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Post by mistrali on Apr 7, 2020 22:38:13 GMT 10
devilinthedetails I forced myself through Uprooted, hoping it would get better. Glad I’m not the only one who was underwhelmed. I like Temeraire - or did, last time I read it, years ago - but Novik’s standalones do nothing for me. I’m reading The Woman in the Window by A.J. Finn. It’s only just starting to pick up, nearly halfway through. Maybe psychological thrillers aren’t for me - I’m used to police procedurals, the gorier the better. It also reminds me far too much of The Girl on the Train (the film, which I saw when it came out - I can’t remember reading the book).
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Post by Rosie on May 24, 2020 20:33:46 GMT 10
I finally made it through Middlemarch! I loved it, and think I'll try Mill on the Floss, but I need to make more of a dent in my TBR pile first... and I'm aiming to get my unread Kindle books to under 150 (currently on about 165, and I'd say a good portion of those are Christmas books I bought to amuse my mum... obviously unsuccessfully!)
Otherwise I forced myself to finish Lucky Jim, which really wasn't my sort of book but at least I've read it now! Diary of a Nobody is set in the 19th century, and was so... delightfully written with an obtuse protagonist.
I read and loved Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo, and the Enchanted April, and the latter made me want to sit outside in a garden so much! One of the recommended books when I was rating on goodreads was Meet Me at the Museum, and... it wasn't much like it tonally, but I can see it in the sense of people growing and changing.
And I read and hated Longbourn. I'm a big Austen fan, and I'd heard good things about this as a story about downstairs... but it felt so gritty and mismatched with Austen's style and repetitive in a completely unnecessary way.
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Post by devilinthedetails on Aug 11, 2020 5:58:29 GMT 10
Been reading and listening to a lot of books while in quarantine.
I listened to "Burial Rites" by Hannah Kent and narrated by Morven Christie. This book focuses on the last woman to be executed in Iceland and the priest that provides her spiritual counsel. It is written in a haunting style, capturing the dark subject and setting in a compelling way, and the narrator did a brilliant job with the reading. Definitely an audiobook I'd recommend.
I also listened to Simon Vance read Guy Gavriel Kay's "Children of Earth and Sky" and "A Brightness Long Ago." Simon Vance is a wonderful reader, and I love the world building in both these books and the poetic writing style. Kay's characters can feel very stock character, but the themes are complex, the writing lyrical, and the setting always very vividly portrayed. I'd recommend reading or listening to these for sure.
I read Agatha Christie's "Death on the Nile" and enjoyed it. It's an engaging murder mystery and that kept me guessing and speculating as I went along. Currently reading "Murder on the Links" through Kindle Unlimited as well.
I've also read a lot of non-fiction works lately. I read "Start by Believing" by John Barr that delved into the Larry Nassar case of sexual abuse with USA Gymnastics and Michigan State University, which was a painful read for obvious reasons, but also one that felt very important. I'd recommend it to anyone who wants to better understand how such a large scale case of sexual abuse could happen for such a long period of time with such big institutions involved. A challenging read because of the topic it confronts but a worthwhile one because of that.
Sticking with non-fiction, I also read "Wish Lanterns: Young Lives in New China" by Alec Ash, which centered around the experiences of Chinese millennials throughout China, and "Under Red Skies: Three Generations of Life, Loss, and Hope in China" which followed three generations in North China, exploring how China and its people have changed in that time period. Both were very interesting and informative. My current China read is "China in Ten Words" by Yu Hua (translated by Allan H. Barr, which is looking at China through a lens of ten words. The format is essentially ten long essays. The focus so far mainly seems to be on Cultural Revolution era China when the author grew up. So far it is an interesting perspective that I'm finding insightful and quite witty as well. Wit can be a hard thing to translate across cultures, so it's nice the translator was able to achieve that.
