March Wrap Up

I just have a short little wrap up post today.  This month wasn't a bad reading month for me with a total of 5 books finished.  Still, I'd like to be reading a little faster.  I'm getting into a routine now though, so things might get better soon!  So, here are the books that I read this month:

1.  Every Breath by Ellie Marney (4 stars)

2.  Angelfall by Susan Ee (reread, 5 stars)

3.  The Night Circus by Erin Morgenstern (5 stars)

4.  Kitty Hawk and the Curse of the Yukon Gold by Iain Reading (3.5 stars)

5.  Every Word by Ellie Marney (4.5 stars)

If You Want... Angels

I've recently been rereading Angelfall because End of Days (the final book in the series) is coming out in May, and there's a readathon going on on Goodreads (here's the group, if you want to check it out).  Anyway, as usually happens when I reread this book, I got thinking about how different it is from anything else I've read.  Then I started thinking about other noticeably unique books, and I came up with this post idea.  I'm tentatively calling it "If You Want..." for now, but if you think of something better, let me know :P  I'll be picking books that fit into one topic but are all quite different from each other, and I'll talk about them a bit.  Goodness knows I love to talk about books!  I'm hoping to do a few different topics over the weeks, and today I'm focusing on angel books.

Top Ten Childhood Books

Top Ten Tuesday is hosted by The Broke and the Bookish.  This week's top ten is books from childhood you would love to revisit.  This is going to be a fairly easy top ten for me, since I read quite a bit as a child and I can name ten favourites off the top of my head.  I own a lot of these books, and even have a shelf on Goodreads dedicated to a fair few of them.  A lot of them are series, so I'm just going to stick with either the first book in the series, or the most memorable of the bunch.  Here we go!


1.  Trixie Belden
This series was introduced to me by my mum.  It follows Trixie and the friends she makes throughout the series on mystery-solving adventures.  The series is over 30 books long, and I never quite finished it.  I didn't read the last book because I didn't want it to be over!  Every book was so exciting and there wasn't a single character I didn't love!

2.  The Sisters Grimm by Michael Buckley
This series is a great cause of pain for me.  I first got into the series about two sisters who discover a town of fairytale creatures (think Once Upon a Time) when I was in late primary school.  The problem?  The series is nine books long.  I kept up with the series until 2010.  With a book or two released each year, it wasn't too hard to remember what was going on.  Then there was an approximately two year wait for the final book of the series.  I'd grown up a lot in that time, and when I tried restarting, I struggled to relate to the characters who hadn't aged a bit over the series.  My interest fizzled out.  I feel mad that I was so invested in this series but never finished the final book!  I never got to find out what happened!  I have been fooling myself for a couple years now that I am "currently rereading" the series - ie. I have a bookmark stuck halfway through the second book.

*sigh*

Life Updates (Did you see this coming?)

So, I mentioned quite a few times in previous posts that I was going to be starting uni, and man, can you tell!  I haven't posted for over two weeks now.  On the one hand, this makes me feel disappointed in myself, because I know I haven't made blogging as much of a priority as I could have (I have watched quite a lot of TV), but on the other hand I knew that my blogging was going to take a hit as soon as I had student commitments in my life again, so this is something I was expecting.  Hopefully, as the trimester goes on, I will continue to work on my time management and get more done in the time I have available to me.

Soundtrack Saturday - Gone Girl

Soundtrack Saturday is a weekly meme created by Erin at The Hardcover Lover.  The idea is to pick a book and match up songs to it.  You can either do a mini-soundtrack (which has guiding questions) or a full soundtrack.  Now, I've usually gone with the mini-soundtrack option, but today I'm trying out the full soundtrack option!  And my chosen book is Gone Girl by Gillian Flynn.  I've also decided not to explain my choices this week, because I think that if you've read the book (and know the lyrics) you'll understand.  So, I guess if you haven't read the book you could consider some of my song choices to be SPOILERS, so watch out if you haven't read or seen the movie.  Oh, and as usual, I'm basing my picks on my general interpretation of the lyrics rather than sound.  I wouldn't put these songs in a movie, they just remind me of events and characters.

1.  Black Cat - Mayday Parade 2.  Lying - Amy Meredith 3.  Blank Space - Taylor Swift 4.  Heartless - A Day To Remember 5.  Lights Out - Breaking Benjamin 6.  The Storm - Of Mice and Men 7.  A Shot Across the Bow - Mayday Parade 8.  Red in Tooth and Claw - Memphis May Fire 9.  Black Widow - Iggy Azalea ft. Rita Ora 10.  Loverboy - You Me At Six 11.  Ugly Heart - G. R. L. 12.  End of Me - A Day To Remember

So there's my soundtrack for this week - be sure to link yours below!

