booksdanilikes

Mid-Year Evaluation

Hello Kittens!

As we approach the mid-point in the year, I’m seeing many people reflect on their reading journeys and thought I might take a moment to do the same. I want to look back on what I’ve read and also re-focus myself for the rest of the year. It has been a disorienting year, to say the least.

In 2020 so far, I have read 66 books, totaling 20,022 pages. My best reading month was April, where I read 15 books (funny what not having to go to work can do to your reading stats).

My favorite book so far has been: Illuminae by Amie Kaufman and Jay Kristoff

My most disappointing book so far was: Vagabonds by Jingfang Hao. I went into it expecting more action-oriented space odyssey and what I got was more lyrical literature told over the space of 640 pages.

My most anticipated release was: Home Before Dark by Riley Sager. It did not disappoint.

Goals for the rest of the year:

I’ve started a few series that I would like to finish by the end of the year. I want to read the next two books in the Illuminae Files series, as well as finish out Claire Legrand’s Empirium trilogy. I’ve read the first two books in the Truly Devious series by Maureen Johnson and will now have to finish that, but I won’t technically be able to do that until 2021 unless I can get my hands on an advance copy. The series started as a trilogy and everyone assumed it was complete, but now it looks like Johnson will be continuing on with the characters in a fourth book due out in April 2021. I also expect to continue on with Sarah J. Maas’ Throne of Glass series, although I may not push myself to finish the remaining 6 books by the end of the year since they seem to get increasingly longer.

The release I am most excited for in the second half of the year actually comes out in early July and it is The Shadows by Alex North. I’ve got an advance copy that I will be starting this week and look forward to getting a review up for you the first week of July. I loved The Whisper Man and I can’t wait to see what North has come up with this time.

My TBR is currently sitting at 615, so I want to make a good dent in that by the end of the year, possibly getting it into the mid 500’s. My Goodreads goal for the year was 100 books and I don’t anticipate having trouble finishing that. Even now that I’m back at work, I’ve been devouring books during my lunch hour and when I get home. Fortunately, I didn’t have a huge desire to go outside and be social before and I’ve got even less compulsion to do so now. Yay for staying home as much as possible!

I hope your reading year is going well, but even if it’s not, remember to give yourself the space to accept that everything is topsy turvy right now and it’s okay if you’re not reading as much. My thinking on the matter is that books come to you when you need them and quietly step into the shadows when you don’t, ready and waiting for when you will need them next.

Stay safe out there Kittens!

Home Before Dark by Riley Sager

Hellooooo Kittens! I have got an upcoming spooky thriller release for you today. I found Riley Sager’s books just as quarantine was getting going and quickly became a big fan. I will literally read anything he writes from now on because everything I’ve read from him ends up being a favorite. It doesn’t come out for about a week and a half, but if you have not pre-ordered it or reserved it from your local library, hopefully this review will convince you to do so. This book is being widely compared to The Haunting of Hill House by Shirley Jackson (I’ll just have to take their word for it since I haven’t read that one, but you best believe I have added it to my TBR after reading this one!)

Title: Home Before Dark

Author: Riley Sager

Author website: https://www.rileysagerbooks.com/

Publisher: Dutton

Publish date: June 30, 2020

ISBN: 9781524745189

Buy the Book: Amazon, Barnes and Noble

Summary:

Maggie Holt has lived her life in the shadow of a house she lived in as a little girl, and the book her father wrote after they lived there for only 20 days. The house is now one of the most famous haunted houses in the country and Maggie’s name is synonymous with the little girl whose terror is portrayed in her father’s famous book. The only problem: Maggie doesn’t remember any of the events from that book and suspects that her parents made the whole thing up. She has grown up an outcast because of that book, and her demands for real answers have gone unheeded by her parents, which stilted her relationship with them.

After her father’s death, Maggie gets the unexpected opportunity to return to the house as an adult to try and find out what really happened. As a designer, she approaches the house like any other project she tackles, but she sets aside time to dig into the house’s history and what really happened to her family in the time that she spent there. The longer she’s in the house, the more memories begin to return to her, and she is forced to confront a startling truth: maybe the book wasn’t as full of lies as she originally believed? As the house’s caretaker once said, “Baneberry Hall remembers…And sometimes history has a way of repeating itself.”

It’s classified as both Thriller and Horror, so prepare yourself before you start because it’s going to get creepy.

Why I liked it:

The story is told in alternating chapters between what Maggie is experiencing and remembering and corresponding chapters from her father’s book. I really loved that approach to telling this story, especially because the similarities between the chapters increase as the book goes on.

I also love how Maggie’s character approaches the entire history of the house. She doesn’t believe it’s haunted and goes through every logical explanation that she can. Some of her explanations are so solid that even the reader will be questioning her dad’s book before long. This is an awesome device as you are reading, because it essentially turns her father’s book into an unreliable narrator.