Another non-fiction read was "She-Wolves: The Women Who Ruled England Before Elizabeth" by Helen Castor, which looked at the lives and leadership styles and struggles of Eleanor of Aquitaine, Isabella of France, Margaret of Anjou, and the Empress Matilda. I found it a fascinating portrait and window into the minds of some of the medieval world's most powerful and influential women. Helen Castor has also written books on Joan of Arc and the War of the Roses which I own and look forward to reading at some point. I really like her writing style (it's very engaging) and how she interprets history in a feminist way.
In fantasy, I re-read "Empire's Ghost" by Isabelle Steiger and enjoyed its characters and world building. I'm currently reading the just released sequel "The Rightful Queen" and find the world-building more expansive and some new, even more interesting characters introduced.
I've also discovered that I apparently like graphic novels more than I thought. I've read all the "Promise" and "Search" Avatar: The Last Airbender graphic novels and have read the first in the Rift series of graphic novels. They make good, light reads when I'm tired, carrying on the stories of characters I fell in love with watching Avatar. Zuko's story in particular has me hooked. Going to have to find myself some good Zuko/Mai fanfic, ha ha...
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Post by Rosie on Aug 11, 2020 8:36:56 GMT 10
Ooh, devilinthedetails, have you read any of Christie’s Marple series? I enjoy her mysteries in general, and read And Then There Were None a few weeks ago, and I thought I had the right murderer, and I... was wrong. Lisa first put me onto Murder at the Vicarage, though, and I’d recommend it if you can find it, but there’s few of her novels I haven’t really enjoyed.
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Post by devilinthedetails on Aug 12, 2020 1:06:15 GMT 10
Ooh, devilinthedetails , have you read any of Christie’s Marple series? I enjoy her mysteries in general, and read And Then There Were None a few weeks ago, and I thought I had the right murderer, and I... was wrong. Lisa first put me onto Murder at the Vicarage, though, and I’d recommend it if you can find it, but there’s few of her novels I haven’t really enjoyed. I haven't read any of Christie's Marple series, but I have to check them out. Thanks for the recommendation. And Then There Were None is a really hard mystery to solve. When I first read it in eighth grade for school, I at first thought it was Walgrave but was thrown off that suspicion by the fact that he seemed to die ("a red herring swallowed one" indeed!) and re-reading it more recently, I still struggled to put the entire mystery together even knowing the answer. I haven't read that many of Christie's books yet, but I do want to change that. So far, I've enjoyed the ones I've read. They give me a bit of a mental workout trying to piece together all the clues, and they can be sort of period pieces that provide glimpses into another era now, which is neat.
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Post by Lisa on Aug 27, 2020 1:30:23 GMT 10
Christie is great fun because you can take the technical clue-based approach (Poirot) or the empathetic human-nature approach (Marple). I personally prefer the latter, but I think that's because there's usually more humor in the Marple books - but I should note that I've read far fewer Poirot novels. Yesssss. I recently read the one that was a series of little interstitial one-shot stories that fell between episodes, and it was delightful. I have all of Imbalance, and need to start reading those, too.
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mageprincess
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Post by mageprincess on Sept 4, 2020 23:46:30 GMT 10
I recently read the final book in the School For Good and Evil series and really enjoyed it. Honestly that entire series surprised the hell out of me, I really didn’t expect to enjoy the first one and the entire series as much as I did, but it’s got amazing twists and you never know how it’s going to turn out. And I love the fact that it’s a YA series that isn’t shy about its body count.
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Post by Seek on Sept 7, 2020 15:47:30 GMT 10
Currently grinding through Mark Charan Newton's The Book of Transformations in his Legends of the Red Sun series. I am okay with the series, but I enjoyed Drakenfeld more. I don't know why but I'm just not really motivated to finish this series.
Edit: I see y'all generally try to comment more, so I will. It's interesting as eco and political fiction - an ice age comes to an Empire and everything goes to chaos and infighting, with fantasy races that aren't actually dwarves-elves-orcs, so that's fascinating. And cults, banshees, and scholars tinkering with strange artefacts. When I put it this way, it should be interesting, I guess, but I just never really feel compelled to inhabit the world or the characters.
