. I especially enjoyed the relationship between Laurence and Temeraire, the dragon. The ninth and final book in the series, League of Dragons, has just been published. Much as I enjoyed the series, I’m not certain I want to invest the time to read the rest of the eight, so I cheated and read Tor.com’s Temeraire reread. I’m hoping this will catch me up sufficiently and I will pick up League of Dragons in audiobook format – narrator is Simon Vance, how could I not go for the audiobook? – as soon as I have a spare Audible credit. I gave His…
Good morning and welcome to another reading roundup. And happy St Jean to my fellow Quebecers! [book-info]This week I read the wonderful Iron to Iron, the prequel novella to Ryan Graudin’s Wolf by Wolf. Like Wolf by Wolf, it is set in an alternate universe in which the Axis won World War II. It tells the story of Luka Löwe and Adele Wolfe’s burgeoning romance during the 1955 Axis Tour, a relationship which causes much of the tension in Wolf by Wolf. Within a couple of pages I was immediately back in the world created by Graudin and back following the Axis Tour. I listened to Wolf by Wolf in audiobook and although this novella is an ebook only, I still heard it in my mind with Christa Lewis’ voice. It’s not often that I have such a strong link with narration. For those of you who have not yet read Wolf by Wolf (and why not may I ask?) the Axis Tour is a motorcycle race between Berlin and Tokyo, with the winner receiving an Iron Cross and many accolades. Iron to Iron is told from Luka’s perspective, and we learn more about him. Both he and Adele…
Good morning and welcome to another reading roundup. It’s been fairly quiet week on the reading front. I’ve been working to finish Mark Lawrence’s The Wheel of Osheim which I finally did. Expect a full review next week. I have also started the audiobook of Amie Kaufman and Jay Kristoff’s Illuminae. I picked up the sequel, Gemina, at BEA and want to refresh my memory. In terms of audiobooks, Illuminae is superb. It is a full, multi-cast performance and is definitely worth listening to. I have Gemina in hard copy ARC form, but I will certainly be picking up the audiobook if it’s anything like the first in the series. On non book related news, Apple announced its big updates to iOS and OS X (renamed MacOS.) There are a couple of updates in particular about which I’m really excited. First is the integration with VoIP apps (such as Skype) so that they can be handled like normal iPhone calls. My parents live in Scotland and aren’t very comfortable yet with the internet, so I use Skype to landline to call them most of the time. Skype has a nice monthly rate for unlimited calls to UK landlines. It will…
Good morning and first in non reading related news, this week LEGO Dimensions released the trailer for their 2016/2017 expansion packs. it’s worth checking out that trailer if only to watch MI’s Ethan Hunt rappel down a rope simply to scratch Scooby Doo’s belly or to see Wyldstyle run over Lord Voldemort on a motorcycle. For those of you unfamiliar with LEGO Dimensions, it’s a toys-to-life video game. I wrote a whole blog post on it. The joy of this game is that you can mix and match your fandoms – so, for example, I took great pleasure in having Doctor Who drive the Batmobile through the streets of Minas Tirith. Now, given that you have to fork out hard cash for new characters in this game, it can be very expensive. Many of the new packs announced in the trailer are completely uninteresting to me. A few more (A-Team, Mission Impossible, E.T.) were yeah I’d play this if you gave it to me for free and only two are ones that had me reaching for my wallet. One of these is the Harry Potter team pack containing Harry and Lord Voldemort. I have it on good authority – Pottermore –…
So this last week I finished Claudia Gray’s 1000 Pieces of You which I mentioned adding to my library in my last reading roundup. Sci-Fi is a genre into which I dip now and again, although I’m not an expert on it. 1000 Pieces of You is a well put together, fun read (well, actually, fun listen as I listened to it primarily in audiobook) – expect a full review on it soon. I also started Sarah J Maas’ A Court of Mist and Fury, the sequel to A Court of Thorns and Roses. At first, I admit, I struggled to get into the story. Slowly though I got sucked into the Feyre/Rhys storyline and am now really enjoying it. Maas has a very “modern” writing style despite this being epic fantasy. I’ve also spent quite a bit of time this week marathoning the first season of 24 on Netflix. Jack Bauer for the win! Although it’s been some time since I watched the show, I remembered all the twists and turns, so it wasn’t quite as exciting for me as it was the first time I watched it. As usual, I watched this week’s episode of Game of…
