books – Page 2 – The Terror of Knowing

T5W | Most Disappointing Reads of 2018

16/01/201915/01/2019Emma5 Comments

Welcome one and all to this week’s Top 5 Wednesday post! For those of you who don’t know Top 5 Wednesday is a weekly meme/challenge which was created by the wonderful Lainey from gingerreadslainey and is now overseen by the equally lovely Sam from Thoughts on Tomes. Every Wednesday, participants devise their Top 5 based on a given topic.

This Wednesday’s topic is Most Disappointing Reads of 2018: these are books you read in 2018, not only ones released in 2018.

Obviously there’s a huge disclaimer that I should state before we even get into this post: these are reads that, for one reason or another, slightly disappointed me. That’s not to say that these books are bad books and that’s not to say that I necessarily disliked them; rather, it’s just that because of a multitude of possible reasons (a big one likely being hype in the bookish community), the books just felt a little short of the expectations I (maybe wrongfully) placed upon them. So it’s not the book’s fault necessarily – it’s not you, book, it’s me, I promise.

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Winter Biannual Bibliothon 2019 | TBR

11/01/201910/01/2019Emma3 Comments

Hello everyone! As you can probably tell from the title of this post, this is a TBR post for the upcoming Winter Biannual Bibliothon. As I’m subscribed to one of the readathon’s hosts, LittleBookOwl on YouTube, I always see videos relating to this readathon but I’ve never taken part… until now! I’m finding out about this readathon a little late but still in enough time to get together a TBR and participate, even if it does overlap slightly with Bout of Books. Still, let’s see if we can start off 2019’s reading strong, shall we?

(I need the kick up the bum; I’ve only finished 1 book and it’s already 10th… who am I?)

For those who don’t know the Biannual Bibliothon takes place (yes, you guessed it) twice a year, there’s a summer and a winter edition and this is the Winter edition! It’s taking place between 12th until the 18th January – head over to the readathon Twitter for more info.

As well as fun Instagram and video challenges to keep you busy during the readathon, there’s a set of Reading Challenges to help choose your TBR:

Reading Challenges

1. Read the Group Book: Empress of All Seasons by Emiko Jean
Providing my order on Amazon comes through in time, I’ll try to get to this one which has been on my radar but not necessarily top of my TBR. I don’t know anything about Japan, to be honest, so maybe reading a Japanese-inspired fantasy could be the first step in broadening my horizons?

2. Read one of the hosts’ 5 star reads: Pivot Point by Kasie West, Eliza and her Monsters by Francesca Zappia, Summer of Salt by Katrina Leno, The Graveyard Book by Neil Gaiman, The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo by Taylor Jenkins Reid, Strange the Dreamer by Laini Taylor, Emergency Contact by Mary HK Choy
Ooo the temptation to re-read The Graveyard Book is SO strong! It’s one of my favourite books too and I’m well overdue a re-read. However I am going to resist (barely) and instead choose to read Emergency Contact by Mary H.K. Choy which is a book I know precisely nothing about. However, it’s available as an audiobook on Scribd and from its Goodreads reviews, I reckon it might be something I enjoy, especially if it is as cynical/bitter as one reviewer said it was!

3. Read a book that got you into reading
Matilda by Roald Dahl. Not only were Roald Dahl’s books some of the first I read, the entire spirit of Matilda champions reading so it’s the PERFECT book to read during a readathon.

4. Read an adult genre
Based on how Christina Lauren’s other books are I’m going to go ahead and assume that Dating You/Hating You is an adult contemporary/romance. It’s also a book I’ve been meaning to read ever since my friend Liz read it and said I’d probably really like the setup of the (inevitable?) couple who are both high-powered agents at competing Hollywood firms that end up merging, meaning they go up against each other for the same job. Sounds fun!

5. Combine your favorite genre with your least favorite format or the opposite
Well, my favourite genre is probably YA fantasy and my least favourite, I guess, would be ebook, so I’m going to pick… hmmm… let’s be prompt and read Enchanteé by Gita Trelease which I was just approved an eARC of and should get to sooner rather than later. It had the magic words in the synopsis “French Revolution” and I was instantly hooked.

6. Read a book with a cover you don’t like
You know, I’m not overly fond of the cover of Emergency Contact, from what I’ve seen of it on Goodreads. The pink and gold thing isn’t really working for me (though I’m sure it could be other people’s jams) so I’ll double-up on challenges with this book, I think.