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Post by devilinthedetails on Sept 7, 2020 23:29:09 GMT 10
Listened to the audiobook version of "Pompeii" written by Robert Harris and narrated by John Lee. The narration was pretty good, and I enjoyed the world building (haven't read that much fiction set in Ancient Rome), which definitely captures the advanced infastructure of the Romans, the Mediterranean climate and lushness around Mt. Vesuvius, and the politics and decadence of the higher classes of Roman citizens. The biggest downside was the characters felt a bit black-and-white and caricatured. Especially with the villain being a former slave who had found prosperity, I would've preferred some of his positive traits being explored.
Borrowed "The Wrath and the Dawn" and "The Rose and the Dagger" from my library. I wasn't a huge fan of the central romance but I did like the world building which felt very detailed and focused on a sort Middle Eastern/Indian culture not often written about in fantasy, and the writing style itself was quite rich. The magic and characterizations also developed in some interesting ways in the second book, which I liked better than the first one. Overall, probably glad I borrowed rather than bought those two.
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Post by Idleness on Sept 10, 2020 11:23:54 GMT 10
I burned through The Empire of Gold by S.A. Chakraborty, the final installment of her Daevabad trilogy. It was probably the weaker of the three books, but I still really enjoyed it. In this one the young people finally break free from the enmities of the older generation and have a shot at making a better world.
Also, Unravel the Dusk by Elizabeth Lim, which is the follow-up to Spin the Dawn. I guessed about half way through how this one was going to end for the heroine, but I still enjoyed the journey to get there.
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Post by Kypriotha on Sept 13, 2020 12:22:49 GMT 10
I was feeling a bit lacklustre on the reading front for a while, which I think was a combo of pandemic plus reading books because I felt I had to - which even if they were books I wanted to read, still made it hard to get through them. But I've shaken things up a bit and found some new reading material/habits and have read more the last month or so.
I finally read the latest Peter Grant novel, False Value by Ben Aaronovitch. I enjoyed it a lot more than the last one (Lies Sleeping) and I hope he does write more (I would also like to read more books or novellas featuring Tobias from The October Man).
I read Growing Up Aboriginal in Australia, which was a fantastic collection of stories edited by Anita Heiss about different people's experiences of growing up Aboriginal. I highly recommend it - the contributing authors were aged 13 to 70+ and grew up all around Australia - so it's an interesting look at different people's experiences at different times in the 20th and 21st centuries. Because each story is so short, I read a couple at night before bed over a period of time, sometimes while reading other books.
I'm now reading a similar anthology - Growing Up Queer in Australia, edited by Benjamin Law. There's 4 or 5 books in this "Growing Up X in Australia" series, most of them published by Black Ink, and I bought all of them earlier in the year.
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mageprincess
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Post by mageprincess on Sept 14, 2020 23:27:39 GMT 10
Kypriotha I know how you feel, I’ve been struggling to read much even though there’s a stack of things I want to read. I keep starting things and then getting distracted. I’m currently trying to get through Crazy Rich Asians, which is as funny as I’d heard it was, and Rise of Kyoshi, and ATLA book about Avatar Kyoshi.
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Post by devilinthedetails on Sept 15, 2020 5:14:12 GMT 10
Currently on a bit of a horror craze with my book listening which I guess fits the season as we approach fall and Halloween. From the new Audible Plus catalog free with my Audible membership, I'm listening to Dracula and to the 2019 Edgar Award finalist The Liar's Girl. I read Dracula my freshman year of college and wasn't a huge fan of it but that might have been because my professor had us keeping a journal of every quote that had something to do with vampires, which resulted in a choppy reading experience that as I remarked to my friends at the time was akin to reading Harry Potter and interrupting the reading experience to record all the quotes pertaining to wizards. At any rate, I'm enjoying my listening to Dracula so far. I feel like I'm appreciating the atmospheric and horror elements more this time around.
