2017 Reading Plans

Well, I managed to leave last year's challenge in the dust! I read 83 books when my goal was only at 60. Of course, a lot of those were mangas which I will probably being staying away from for this new year since I have read the only interesting ones at the library branch I visit. I will however be finishing the Attack On Titan series as soon as I get a chance, so look for an update for those at some point.

I am going to be putting the bar at 60 once more for this year, and try to tackle more novels for the goal. I will also be going along with the themes set up by the book club my sister moderate once more, so look out for some weird patterns in my reading once more! I look forward to really expanding my base again as I try to meet each theme. As I did last year I will have the themes posted by the month in the right column of my page and my posts labeled. 2 books per theme!

Also on my plans is another of the Game of Thrones series, so be on the look out for that!

I believe that we are also changing up plans for the Texas Teen Book Festival, attending the North Texas one this year in Irving in March. If that is the plan, my update of new books from there will probably be used to fulfill some of the themes. We will just have to wait and see!

I hope everyone has a fun year full of books ahead of them!

You're Never Weird On The Internet (almost)

June: Books written by celebrities.

When did I first become aware of Felicia Day? I don't even know. I remember seeing her on Eureka and recognizing her immediately, so I had to have seen Dr. Horrible's Sing Along Blog by then. I don't know if I saw the episodes of Buffy: The Vampire Slayer before or after I knew her name. But I know for a fact when I saw her on Supernatural I fangirl squealed and did a jumping dance in the middle of the living room because Felicia Day was so cool and on my new favorite show! I didn't get to watch her show The Guild when it first aired but I have since made up for that by watching it multiple times and mentioning it to all my friends. So basically it's like I've always been aware of Felicia Day, even though she has only been an actress since 2001. Maybe it's like Joss Whedon said in his intro: "She's something more than a self-made woman - I sometimes think she's not a human woman, that she willed herself into existence, before willing the world to make a place for this new, unfathomable creation." Felicia Day willed herself into my life, and it has been glorious ever since.

In her memoir Felicia tells the incredible tale of how she grew up home-schooled, managed to start college at age 16, and obtained two Real Degrees while never getting her GED. Than she moved to LA with the feeling that she was just meant to be an actress. And it seemed that anything she wanted to do, she put her mind to, and rocked it.
Only, it didn't keep happening that way.
While most of the world sees Felicia Day as this incredibly bubbly, happy, bright person who is not only beautiful but is also a gamer, which is just awesome, people don't suspect the underlying anxious, over-worked, neurotic that hides behind the games she played until she had pushed most of the world out.

And this is why I love Felicia Day. On top of the fact that I always love her bigger characters, I started to catch glimpses of the real Day sometime after she stared in Eureka and what I saw fascinated me. I'm not a major gamer, but I love to sit and loose myself in some Zelda when I can. I spent most of my teen years behind a computer screen in RPG chatrooms because I could be better than who I was IRL. I am addicted to stories because they are the easiest way for me to loose myself (and reading is something that people will encourage). And with all the convention panels I was getting to watch on YouTube, I started to see someone that I could relate to. And she was awesome!

Reading this book I got a closer look at Felicia Day than I ever had before. She opens her soul for the readers and welcomes them in to follow her journey through not only her childhood and move to LA, but the tough years including the two she spent literally addicted to WoW and then later when depression and anxiety got a hold of her so bad that her health took a turn for the worse. Day does not sugarcoat how hard things got for her, and I love that, because people that go through the same need to see that other have it just as bad. And her making her way out of it and doing something incredible, gives the rest of us real hope.

When I saw that Felicia Day wrote a memoir I got so excited, because she is awesome and I love to read about peoples' lives, how they got to where they are, and what they take from that experience. I got so much more in this book. I got to see hope that even though I am incredibly anxious and what people think of my work terrifies me, I can still put it out there, because I made a think #LookIt.

I really encourage everyone to read this one. It's full of laughter and sweet stories and awkward moments. And then it's full of truth and honesty. For the gamers, the women, the socially awkward creative people. Everyone feeling like maybe their passion is just too weird. Everyone that overthinks things to the point of insomnia. Here is a book written by a woman that gets it. And says that it is ok to be like that, you can make something of it, you just got to try. So give the book a read, and tell me what you think about it!