I also loved how many twists there were! Twists on twists on twists. It is a thriller reader’s paradise. All of the twists are believable and you have the information in there to parse a few of them out if you pay attention. I will tell you that I pegged a villain pretty early on, then retired that guess when one twist made me re-evaluate, only to get some vindication for my guess in the end. On the other hand, I also have to admit that I pegged another character as a villain, only to be completely wrong. He wasn’t a villain, he just annoyed me and acted in a somewhat creepy manner.

Sony already bought the film rights for the book and I cannot wait to see what they do with it.

What I would like to change:

I think there may have been a few unplugged plot holes in there regarding some of the spooky events. At some point in the near future I’m going to re-read this one and see if those things actually were explained and I just missed it (entirely possible). At times I was reading so fast to get to the next “thing” that was going to happen that I was actually just skimming some of the words.

Also, this book may have ruined what was previously one of my favorite scenes in The Sound of Music. I’m not sure I’ll ever be able to hear that song again without getting goosebumps.

Disclaimer: I originally received an e-galley of this title from the publisher via NetGalley, but then it came out as an early release Book of the Month pick, so I ended up primarily reading the physical copy that way. Either way, the preceding review is my honest opinion of the book.

My library rating: This rating is primarily due to the number of curse words in here. I’ll admit that I barely notice them when I’m reading anymore, but I still have patrons who will mark them out in the books that they read (welcome to the South). I did a search on my e-galley to see how prevalent they were, and it was actually…pretty prevalent. I will still be recommending this book to a wide variety of adult readers. It was fantastic.

lemonade_icon 4 glasses of lemonade= a book you could recommend to a book group or anybody who reads. You might find controversial subject matter, but it is handled delicately.

My personal preference rating: No surprise here. I gave this one 5 full stars. It was great and I look forward to reading it again soon (I already loaned out my copy to a friend). If you love thrillers, you need to get on the Riley Sager bandwagon like right now.

Extras:

The Murder By the Book Bookstore is doing a live Zoom event with Riley Sager on June 30^th, at 6pm Central time. Purchasing a copy of the book from the bookstore counts as your admission to the Zoom event, and it will even be a signed copy (not personalized since that deadline already passed, but signed is still cool.) The link for the event is here if you’re interested: https://www.murderbooks.com/event/riley-sager

I don’t earn anything from the event or sale of the book, etc. I just thought it was a cool opportunity for anyone who was interested. I live in a town that doesn’t get a lot of big authors for book signings generally, and while I know this event is solely because COVID-19 is preventing them from doing an in-person event, I would love to see bookstores offer stuff like this permanently. I don’t think we should stop having in-person events once it’s safe, but it would be nice to have more digital events for those of us who can’t attend locally.

Library Haul- June 2020

Hello Kittens! I may have gone a little overboard with my library checkouts so far this month. I might actually need to stay out of the library for the rest of the month… Which is only slightly problematic since I work in a library. Oh well! Most of these books actually came from a nearby library system that opened for curbside before mine did. So without further ado, let’s look at what I’ve gotten myself into.

June’s Library Books (links are to each title’s Goodreads page)

Kings of the Wyld by Nicholas Eames (Read-a-long for the Shelf Space Book Club)

Gemina by Amie Kaufman and Jay Kristoff (the 2nd book in the Illuminae Files series)

Kingsbane by Claire Legrand (the sequel to Furyborn which I reviewed here)

Orange V.1 & V.2 by Ichigo Takano

Distress Signals by Catherine Ryan Howard

The Silent Patient by Alex Michaelides

Throne of Glass by Sarah J. Maas

Intercepted by Alexa Martin

The Return by Rachel Harrison

The Guinevere Deception by Kiersten White

Scythe by Neal Shusterman

An Extraordinary Union by Alyssa Cole

The Invisible Library by Genevieve Cogman

The Joy of Missing Out by Tonya Dalton

A Blade So Black by L.L McKinney

Aurora Rising by Amie Kaufman & Jay Kristoff

The Gilded Wolves by Roshani Chokshi

Adequate Yearly Progress by Roxanna Elden

A Tale for the Time Being by Ruth Ozeki

Master Class by Christina Dalcher

Recursion by Blake Crouch

The Vanishing Stair by Maureen Johnson

Kill the Farm Boy by Delilah S. Dawson

Rogue Protocol by Martha Wells

Crown of Midnight by Sarah J. Maas

Furyborn by Claire Legrand

Hello Kittens! This title was a little late to get on my radar considering it’s a trilogy that will be complete this October. I’m going through a YA Fantasy renaissance and going back to start some of the series that I missed from the last 5 years or so. If you, like me, missed this one the first time around, I highly recommend giving it a try. Plus, if you start it now, you can have the first and second books done before the finale this Fall.