The Liar's Girl by Catherine Ryan Howard is a great listen so far (I'm about halfway through) that follows the story of a girl whose college boyfriend admitted to being a serial killer ten years ago. The story is told along two timelines--the past and the present--as the murders take place in the past and as repeat crimes occur in the present that make the protagonist wonder if her boyfriend really was a serial killer. So far, it's very gripping, and I love the Irish setting as well as the Irish accents reading the book on Audible.
I'm also continuing to make my way through Shadow Scale by Rachel Hartmann which is a YA fantasy book and sequel to another YA book I borrowed from the library awhile ago entitled Serpahina. I'm actually enjoying Shadow Scale more than Serpahina perhaps because I feel like there is more traveling and creative worldbuilding in this book than in the first one.
I also finished Free Fall, a YA Star Wars novel. It's run of the mill Star Wars stuff that feels quite episodic in nature but does improve at the end.
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Post by Kypriotha on Oct 13, 2020 12:52:13 GMT 10
Fell back into a reading rut where I kept starting and struggling to read books. So I ditched one completely and decided to come back to the others later and instead opted for my ultimate comfort read: Anne of Green Gables. It's worked wonders - I've read the first 3 and am now reading Chronicles of Avonlea before moving onto the next novel in the series.
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Post by Rosie on Oct 13, 2020 20:24:05 GMT 10
Anne is the best remedy! I'm stalling at the moment, which I always do around the time of book club since I'm not reading books of my choosing. Still, book club is on Friday, so I'll be done one way or the other!
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Post by Tamari on Oct 14, 2020 6:42:30 GMT 10
Oh, Anne is the ultimate comfort read! I reread the first three as well earlier this spring. Somewhere I have Anne's House of Dreams and Anne of Ingleside, but I never owned Anne of Windy Poplars (only borrowed it from the library). The first three are my favorites. I need to reread Emily of New Moon too.
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Post by Seek on Oct 15, 2020 20:32:13 GMT 10
So I finished The Broken Isles, which rounds off the Legends of the Red Sun series. It had some good ideas but I've honestly slogged through the series and felt meh about it. The setting was okay but a lot of characters really weren't that interesting.
I moved on to the latest Dresden Files books after that, and it was a really major switch-up and a breath of fresh air. I forgot what it's like to read books and not feel forced or bland about it! Peace Talks and Battle Ground are fantastic but it's very clear they began as the same book. PT is more set-up, while BG is almost entirely epic pay-off. I can see why the people who read PT and had a month to wait for BG felt very put-off: I'd have been too, if I hadn't been too busy and preoccupied to read PT until BG came out!
I really love Mab more and more, and I feel like we're starting to see some huge shifts in the political landscape of the Dresdenverse!
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Post by Rosie on Oct 16, 2020 0:24:14 GMT 10
Lisa said much the same re: Dresden Files! I haven't started PT yet, I feel so out of the loop with it all at the moment, and I'm veering more towards female-led books right now (also part of the reason I haven't started Aaronovitch's False Value which I've owned for months). At least I'll be able to read BG immediately after. I've just finished the first in the Winternight trilogy, though, which was quite slow-paced until the last quarter, but I really enjoyed it.
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mageprincess
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Post by mageprincess on Oct 16, 2020 20:42:56 GMT 10
So I have finished absolutely none of the books I was reading when I last posted here a month ago, but I did just finish the final book in Rick Riordan's Trials of Apollo series, The Tower of Nero. It was, as always, a very good book. I was a tiny bit disappointed in the ending, but at the same time I'm honestly not sure how else it could have ended.
