Hello and my apologies for the lateness of this reading roundup. I started a new role at work this week so it’s been a very busy week. I’m switching from shiftwork to a more regular Mon-Fri job, so my blog posts may be somewhat irregular until I get myself into a new routine. Please bear with me. I did read some great books over the last little while. I read and finished Furthermore, Shatter Me author Tahereh Mafi’s foray into middle grade. While it wasn’t really my cup of tea, the writing was beautiful. I will be writing a full review of Furthermore shortly, so keep an eye out for it. I hadn’t intended to pick up Ernest Cline’s Ready Player One, but I started reading/listening to the sample and I was hooked. I’m about four fifths of the way through it, so again expect a review at some point in the future. This week I finally started to read another of the ARCs I received from BEA, Replica by Lauren Oliver. It moved up my TBR because of the EpicReads First 5 newsletter to which I am subscribed. This is a email where they send you the first five…
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 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…
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…
First of all, my apologies for not having posted much in the last few weeks – I’ve been too busy reading to write about reading. As I have mentioned in previous posts, in the months of October and November there were a shedload of new releases about which I was very excited. I’ve only just now caught up with all of the new books in my life. Some of the reviews will be quite brief as it’s been quite a while and several books ago that I read them It will take a couple of posts to go through them all so let’s get started. [book-info] The Scorpion Rules is the first in Erin Bow’s Children of Peace YA series. In Bow’s world, peace is maintained by an AI named Talis who forces each country’s leaders to provide a child or grandchild as a Child of Peace – if the country enters a war, the hostage is killed. The book centres around a young princess named Greta, whose orderly world as a hostage is shaken by the arrival of a new Child of Peace, Elian. Elian is new to the hostage system and struggles to adapt. Things escalate when Greta’s…
One of the books I started listening to this week is Because You’ll Never Meet Me by Leah Thomas. This is the story of two young socially isolated boys who become penpals. Their respective issues – one is highly allergic to electricity and the other requires an electrical pacemaker – precludes their ever meeting. I’m about a third of the way through it and am very much enjoying it. It is written in the style of letters the two boys send to each other – which means it’s about as perfect for the audiobook format as you can get. Both narrators are doing an excellent job. I may do a full review on this later, so I won’t say much more. [book-info number=1] Another book I started reading this week was Patricia Briggs’ Dead Heat, the fourth in her Alpha and Omega series. I felt in the mood for some contemporary fantasy. I’ve only just started, but so far, so good. Briggs is usually a reliable go-to for this kind of good, and her characters are generally well-developed and interesting. I’m beginning to feel though that she has just about come to the natural end of the stories she can…
Yikes, has it really been a month since my last reading roundup? My apologies for the delay – life got in the way as it often does. As I’m back on nightshifts again (cue: sob, wailing, gnashing of teeth) I have been listening to a lot of audiobooks. My favourites, and a highlight of my reading/listening month, were the NPR radio adaptations of George Lucas’ Star Wars. I picked the first one up, Star Wars, some time ago when it was one of Audible’s Daily Deals but had not got around to listening to it. I rectified that mistake last weekend and loved it. This adaptation has been licensed from George Lucas, so they were able to incorporate John Williams’ iconic music and the sound effects from the movies (blasters! lightsabers! R2D2!). It boasts an excellent cast including Mark Hamill and Anthony Daniels from the movies. At first it did take me a short while to adapt to the different voices for Leia, Han and Darth Vader, but the production quality and the excellence of the cast soon made me forget about that. As I’ve said before on this blog, the original Star Wars movies have such strong themes and…
Good afternoon! I’m sorry for the lack of posts in the last couple of weeks, but I have been on vacation. It was a very relaxing vacation spent visiting family and I got to read a whole bunch, which was excellent. With being on holiday, I added so much to my library. I was really in the mood for a quirky contemporary romance, so I added Rainbow Rowell’s Landline to my collection and read and finished it straight away. It was an excellent choice and I devoured it straight up. I loved the main character, Georgie McCool – what an awesome name! – and adored how her relationship with her husband was explored in both past and present. Definitely worth picking up. Red Queen by Victoria Aveyard has been promoted very heavily recently, and I gave in and bought it. I ended up really enjoying it and will write a full review soon. Despite not being blown over by Bloodlines by Richelle Mead, I was really in the mood for that kind of book and after leafing through Golden Lily in a bookstore I picked it up in Kindle format. I did enjoy it more than the first book in…
So welcome to my first reading roundup of 2015! Yay! The first thing I want to talk about this week is my GoodReads reading challenge for 2015. I failed to achieve my goal of 100 books last year – I read 91 – and I noticed that because I was listening to more audiobooks, books were taking me longer to finish. This year I have set my goal for 75 books. That’s still just under a book and a half a week. My family was also very generous to me over the festive season. I was showered with Amazon and iTunes vouchers – thanks everyone, you know me well! I also received the gift of Amy Poehler’s Yes, Please! book in my Christmas stocking. I look forward to reading that. This week I did something I don’t often do – I accepted I was never going to finish a book and removed it from my currently reading list. The book in question was Endgame by James Frey and Nils Johnson-Shelton. I’m sorry, but life is too short to stick with a book that really isn’t doing anything for me. You can check out my review to see why I dumped…