7. Read a book by an author you’ve never read before
I’ve never read anything by Gita Trelease before… mostly because this is her debut novel but shhhhh, it’s not really cheating to double up on this challenge.

My TBR

Empress of All Seasons by Emiko Jean (#1)
Emergency Contact by Mary H.K. Choy (#2, #6)
Matilda by Roald Dahl (#3)
Dating You/Hating You by Christina Lauren (#4)
Enchantée by Gita Trelease (#5, #7)

There we have it, there’s what I will be attempting to read during the Winter Biannual Bibliothon. Are you taking part? Share your TBR below! Otherwise, tell me which book you’re planning on picking up next, I’d love to hear about it!

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TBTB Secret Santa 2018

09/01/201909/01/2019Emma3 Comments

If you’re an avid reader, you may remember that in 2017 I took part in the 8th Annual Broke & Bookish Secret Santa as ran by the lovely Jamie and Jana. Well, it was back for 2018, and I had to take part, even when the announcement and sign-up period happened when I was enjoying a holiday at Disney World in Florida. So, I dusted off my sign-up email all about me from last year, added a couple of things, and sent it off almost immediately. Then came the waiting game until I got my Santee and got to see their email/letter to Santa.

For those unaware, every year Jamie and Jana host a brilliant Secret Santa event for the online bookish community. The aim of the game is to act as someone’s Secret Santa and send them some presents based on the letter they send to their “Santa”. It’s a super fun way of getting all the community together – book bloggers, bookish tweeps, Bookstagrammers, readers alike – and getting in the festive ‘giving and receiving’ spirit.

After the success of last year, in 2018 I decided to go hard ~~(or go home)~~ and chose option C: 2+ books and goodies, because I knew from my first experience of TBTB Santa that I liked shopping for a fellow book lover and making their gift as brilliant as possible. I always go overboard once I start, so I thought I might as well state from the beginning that I would and let the inevitability happen!

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Bout of Books 24 | Sign Up & TBR

06/01/201907/01/2019Emma12 Comments

Hello all and welcome to this, the first of the ‘Emma signs up for a readathon with an overly ambitious TBR she abandons almost immediately’ posts for 2019! This is fun, isn’t it? Exciting. Will it be more of the same in 2019 or will Emma actually follow through on the readathon aspirations she has this year? Who knows… only time will tell.

Quite handily for me, however, the first readathon I’m choosing to participate in this year is the Bout of Books readathon, a firm favourite of mine because of its low-key setup and challenges. In fact, there are no reading challenges or prompts that you have to fulfil with you TBR; rather, the main aim of Bout of Books is simply to read. I can get onboard with this. For those of you who haven’t come across Bout of Books before, here’s the schtick:

The Bout of Books read-a-thon is organized by Amanda Shofner and Kelly Rubidoux Apple. It is a week long read-a-thon that begins 12:01am Monday, January 7th and runs through Sunday, January 13th in whatever time zone you are in. Bout of Books is low-pressure. There are challenges, giveaways, and a grand prize, but all of these are completely optional. For all Bout of Books 24 information and updates, be sure to visit the Bout of Books blog.
– From the Bout of Books team

When it comes to Bout of Books, you are encouraged to be as low-key or ambitious as you like, it really is what you make of it. This potentially comes at quite a good time for me as I’ve been struggling these first few days of the month/year with what to read – sometimes, when you have SO MANY options to choose from, you actually end up struggling to decide on one. (Seriously, it’s a legitimate Thing.) At the suggestion of housemate and friend Liz (you may know her by my frequent mentions of Travel In Retrospect, I’m sure) I’m reading a kinda so-bad-it’s-good romance novel and it’s working as something of a palette cleanser. But I’m still eager to start my reading of other things too which is where Bout of Books comes in as it has forced me to confront the issue of my indecisiveness head on and pick a (albeit tentative) TBR for the upcoming week’s readathon.

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Best Books of 2018

03/01/2019Emma11 Comments

Welcome one, welcome all, to the downright obligatory Best Books of 2018. As is often the case with these ‘best books of the year’ posts of mine, the top 10 that make the list may not necessarily be the books that I gave 5-stars when I finished reading them. Because I make my ratings’ decisions immediately after finishing a book, they can be impulsive and would, on reflection, be altered. I make a point of not altering ratings once I’ve set them, but this annual best books list is a good way to “reassess” the ratings I’ve given books in the past year and decide, once and for all, which books were actually deserving of that moniker. The results is that these books are the ones that have stayed with me, for one reason or another, and were, completely subjectively, the “best books” that I read in 2018.