My TBR For The Next... While

Just as a warning, this post is going to be a rambling mess.  Today I want to talk about some of the books I'm currently reading, and some books I want to read very soon.  I didn't put a TBR in my recent wrap up post like usual, because I have no idea how much I'm going to be reading this month since I'm starting university!  Next week!  I never really thought about what would happen when I got out of high school, but now it's happening and it's so weird... In a good way though, I think.  So after three and a half months of absolutely no responsibilities I'm being thrust into hardcore study and I don't know if my reading is going to suffer.

Something else to note, as you will see, is that I figured out how to make tables stay in the centre of the page, so this is going to revolutionise my future wrap up posts :P

Anyway, after having a dodgy reading month in Feb, I still have some books from that TBR to read.

Kitty Hawk and the Curse of the Yukon Gold

Florence

These are two books I received for review so they are top priority right now.  I've already started both and I'm enjoying them!

I've also currently got The Night Circus by Erin Morgenstern out from the library, so I'm going to get to that soon too.  I've heard nothing but good things about it, so hopefully my expectations aren't too high!  I'm in the queue for both Red Queen and Every Word as well.  I'm super excited for Red Queen because I haven't read anything like it in a while and it sounds amazing!  I put Every Word on hold because I finished Every Breath this morning and enjoyed it well enough.

Top Ten All Time Favourites - Top Ten Tuesday

As you probably know, Top Ten Tuesday is hosted weekly by The Broke and the Bookish.  This week's top ten is all time favourite books from the last three years.  I'm going to make this all time favourites that I read in the last three years, rather than released in the past three years, because I don't think I've read enough for that!  I'm also going to split it into true favourites and casual favourites.  My true favourites are books that I know I will love forever.  Books that I couldn't put down once I'd picked them up.  These are the books that I got a special feeling about from the first page.  My casual favourites are books I loved when I read them (and even now), but I know they might not be forever.  I wasn't gripped from the first page, but by the end I was in love.  I hope that makes sense!  It does to me!
Oh, and I'm not including sequels of books already chosen.

True Favourites

1.  Cruel Beauty by Rosamund Hodge
2.  Daughter of Smoke and Bone by Laini Taylor
3.  Please Ignore Vera Dietz by A. S. King
4.  Attachments by Rainbow Rowell
5.  Shadow and Bone by Leigh Bardugo
6.  Angelfall by Susan Ee

Casual Favourites

1.  Tiger's Curse by Colleen Houck

2.  Legend by Marie Lu

3.  Crown of Midnight by Sarah J. Maas

4.  Clockwork Princess by Cassandra Clare (this is leaning towards a true favourite, but I'll have to wait to reread it and see - maybe it was just my strong emotions about the characters clouding my judgement!)

So that's this week's top ten for me.  As usual, be sure to share yours in the comments!

February Wrap Up / Mini Reviews

It's back!  The dreaded slump!

For some reason, it's taking me a lot longer to get through books than I would like and I'm finding nothing to my taste.  The problem is, I don't know if it's me or the slump that doesn't feel connected to anything I pick up *sigh*

Anyway, I read three books this month and I'm going to mini-review them otherwise this post will be super short!

The Young Elites by Marie Lu

This is the first novel in a new fantasy series by the author of the Legend trilogy - a trilogy which I absolutely loved.  The Young Elites didn't wow me as much as Legend, but I did enjoy it.  It follows the story of Adelina, a girl who survived a disease as a child and as a result now has some strange powers.  Unfortunately, survivors of the disease carry markings of it, and they are shunned by their society due to it.  So, as you can imagine, Adelina had quite a rough childhood.  Seeing how her past shaped and even warped her was intriguing.  Her transformation over the novel was awesome, if a little scary!
Though it wasn't boring, I did find that there were some predictable moments, and there was a large plot point that I really didn't like, but understood all the same.  Highlight for spoilers about said plot point: [I hate, in any book, when a character has a secret that probably wouldn't be a problem if they shared it, but becomes a problem when another character finds out they were keeping it from them.  To explain this a bit better: I hated that Adelina couldn't/wouldn't tell the Young Elites about Teren blackmailing her, and that it was so obvious she was going to be caught out - and she was.  I understand that it was likely the Young Elites wouldn't want to save her sister, considering at that point they didn't know she had powers, but it still got on my nerves and affected my reading experience.  It was so very frustrating!]
Another thing that affected my enjoyment of this book was that I didn't seem to really connect with any of the main characters.  My favourites were Raffaele (though I'm a little wary of him) and Gemma (mostly because of the animal power).  I don't know who to trust - which I'm sure was the point!
The novel felt a little more like a prequel to me, but it has set the series up for an extremely interesting sequel, which I can't wait to get to!