May Summary

June 11, 2018June 14, 2018Leave a comment

May felt like a really slow month for me, but I still ended up knocking back almost 3,000 pages, so definitely nothing to feel bad about. My summary for May is:

Books read: 7
Pages read: 2,750
Main genres: Fantasy and Mystery
Favourite book: Children of Blood and Bone

I started the month off with an advanced reading copy of The Death of Mrs. Westaway from netgalley. I’m a little bit obsessed with Ruth Ware, so I was super excited about this one. Unfortunately it didn’t end of being one of my favourite Ruth Ware novels, but I did still enjoy it and I will definitely still be reading all her books.

After that I finally picked up a copy of Children of Blood and Bone, which I have been hearing SO MUCH hype about since it came out. I was worried it might have been over-hyped, but it definitely was not and I really liked this West-African inspired fantasy novel. It had several different perspectives and while I thought it was a little predictable, it was so fast paced and thoughful that I loved every second of it!

I went back and forth between fantasy and mystery novels this month. I really like mystery novels, but I don’t tend to read that many of them. I had 2 winners in May though! First I read Sometimes I Lie for my book club. I admit, I didn’t really want to read this one because it sounded kind of boring with the main character being in a coma. But it ended up being super compelling and have a million twists that I never saw coming.

The other mystery novel I picked up was Kristen Lepionka’s second book in her Roxane Weary series, What You Want To See. I loved Lepionka’s debut novel and I think Roxane Weary is a great PI/character. Her second novel did not disappoint and just made me love Roxane even more.

I had a few new fantasy releases that I just HAD to read in May. Sarah J Maas’ novella, A Court of Frost and Starlight, and the third book in the Ruined series, Allied, both came out on May 1. I wasn’t expecting much from A Court of Frost and Starlight, which is supposed to bridge the gap between the original series and a new spinoff series, and I got a story just as underwhelming as I expected. I have a whole ton of opinions on why this book was so bad, so read my full review for more. Allied was definitely better, although still a little underwhelming for the final book in a trilogy. I did like it, but sadly it didn’t have the same flair as the first two books.

I finished off the month with a great book though! I picked up The Astonishing Color of After on a whim and ended up loving it! It’s about a teenage girl who in her grief at losing her mother to suicide, believes she has come back as a bird. It’s full of magical realism and gorgeous writing. It took me a while to get through, but I thought it was a fabulous debut novel.

You’ll notice I didn’t complete a monthly challenge in May, but I have set one for June that I am very excited about!

June Monthly Challenge

June 6, 20184 Comments

I was too busy in May to do a monthly challenge and I actually really missed it. I love the flexibility of just being able to pick any book you want off the shelf, which I rarely do anymore between my challenges, book club, and netgalley reads, but I felt like my reading was a bit aimless without any reading goals to work towards in May.

I’m super excited about my June reading challenge though and I think I’ve picked out 3 great books for it. Historical fiction was my favourite genre for many years, but I’ve been a little fatigued with it over the last few years because I feel the genre is over-saturated with WW1 and 2 novels and books about slavery. So I got a lot more into fantasy and discovered all these YA fantasy series that have huge online followings, but I am starting to get a bit fatigued with this genre now because while there’s so much out there, once you start reading a lot of it, it tends to get a bit repetitive.

In an effort to branch out a little more again and return to a genre I love, I’ve decided that in June my monthly challenge will be to:

Read 3 Historical Novels

It was really hard to narrow it down to just 3 books, because I do have a huge list of historical novels that I’ve been wanting to get to, so I tried to focus on reading about stories set in different countries and different time periods. The three books I picked are:

1. The Great Alone by Kristin Hannah

2. I Was Anastasia by Ariel Lawhorn

3. Fruit of the Drunken Tree by Ingrid Rojas Contreras

I read Kristin Hannah’s other bestseller, The Nightingale, in 2015 with my book club and we all really liked it. My book club liked it a little more than me because this was when I was really getting fatigued with the WW1 and WW2 books, but I did still like it. The Great Alone is her new book and has been getting fantastic reviews – I bought a copy on sale in February and I’ve been trying to get to it ever since. I don’t like to know too much about my books when I start reading them, but this is set in Alaska in 1974 and examines the aftereffects of a former Prisoner of War during the Vietnam War when he returns to Alaska.