Hello and welcome to my reading roundup for this week. I have read/listened to a couple of books about which I’d like to tell you. [book-info]The first of these is Caraval by Stephanie Garber. Now, you won’t find this in the stores yet; it was one of the Advance Reader Copies I picked up at BEA and it won’t come out until January 2017. I won’t say too much about it – I’ll post a full review nearer the time – but let me say you have a treat in store. Garber has created a wonderful, whimsical world in Caraval with lots of mysteries, red herrings and weird characters. I have the feeling that this first book is only starting to scratch the surface of what we will find out about this world. This is a definite five out of five for me. [book-info number=1]I wasn’t nearly so happy with the second book I listened to, which was The Star Touched Queen by Roshani Chokshi. This is a retelling of the Persephone/Hades story and unfortunately, it failed to grab my attention. I kept falling asleep while listening to the audiobook. I forced myself to finish it, but it was a…
Hello and welcome to another reading roundup. I’ve clearly been on a bit of a social history kick lately – all of the books I’ve read and/or listened to in the last couple of weeks have had social change as a strong theme. Let me tell you about them. [book-info]The Summer Before the War by Helen Simonson is a slice-of-life look at an English town in the summer of 1914, just before the First World War. This conflict had a profound impact on British life, especially in terms of the class system and women’s role in society and so this particular period of time about which Simonson writes is a real turning point. The author clearly has a strong knowledge of and interest in social history and it comes across very well in the book. Add to this wonderful, engaging characters (I’m heavily invested in our protagonist Beatrice Nash and young Snout) and this is a great read. I’m about two thirds of the way through the audiobook and enjoying it very much. Fiona Hardingham is undertaking narration duties and does an excellent job of distinguishing all the characters. [book-info number=1]The second social historical audiobook I’m enjoying is Julian Fellowes’…
Hello and welcome to another reading roundup. Again, it’s been a month where I’ve really struggled to focus on reading and blogging. I really should be more ruthless about putting books into my Did Not Finish pile. I spent too much of the month plodding through books which really weren’t doing anything for me. [book-info]With regards to Yellow Brick War by Danielle Paige, I’ll be perfectly honest and say that my opinion and rating is heavily influenced by my – mistaken – impression that this was the final book in the Dorothy Must Die series. This is a series involving an updating and reimagining of the world of L Frank Baum’s Wizard of Oz. I had been expecting, and looking forward to, resolution to the plot points introduced in Dorothy Must Die and The Wicked Will Rise. So coming towards the end of the book when I realised there were no resolutions coming, I felt annoyed and frustrated. My own fault, I freely admit it. Had I known there was one more book to come, I could have better appreciated the continued excellent worldbuilding and character development in Yellow Brick War. I will certainly read the conclusion when it comes…
Gosh, it’s been quite a while since I last posted. My apologies. I seem to have been going through not quite a reading slump but a lack of focus in my reading – I’ve been all over the place. I’ve started so many books and not actually finished them before moving onto another book. Sigh. Some of the books that I have managed to finish have been by Brandon Sanderson who published not one, not two but THREE books in the last couple of months. These are: Bands of Mourning, Mistborn: A Secret History and Calamity. Bands of Mourning and Mistborn: A Secret History are both set in Sanderson’s Mistborn world, the first being the third in the four book Wax and Wayne series and Secret History a short novella set just after the events of the original trilogy. While I very much enjoyed Bands of Mourning – the pacing, characters and plot were all wonderful, and an incredible ending – I was less happy with Secret History. For those of you unaware, all of Sanderson’s adult novels are set in the same world, which he calls the cosmere. In other words, Mistborn, Warbreaker and the Stormlight Archives are all…