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Post by Seek on Oct 17, 2020 23:25:31 GMT 10
Lisa said much the same re: Dresden Files! I haven't started PT yet, I feel so out of the loop with it all at the moment, and I'm veering more towards female-led books right now (also part of the reason I haven't started Aaronovitch's False Value which I've owned for months). At least I'll be able to read BG immediately after. I've just finished the first in the Winternight trilogy, though, which was quite slow-paced until the last quarter, but I really enjoyed it. Winternight is fantastic, and I understand the desire to read more female-led books as well! I'm getting ready to dive into the latest October Daye book - just wanted to finish my Dresden spree first
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Post by Kypriotha on Oct 20, 2020 17:57:08 GMT 10
Peter Grant is my current exception to otherwise mostly female-written or female-led books. I was so glad False Value was better than the previous book!
Reading Anne's House of Dreams now, which is one of my top faves of the series. My copies of it, Anne of the Island and Anne of Windy Willows (what Anne of Windy Poplars is called here) are all falling apart, so I was excited to support some Melbourne-based independent bookstores and order a new set of books. Except I only found out that Anne of Windy Willows was falling apart *after* I'd already set my heart on a cover set that only has the original 6 novels...so I'll probably buy another complete set at some point in the future (I may have already decided which one). That would take me up to 5 copies of the first book. That's fine, right?
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Post by Rosie on Oct 20, 2020 21:16:48 GMT 10
That would take me up to 5 copies of the first book. That's fine, right? I have seven versions of Pride and Prejudice, so you're in good company. Or, well, in my company, at any rate...!
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Post by Kypriotha on Jan 18, 2021 9:09:32 GMT 10
I finally got around to reading The Secret Commonwealth, the second book in Philip Pullman's Book of Dust series. His Dark Materials is one of my all-time favourite book series and I liked La Belle Sauvage well enough (even though I felt it was too long). So it went against all my expectations when I really did not enjoy The Secret Commonwealth. It was even longer than La Belle Sauvage and I have no idea what the point of it was or what message Pullman was trying to convey. It ended without resolving the main thing I wanted it to resolve, so I will probably read the third book, but I don't know if I'll buy it.
After that, I read The Place on Dalhousie by Melina Marchetta. It's a sort of sequel to Saving Francesca (set a bit later than The Piper's Son, which I haven't read). I started off being annoyed at the main characters, but by the end I liked them and enjoyed the experience of reading the book. So I would recommend it to any Melina Marchetta fans! I don't think you have to have read Saving Francesca to read and enjoy this book, because I've only read it once and had forgotten a lot of it, though I did vaguely remember some of the characters while reading The Place on Dalhousie.
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Post by devilinthedetails on Jan 21, 2021 1:17:04 GMT 10
I haven't posted in this thread in ages, and I've been doing a lot of reading in quarantine, so I won't even try to list all the titles I listened to and read in print or on Kindle, haha. I'll just share a few.
I am listening to the audiobook of "Woman Who Rides Like a Man" from my local library. I've also listened to "Battle Magic," "Alanna: The First Adventure," and "In the Hand of the Goddess" through my local library.
On Audible, I have also just finished "Sons" by Pearl S. Buck, which follows the adventures of one family living in China in the early twentieth century. I listened to the prequel as well "Good Earth." Soon I will try to listen to the third book in the trilogy, "House Divided," as well.
I am currently reading "Spinning Silver" by Naomi Novik (which I'm enjoying way more than Uprooted, so yay for that), "Dead Mountain" a non-fiction book about a Russian mountaineering disaster in 1959, and re-reading "The Witchwood Crown" by Tad Williams.
That skips over a ton of what I've read and listened to but if I listed everything, I'd be writing my own novel on the subject...
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Post by Tamari on Jan 22, 2021 12:40:53 GMT 10
Put me on the Naomi Novik train - I got Spinning Silver for the holidays and read it first thing. I absolutely adored it. One of the best fantasy books I've read in ages.
I also devoured Holly Black's The Folk of the Air series, starting with the Cruel Prince. There are some things I didn't love as much about the first one in particular, but I found the characters interesting and I enjoyed the worldbuilding. I have a lot of books left in my to-read pile!
I'm also doing a book club, invited by a friend from college who was co-president of the native and indigenous club with me. We're reading Braiding Sweetgrass which I'm excited to finally read! I hope it lives up to the hype.
