Tag: Monthly Challenge

July Monthly Challenge

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Where did June go?? I have a feeling that summer is just going to fly by this year! It’s easily my favourite season and I have a lot of hiking and camping activities planned this year, so I’m not sure how much reading I’ll be able to fit in, but I’ve still developed a pretty ambitious summer reading list.

I’ve been doing my best to select diverse books for my monthly challenge (and in general), and to tie in some of my challenges with my book club selections, so for my July Monthly challenge I’m aiming to:

Read 3 book by authors of colour

Like in everything else, diversity and representation are just as important in literature. I love reading not only for the storytelling, but because I genuinely learn so much from reading about different historical time periods and reading from the point of view of those who are different than me. One of the easiest ways to walk a mile in someone else’s shoes is to read a book by someone with a different perspective and lived experience.

I’ve always been frustrated that the majority of books published are by american and english authors, even books that are set in other countries and from other perspectives are often still written predominantly by white american and english authors. Even the books I’ve selected for this challenge are partly by american immigrants. The 3 books I’ve picked for this challenge are:

  1. An American Marriage by Tayari Jones
  2. The Map of Salt and Stars by Jennifer Zeynab Joukhadar
  3. Mystery Book! See poll below!

My first book, An American Marriage, has been sitting on my shelf since the beginning of the year and I’ve heard so many good things about it. An American Marriage is the story of a newlywed couple whose lives are ripped apart when the husband is sentenced to 12 years in prison for a crime he didn’t commit. Black people are systematically targeted by police and oppressed within the justice system, so I’m really interested to read about this couple and the impact this sentence has on their relationship.

My second book is also my book club selection for July. This novel is being advertised as “The Kite Runner for Syria” and sounds super fascinating because it focuses on two girls who lived 800 years apart. One girl is a modern day Syrian refugee and the second girl is a medieval adventurer and mapmaker, which I am totally intrigued by. 800 years a huge timeline gap, so I’m interested to see how the author approaches this, as well as how she explores the humanitarian crisis that is ongoing in Syria. The author is Syrian-American.

Okay, so now about my last book. I have been having a really hard time picking the last book because there are several books I want to read, but I’m not sure what one I’m most into. I like trying to have a diverse selection for my challenge, and in this case, I’ve decided it might be better to wait until after I read the first two books to see what I’m feeling might be the best final book for the challenge.

I’m not going into this totally blind though and there are several books I’ve been going back and forth between and have been torn on which to pick. The books are Exit West by Mohsin Hamid, Swing Time by Zadie Smith, Stay With Me by Ayobami Adebayo, and What We Lose by Zinzi Clemmons. They are all quite different novels, each with different aspects that appeal to me, so I’ve decided to pick one of these later in the month. Please let me know if you’ve read any of them and vote in the poll below. I’d love to hear your opinions and they may help me decide which book I ultimately pick! I would of course love to read them all and they will all stay on my TBR, but I am trying to pick one for this month!

There you have it, feel free to read along with me and share your opinions, I love getting comments and feedback and talking about all things book related!

June Monthly Challenge

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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.

March Summary

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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 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!

The Fifth Season

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Rating: ⭐⭐⭐
Author: NK Jemisin
Genres: Fantasy
Pub Date: Aug. 2015 (read Mar. 2018)

I’ve only heard good things about this series and I’ve been dying to read it for ages, but this was quite different than all the other fantasy I read and I really struggled to get into it.

I definitely liked the story, but it took me a while to get into it and it wasn’t until the first “twist” of the story that I started to understand how clever this was. I’ll be honest, I mostly read YA fantasy, which is why I think I initially struggled with this.

The Fifth Season supposedly tells the story of how the world ends for the last time. This world has been through many seasons that have threatened the existence of humans, but they have always managed to survive. The book starts off with a huge earthquake that destroys the major city of the continent, Yumenes, and with a mother fleeing her community after the death of her son. We follow the perspectives of 3 women as we learn about the intricacies of this world.

The continent is largely dictated by earthquakes. There are many fault lines and the ground is never stable. The communities are used to frequent shaking of the earth and many communities struggle to survive beyond a few seasons in this hostile world. There is one thing that can stabilize the earth and prevent earthquakes, the Orogenes, who can communicate with the earthquake and quell and create shakes. They can be extremely dangerous if not trained, so there is another group called Guardians, who seek out orogenes and bring them to the Fulcrum in Yumenes to be trained. Our three main characters are all orogenes. Essun has just lost her son after the great shake in Yumenes, Syenite is completing a mission on behalf of the Fulcrum, and Damaya has just been discovered in her community by a Guardian.

It’s a hard book to get into because there’s a lot to learn about this new world and it’s hard to keep up with the constantly changing perspectives. I also found the timeline a little confusing and had a hard time with Essun’s perspective because it’s written in 2nd person POV. But I did start to get into it after about the half way mark and I think the next two novels will be easier now that I understand the baseline of the story. Like I said, this book is quite clever and the writing is good.

I’m not sure when I’ll get to the next book, but I probably will try to do it soon because I’m worried about forgetting what happened in this book and I don’t want a steep learning curve again! Hoping the next one will be a 4 star read for me.