I Was Anastasia is a fairly new release, but I feel like I’ve been waiting to read this one since I first saw a synopsis of it months ago. This is actually my book club selection for June, so I’m happy to be able to combine two of my reading lists this month. This is a WW1 book, but bear with me because this sounds different than any other WW1 book I’ve ever read! It’s about the grand duchess Anastasia and her supposed execution with the rest of the Romanov’s during the Russian Revolution. There’s always been speculation that Anastasia may have survived and in this novel, a young girl shows up in Germany 3 years later claiming to be Anastasia. Was anyone else obsessed with 20th Century Fox’ version of Anastasia growing up? Because I was and I am super excited for some bestselling, historical fiction about her! I’m on a journey to the past with this one folks.

My last pick of the month is a brand new, not-yet-released book that I only heard about recently. I’m not even sure where I first heard about Fruit of the Drunken Tree, I think Goodreads may have featured it in one of the lists of their blog, but it sounds so good. It’s a debut novel by Ingrid Rojas Contreras that was inspired by her own life growing up in the 1990’s in Colombia. It’s a coming-of-age story during a period of great upheaval and violence in Colombia and features a piece of history that I am not knowledgeable about and haven’t seen featured in historical fiction before. A big thanks to Penguin Random House Canada, who happily provided me with an advance copy of this book so that I could include it in my monthly challenge.

April Summary

May 24, 2018Leave a comment

Okay, I know, I know! It’s way too late to be posting my April Summary, it’s almost June for heaven’s sake! But please forgive me, I was on vacation for half of May and I never got around to posting it, but I read a lot of books in April that I want to talk about!

As a side note though, I decided not to do a monthly challenge for May. I was fully intending to, but then a whole bunch of new releases came out that I had to read and I only read 2 books the whole 3 weeks I was on vacation, so I ran out of time to do any kind of challenge. But I already have a challenge planned for June that I’m really excited about, so I’ll be back at it soon! Here’s my April Summary:

Books read: 9
Pages read: 3,081
Main genres: Young Adult
Favourite book: The Nowhere Girls

Love Hate & Other Filters by Samira Ahmed

The Queen of Attolia by Megan Whalen Turner

April was the month of YA and audiobooks. I discovered in March that I was digging a lot of the YA audiobooks, so I kept the trend going in April and listened to 3 books, but sadly only one was a winner. The Nowhere Girls was the first book I read in April and ended up being my favourite book of the month. I loved everything about this book. The content, the characters, the audiobook narrator, the book narrative, the writing – it was all fantastic!

The other two audiobooks I listened to were Love, Hate, & Other Filters and A Girl Like That. Both of these books tackled some fairly complex topics and had great diversity, but sadly I didn’t love either. I thought Love, Hate & Other Filters was juvenile and poorly written, though I thought the plot held so much promise. I blame my dislike of A Girl Like That on the audiobook though. I didn’t love the narrator and I found this extremely hard to follow in audiobook form, but I loved that it was set in Saudi Arabia, which is a setting I’ve never read about it a book before.

The Poet X was probably my next favourite read after The Nowhere Girls. It’s a brand new release that’s written in prose (reads like slam poetry), which I also thought was fantastic. The writing was definitely my favourite part of this book, but the main character had a lot of depth, which I really liked.

Last month I read Megan Whalen Turner’s The Thief, so I followed that up with a read of The Queen of Attolia. I had mixed feelings about this one because I’d heard such good things about it and I think my expectations were a little too high and I didn’t like it quite as much as I thought I would, but still a good book and I will definitely be continuing on with the series.