(If you’re looking for my more stats-based wrap up of 2018 then please do pop over to my 2018: A Bookish Year In Review post!)

Without further ado, let’s do this like the music charts, in reverse order, shall we?

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2018 | A Bookish Year In Review

03/01/2019Emma9 Comments

As you can see from the title of this post, this is my ultimate monthly wrap up – it’s my year in review for 2018. This means I’m going to look back at the stats for everything I read in 2018, month by month, and there’s some nice visual representations of the books too. If you want to see what my top books of the year were, please see the companion blog post: Best Books of 2018.

But, first things first, let’s take a good look at every single book I read this year, because even the simple graphics and basic statistics are deeply satisfying to me.

JANUARY

jan2018

Read: 7 books | 2236 pages
Fav: The Language of Thorns by Leigh Bardugo

FEBRUARY

feb2018

Read: 6 books | 2292 pages
Fav: The Girl from Everywhere by Heidi Heilig

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Wrap Up | December 2018

01/01/201901/01/2019Emma2 Comments

Welcome one, welcome all, to my December Wrap Up. After a reasonably slow reading month in November, largely due to concentrating my efforts on NaNoWriMo instead, I was back with a vengeance in December and determined to finish the year on a high. I’ve long since surpassed my Goodreads Reading Challenge of reading 52 books in the year but I still had a fair few prompts from Around the Year in 52 Books to address and, as you might have seen in my December TBR, I became determined not to end the year without having at least tried to catch up at the eleventh hour and finish the challenge. So how did I do? Let’s see that, and which books I read in December…

In December, I read a total of 11 books – 9 fiction and 2 non-fiction – and 2 were re-reads (marked by *). This amounted to 3144 pages in total.

In terms of format: 2 were paperback, 4 were hardback, and 5 were audiobooks.

As for genre, 3 were fantasy, 3 were classics, 2 were non-fiction/memoir, 1 was a contemporary, 1 was YA historical fiction, and 1 was gothic.

Onto the books themselves…

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My 2018 Resolutions | Quarterly Check-in #4

31/12/201831/12/2018Emma3 Comments

As you may have seen if you’re been around the blog for a while, throughout 2018 I have been doing check-ins for my yearly resolutions as a way of keeping me accountable to more people than just myself. At the end of the first quarter of 2018, I posted my first check-in, at the end of June I posted my second check-in, and my third check-in came at the beginning of October. Today’s post is my fourth and final quarterly check-in and will, ultimately, also deliberate on whether I completed my goals and aims for 2018 or not.

(If you need/want an in-depth reminder of my 2018 Resolutions you can find that post here before diving in to see how I did below.)

READING GOALS

1. Complete Goodreads 52 Books goal

Verdict: Completed
At my last check-in I’d read 63 books and I mentioned that I was hoping to get to 75 by the end of 2018. well, I surpassed that. I’m quite proud of myself for that. Presuming I finish off the book I’m currently reading tonight before that arbitrary ticking over of the clock from 11.59pm on 31st December 2018 to 12.00am on 1st January 2019 then I will have read 83 books in 2018 and will be rather pleased with myself for that.

2. Complete Around the Year in 52 Books

Verdict: Completed
Progress on this slowed considerably in the third quarter of 2018, and I had many challenges left. December dawning weirdly motivated me to keep going because I was behind but not insurmountably so, if I just sat down and worked out what I needed to read to complete the challenge. As I sit and type this post up, it’s New Year’s Eve and I have one book left to finish the challenge of “a gothic novel”. About 120 pages stand between me and saying I completed Around the Year in 52 Books so I’m going to optimistically say I’ve completed this resolution and hope that, by doing so, I haven’t damned myself.

3. Finish off the books in a series I have yet to read

Verdict: Failed
As mentioned at my last check-in, I didn’t even think about finishing any series and that tradition carried on into the rest of 2018 too. It just wasn’t a priority for me anymore and, do you know what? I think I’m ok with that.