Title: Furyborn Furyborn (Empirium, #1)

Author: Claire Legrand

Author website: https://www.claire-legrand.com/

Publisher: Sourcebooks Fire

Publish date: May 22, 2018

ASIN: B077Y63CVW

Buy the Book: Amazon, Barnes and Noble

Summary:

Furyborn is told in two timelines focusing on two women and a prophecy. The book starts with a foundational scene where a character named Rielle is giving birth to her first child, a girl. She is mostly alone for this process and we learn that her husband, the king, has died and that she is viewed as responsible for his death. After a traumatic event, we find ourselves meeting a character named Eliana who lives 1,000 years later. Alternating chapters tell us their stories. While their lives are very different, we learn that they are bound together by the same prophecy regarding two queens in this land, one who will destroy the land and one who will save it.

In a land of elemental magic, Rielle has had to hide her abilities because she has had trouble controlling them in the past. When her magic makes itself known at a public event, Rielle is challenged by the King and his court to prove that she is the Sun Queen, the queen from the prophecy who will save her people. In order to prove this, Rielle is forced to undergo a series of challenges to show that she can master all of the elements in this magic system. If she fails, she will most likely be killed, but if she succeeds, she will assume her role as a protector of the realm.

Eliana just wants to keep her family safe. If that means working for the Empire, so be it. She emotionally disconnects herself from the work that she is doing, even though she knows that nearly every person she turns over to the Empire’s forces will be executed, regardless of age, gender, or other factors. The people around her, especially her little brother Remy, are always working to remind her of her humanity. She’s not a big fan of their efforts and justifies that her work keeps them all much safer. When the Empire asks her to find a rebel mercenary known as the Wolf, she is all too happy to oblige. Unfortunately, the Wolf finds her first, her mother is taken by seemingly invisible forces, and Eliana is forced to work with the rebels in order to try to get her back.

Why I liked it:

It’s fast-paced and very well-developed. The elemental magic system is well thought out, and we really only get a taste of the lore surrounding it from this first book. I also appreciated how much the story was starting to come together. As the reader, you’ll catch on to certain elements of commonality before the characters do, but I didn’t mind that at all.

I’m definitely invested enough to keep going with this series. I already got the second book, Kingsbane, from a nearby library offering curbside services right now.

What I would like to change:

The book lacks symmetry for my taste. When we get that first chapter, I expected that we would be circling back to that event by the end, but that was not the case. While we did get much closer to it, we evidently won’t be resolving a lot of what happened in that first scene until the second or third books.

Disclaimer: No disclaimer needed. I borrowed an e-book of this title from my library.

My library rating: While I didn’t think it was too much, some people might object to the steamy scenes in the book (there’s only 2). It also gets a little gruesome towards the end and that was a little tough to read (think innocent people being used without willpower).

lemonade_icon 4 glasses of lemonade= a book you could recommend to a book group or anybody who reads. You might find controversial subject matter, but it is handled delicately.

My personal preference rating: 4 stars. I really enjoyed this one and didn’t mind the steamy scenes or the tough battle scenes. We’re just getting started with what I think are going to be some epic love stories and truly magnificent strong female characters.

June’s Book Haul

Hello Kittens,

I went a little overboard with the book hauling this month and I need some accountability methods so I’ll stop spending my entire paycheck. I ordered a lot of these from Book Outlet (side note: I won’t be ordering from them anymore after their poor response to a legitimate question about diversity in their partnership program, but these orders had already shipped) and got a few from Amazon.

Keep in mind, this isn’t even everything and we’re only a little over a week into the month. I’ll be posting later on with the e-galleys I’ve been approved for this month, the books I’ve borrowed from the library, and my Book of the Month selections.

Also, did I mention that I only own 1 bookshelf…does anyone know anything about determining the structural integrity load of a shelf?

Each book will be linked to its Goodreads page.

This Side of Home by Renee Watson (e-book)

Queen of the Conquered by Kacen Callender (e-book)

The Misadventures of Awkward Black Girl by Issa Rae (e-book)

The Empress of Salt and Fortune by Nghi Vo (e-book)

Me and White Supremacy by Layla F. Saad (e-book)

This Book is Anti-Racist by Tiffany Jewell (e-book)

This is Kind of an Epic Love Story by Kheryn Callender (e-book)

Sorcery of Thorns by Margaret Rogerson

All the Ever Afters by Danielle Teller

All Systems Red by Martha Wells (I’ve read this one before and reviewed it here. I’m hoping to get the entire series in hardback over the next few months)

Exit Strategy by Martha Wells

Furthermore by Tahereh Mafi

Whichwood by Tahereh Mafi

The Legacy by Yrsa Sigurdardottir

The Fixer by Jennifer Lynn Barnes

The Borrower by Rebecca Makkai

The Masked City by Genevieve Cogman

The Burning Page by Genevieve Cogman

The Lost Plot by Genevieve Cogman

The Mortal Word by Genevieve Cogman

Stealing Snow by Danielle Paige

The Keeper of Lost Causes by Jussi Adler-Olsen