My book club selection for the month was a letdown though. We read The Humans, which had mixed reviews between our members. Some people loved it, but I was really not a fan. It’s a science fiction novel that raises some interesting questions, but that I personally thought had too many plot holes to be engaging.

My last 3 reads were my monthly challenge reads for April. I challenged myself to read 3 award winning books and I loved 2 of 3 of them. I really liked both Aristotle and Dante Discover the Secrets of the Universe and Brown Girl Dreaming. They were both really diverse books that had some great themes and I loved that Brown Girl Dreaming was written in prose. But I felt super bad about not liking The Underground Railroad. It won both the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award, but I just could not get into either the writing or the story. I wanted to love it, but it wasn’t engaging for me. It’s obviously beloved by a lot of other people and I appreciate what the author tried to do with the story – it just wasn’t for me and I can’t pretend that I enjoyed it.

I don’t think May is going to be as successful a reading month, but I’m doing my best to squeeze in a few more books!

April Reading Challenge

April 11, 20183 Comments

I am really late posting my April Reading Challenge, but I have been working on it!

March was probably my least successful reading challenge to date. I really liked The Thief, but I didn’t love either of the other books I read. I may have went too broad with the “read 3 fantasy books” idea, so I’ve decided to narrow it down a little more this month. My April Reading Challenge will be to:

Read 3 award-winning books

The three books I’ve chosen are:

The Underground Railroad by Colson Whitehead
Aristotle and Dante Discover the Secrets of the Universe by Benjamin Aliré Saenz
Brown Girl Dreaming by Jacqueline Woodson

My first book, The Underground Railroad, was published in 2016 and won both the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book award for fiction. It was also one of Oprah’s book club reads and it won the Goodreads choice awards in historical fiction. The Underground Railroad looks at slavery in the early 1800’s, prior to the civil war, and re-imagines the underground railroad as an actual underground railroad, instead of just the network of secret routes and safe houses that it was in reality. It tells the story of Cora, a young girl who tries to escape the cotton plantation in the south where she’s spent her entire life.

The second book I selected was Aristotle and Dante Discover the Secrets of the Universe. I like including young adult books to capture a wide variety of experiences and this one has won a litany of awards. It won the Lambda Literary Award and the Stonewall Book Award for LGBT fiction, the Pura Belpré Narrative medal for Latino fiction, and the Amelia Elizabeth Walden Award honour and the Michael L. Printz Award honour. I don’t know a whole lot about the plot of this book, except that it focuses on the friendship that develops between two boys, Aristotle and Dante, and has LGBTQIA+ themes. I’ve heard a lot of good things about it from vloggers I follow, so I’m excited to read it!

The last book on my list is Brown Girl Dreaming, which I bought a copy of a while ago and have been meaning to get to. I have no excuse as this is a middle grade novel written in prose, so I’m expecting it to a pretty quick read. Brown Girl Dreaming won the John Newberry Medal, the National Book Award for Young Adult Literature, and the NAACP Image Award for Outstanding Literature. It tells the story of a young girl growing up in the Jim Crow era in South Carolina.

I will admit that I’ve been working on The Underground Railroad for the last week and that I haven’t gotten very far because it has a pretty slow start, but it is finally starting to pick up and I am optimistic.

I am going to have to do some serious reading to fit these all in (plus my book club’s selection) over the next 2 weeks because I am going on vacation towards the end of April to Vietnam for 3 weeks! You likely won’t hear a lot from me during this time, but I’m really looking forward to doing some travel and I’m sure I’ll knock out a book or two on the planes, trains, and beach.