4. Finish War and Peace and read another Russian classic

Verdict: Failed
It’s becoming a joke right now but, nope, I still haven’t finished War and Peace. It’s getting faintly a little ridiculous now. I just can’t decide if I’m going to need to start afresh or at least read a length summary of the first five volumes before I can finally read the sixth part of the book – not wanting to face up to this possibility is what has definitely put me off picking up Tolstoy’s brick again. I also didn’t read another Russian classic but, hey, I read a huge French classic in the form of The Count of Monte Cristo so does that count?

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T5W | Books You Didn’t Get to in 2018

26/12/201821/12/2018Emma4 Comments

This Wednesday’s topic is Books You Didn’t Get to in 2018: discuss the books you didn’t quite get around to this year but are at the top of your list for 2019! I think this is pretty self-explanatory so let’s waste no time and get straight down to the books, shall we?

5. A Dance with Dragons, Vol. 2 by George R.R. Martin

There was a readalong many moons ago for the entire A Song of Ice and Fire series and I managed somehow to make it as far as this book before I properly faltered. At this stage, I’ve got book and TV show mixed up, and I’m not sure where either of them are up to for each of the characters, which makes the idea of picking this book up less and less appealing as time passes and I forget even more.

4. If We Were Villains by M.L. Rio

Often compared to Donna Tartt’s The Secret History, this is precisely why I’ve successively put off reading this book from M.L. Rio. The Secret History remains one of my favourite books of all-time so anything that’s compared to it has rather large shoes to fill. However, this has its own merits because it is heavily focused on Shakespeare – rather than students of classics, as they are in Tartt’s novel, the students in If We Were Villains are at an elite conservatory for drama. I’m sure that it’ll be a case of life imitating art imitating life with its Shakespearean themes but I’m just nervous to try it out in case it proves to be disappointing – I have such high hopes.

3. War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy

Can you believe I still haven’t finished the sixth and final section of War and Peace? No? Well neither can I. I did so (/reasonably) well back during the War and Peace Readalong but many months have passed and I still haven’t managed to finish that final elusive section. It’s starting to get to the point where it’s been so long I barely remember anything that happened in the first 800 or so pages and that’s a dangerous place to be if you hope to pick it back up to finish soon. Maybe 2019 will finally be the year?

2. City of Ghosts by V.E. Schwab

Basically, it’s surprising that there’s a V.E. Schwab book that was released this year that I haven’t immediately read upon its publication. This and The Dark Vault (which was a bind-up/re-issue of The Archived and The Unbound) were both released in 2019 and yet I haven’t finished either of them. At least I’ve picked this one up, via the audiobook that I was surprised to find on Scribd straight after it was released, but I haven’t yet finished listening to it. I really need to fix that.

1. The Raven King by Maggie Stiefvater

I think this is going to be on every single one of these lists until the end of time. I love this series, I don’t want it to end, therefore I constantly put off reading the fourth and final book, so it never has to be over. To this day I am astounded I’ve not been spoiled for its ending (or, in fact, anything at all that happens in it) but it feels like, as more time goes by, the more likely it is that I will be by a random blog post. So I should probably read The Raven King at some point, to avoid that happening by mistake but I do wonder if this will be a running joke of a book I just can’t (or won’t) read.

What books did you want to read but not get to in 2018? Do you have a Top 5 Wednesday post for this week? Be sure to link me below if you do!

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Blogmas Reflection & Happy Holidays

24/12/2018Emma1 Comment

I could make this a long post, or I could keep it simple. I’ll try for brevity, for once.

If you haven’t gathered, I’ve been trying to bring a little Blogmas spirit to the blog since the start of the month and I’m slightly surprised I managed to keep it going until today, Christmas Eve.

Blogging everyday has helped me to better schedule, understand my own limitations and motivations, and to force myself to write every day, something which NaNoWriMo in November helped me to do too with the more fictional words. It has also helped me to reevaluate why I blog and focus more keenly on what kind of content I want to most write for this blog. All of those things are valuable, regardless of the topics that are the focus of those posts. Thank you for this excuse, Blogmas.

Since no one could provide a definitive answer as to when Blogmas’ start/end date was I’ve decided to call it today. All that remains is for me to thank every single one of you reading this for sticking around this little book blog. Thank you for all your views, your likes, your comments, but mostly your friendship, encouragement and support- this is the reason I stick around the blogosphere. Christmas is a time when I think we could all do with pausing to take stock and think about all the things we’re grateful and thankful for, so this is my moment.

However you celebrate it (or if this is simply another day to you), I wish you a very merry 24th December and I hope you are happy and healthy.