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mageprincess
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Post by mageprincess on Jan 30, 2021 20:49:52 GMT 10
I'm reading a truly excellent YA book called The Ash Princess by Laura Sebastian. It's the first book in a trilogy of the same name. It's the first book I've read in quite a while and I am really enjoying it. The basic rundown is that the main character's country is invaded and conquered and she becomes a hostage in the Kaiser's Court (he forces her to wear a crown of ashes to all formal events, to remind everyone of her status). She essentially becomes a part of a rebellion and attempts to reclaim her throne. It has some Throne of Glass vibes but I'm enjoying this a lot more than I did that.
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Hopeless
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Post by Hopeless on Jan 30, 2021 22:00:40 GMT 10
So I have finished absolutely none of the books I was reading when I last posted here a month ago, but I did just finish the final book in Rick Riordan's Trials of Apollo series, The Tower of Nero. It was, as always, a very good book. I was a tiny bit disappointed in the ending, but at the same time I'm honestly not sure how else it could have ended. I’ve read the first 3 trials of Apollo, and I need to read the others so badly! At the moment I have been really awful at reading- I get halfway through them and then I don’t go near them again/ start another one instead... Spoiler I was so sad when Jason died the first time I read ‘the burning maze’, but when I read it the second time, I was kind of glad he died... 🤷♀️ This past week, I have been reading ‘twenty thousand leagues under the sea’, and it’s really interesting/really weird! I love old books though, and my Grandad gave this to me a couple of years ago, so I thought maybe it would get me reading again. 🌝
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Post by MythicMistress on Mar 1, 2021 8:31:45 GMT 10
The last book I finished reading was the second of the Fowl Twins series by Eoin Colfer. I've found the books to be disappointing thus far, so I'm not sure if I'll read more of the series in the future.
May 14: I just finished the fourth book in John Flanagan's Royal Ranger series. It was fun, but darn that cliffhanger ending!
May 31: Last book I read was The Positronic Man by Isaac Asimov and Robert Silverman, an expansion of Asimov's novella The Bicentennial Man. The expansion felt very organic.
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Post by Kypriotha on Jul 12, 2021 9:29:43 GMT 10
I wanted some quick easy reads, so I re-read a lot of Garth Nix. The Old Kingdom books were fine (Sabriel et al), but I didn't enjoy The Keys To The Kingdom as much (it is middle grade, so maybe not surprising, but I also feel the story is strung out too much over the seven books and loses cohesiveness).
I then read Growing Up Disabled In Australia and Growing Up Muslim In Australia. I really enjoyed Growing Up Disabled, but it turns out that Growing Up Muslim is the one book not published by Black Ink and so doesn't have quite the same curation and diversity of stories (in particular in terms of how many stories were included and how they were selected and edited). So while it was interesting to read the different perspectives, I didn't enjoy it as much as Growing Up Disabled.
I have just finished re-reading The Hunger Games, which I have been wanting to re-read for ages, but put off due to pandemic, stress, needing to be in the right head space etc. The last book in particular was an emotionally tough read, as always, but I love the whole series so much and I think it still holds up well.
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Post by devilinthedetails on Jul 12, 2021 23:42:44 GMT 10
Just finished reading Concrete Rose by Angie Thomas to make a YA video book review on in it my new role as teen librarian. It was great both as a prequel to The Hate U Give and as a standalone novel that was meaningful in its own right.
Right now, I'm reading Last Light of the Sun by Guy Gavriel Kay, Empire of Grass by Tad Wiliams, and Rebel Seoul by Axie Oh (going to do a YA video review on that too). In terms of audiobooks, I'm listening to What is a Girl Worth? by Rachael Denhollander, the Dragonbone Chair by Tad Williams, and Autumn Throne by Elizabeth Chadwick. All are excellent. So listening to a good mix of fantasy, historical fiction, and non-fiction.
Would recommend everything that I'm reading right now.
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