March Summary

April 6, 2018April 6, 20181 Comment

I struggled a bit at the end of March to finish my Monthly Challenge, but overall it ended up being my most successful reading month! I read 3 Fantasy Novels for my monthly challenge, a few advanced reader copies of books from Netgalley, and several audiobooks. Here’s my March Summary:

Books read: 13
Pages read: 4,425
Main genres: Fiction, Fantasy
Favourite (new) book: I Am Not Your Perfect Mexican Daughter
Favourite re-read: Beartown

I Am Not Your Perfect Mexican Daughter by Erika L Sanchez

I started off the month with a few ARC’s, which are early copies of books that publishers share with a limited number of readers to provide early feedback before the books are released. I’ve been getting more ARC’s from Netgalley since I started my blog and I’ve been starting to build some relationships with publishers, which has been a lot of fun for me!

The two ARC’s I read this month were The Lost Girls of Camp Forevermore (which came out in early March) and Us Against You (which comes out in June). The Lost Girls of Camp Forevermore was a short read about several girls that get lost in the woods at a summer camp when they were 12 and how it affects them later in life, which I really enjoyed. Us Against You is the sequel to Beartown, which was my favourite book of 2017, so of course I had to re-read Beartown this month as well. I loved Beartown just as much the second time around, but sadly I didn’t love Us Against You as much. I wrote a pretty in depth review about it and I did still really like it, it just couldn’t hold up to the masterpiece that is Beartown. But I’d still recommend reading it and I’m hoping for a third book!

Next I read 2 of books for my monthly challenge, The Thief and This Savage Song. I really liked The Thief, which is a fast read, and I’m excited to read further into the series, but I didn’t really like This Savage Song very much. I have it 3 stars, but as time passes I’m starting to like it less and less and I think it might be more of a 2.5 star read. I can’t quite pinpoint what I didn’t like about it, I just never really got into it and I didn’t think it was that engaging.

I had great success with Audiobooks this month though! I haven’t listened to any audiobooks since November (probably because I stopped running and I recently started again), but I got back into them this month. I was bored with the one I was listening to and I was never motivated to listen to it, so I decided to ditch it and start fresh, which was a great idea because I finished Before We Were Yours this month and absolutely flew through I Am Not Your Perfect Mexican Daughter and The Authentics.

Before We Were Yours was an interesting historical read about the birth of adoption in Tennessee, but I Am Not Your Perfect Mexican Daughter totally blew me away! I didn’t really expect that much from it because I’d read the main character was pretty unlikeable, but I loved the audiobook narrator for this one and I thought the main character was just so well portrayed. I picked my last audiobook, The Authentics, because it had the same narrator and similar themes to I Am Not Your Perfect Mexican Daughter, but while I liked it, it definitely wasn’t as strong a book.

My Book Club’s book of the month was The Child Finder by Rene Denfeld. I gave it the highest rating of the group with a 7 out of 10, but the general consensus of the group was that we liked it, but didn’t love it. It has a fantastic setting and atmosphere, but the mystery plot leaves a little to be desired. I also read The Marrow Thieves this month in an attempt to read another of the Canada Reads shortlist before the debates. The other book I read from the Shortlist was The Boat People, and while I gave them both 4 stars, I liked The Marrow Thieves more. I thought the writing and story were both great and incredibly moving.

I snuck in a poetry reading this month as well and read Milk and Honey by Rupi Kaur. This is her debut novel, but I read her other book, The Sun and Her Flowers, last year and really liked it. I didn’t like Milk and Honey quite as much, but it was still a nice, fast read.

Finally, I thought my last book of the month was going to be my final challenge book, The Fifth Season, because it was taking me forever to get through, but I managed to cram in a reading of Avenged over the Easter weekend (the sequel to Ruined). I didn’t love The Fifth Season as much as I was hoping because it was a pretty heavy read and it took me a while to get into, but I’m optimistic about the rest of the series. Avenged was almost as much fun as Ruined, which I loved. I know the Ruined series is not even on the same level as the Fifth Season, which is quality fantasy writing and world building, but I can’t help but love it because it’s just so fast-paced and fun!