The Blinding Knife

March - Books with 500+ pages.

{{Possible spoilers if you haven't read the first book in the series! I will try not to ruin anything, but you have been warned!}}

Where do I even start?! Ok, this book was just as incredible as the first. Most times when you have a trilogy the second book tends to slow down; it becomes a filler containing mostly just enough info and action to get you through to book three. It's no fault of the authors, usually, the middle of the story just runs the risk of lagging. Not in this series.

The Blinding Knife is filled with just as many revelations, twists, points of drama, fights, complications, and moments of actual happiness as the first book. I found myself laughing, squealing, yelling, clutching my heart just as much as I had in the first book. There is so much to love and hate about this second part of the story. The fact that it took my an extra two days to finish it was simply due to the world outside the story.

Once more we find ourselves following multiple characters: Gavin Guile, Kip, Karris, Liv. With the occasional visit to the prisoner and a new plot twist, experiencing a chapter here and there as other people who will no doubt come to mean a lot more to the plot long after you have forgotten the details of their brief story. Because there is a lot more going on here! Kip is training with the Blackguard, Gavin is trying to stop a war, control the Spectrum, and get rid of banes while keeping his secrets, Karris is trying to find a way to tell Gavin she knows some of his secrets, and all the other players on the board are trying their damnedest to ruin things for everyone.

And again the brilliance of Brent Weeks is evident. I had forgotten how vividly he painted war, making the reader understand just how atrocious it really is. He is also adept at intertwining story lines, making the reader really work to figure out where everything is going and what the possible outcomes could possibly be. With about a third of the book left I went to my husband to talk to him since he had already read the book. "You've figured a lot out, but your missing some stuff that I thought you would have gotten by now." Now that I am done with the book I get what he meant, and wow, yeah, I should have seen at least one of those things coming. These books sure are keeping me on my toes. And making me overly suspicious of everyone! Because everyone in the Chromeria is a viper just waiting to strike.

I was, however, reminded of my one problem with Weeks' writing. His timelines. The problem with following multiple characters you run the risk of getting days and weeks confused. While Gavin and Karris are in one place and you think they should be back quickly, Kip is watching days, weeks, months go by, and it's not till the end of the next chapter that you figure out what is keeping the first two away so long. Weeks does as best as he can putting everything in order, but a couple of times I was thrown on precisely when events occurred in relation to other events. He straightens it out, but it throws me off just a little, nonetheless.

So other than that this books is another great read by Brent Weeks. Seriously, pick up this series! I am excited to open the third, and last, book today without hesitation. While I am terrified how Weeks can ruin everything for my beloved characters, I just have to know how everything turns out! See you on the other side!

The Black Prism

March - Books 500 pages or longer

Brent Weeks always writes incredible stories that are immensely complex and tangled, with characters that are never clear cut and all the more amazing. As a reader I am continually sucked into his worlds, thrown about by the story, and left to crawl my way out the other side a changed person! He is just such an amazing story teller.

When I first saw the theme for this month in the book club I thought my sister was insane. Not only did she want me to read a 500 page book, and near the end of the month since last month took me so long to get through, but she wanted me to read 2! Then I began panicking because I didn't think that I owned a book with 500 pages! Of course my husband had to prove me wrong, pointing out The Black Prism sitting on our already read shelf from when he had made his way through it a while back. I groaned but agreed because it met the theme and I had read Brent Weeks' Night Angel Trilogy and loved it.  But 2 things I didn't take into account when I agreed. 1) This is a trilogy, all three books 600ish pages, and we owned all three. Once I had read the first two for the book club I was going to have to read the third to be satisfied. So I was challenging myself a little more. 2) I forgot how Weeks affects me! With The Night Angel Trilogy I spent days in withdrawals, that shaking, all thought consuming, mind fog you get when you finish a series that changes your life. I couldn't stop talking about it, drawing my husband into conversations repeatedly because I hadn't been able to get over some aspects of the story. (Mostly because one terrifying thing Brent Weeks does with accuracy, not everyone gets a happy ending. A fact that has me terrified for this series!) Weeks after putting the book down saw me reeling a friend into a rabid conversation when he noticed the omnibus on my shelf. All this I have to look forward to because after just finishing the first book I know I am going to loose sleep over the possible outcomes of characters I am already far too invested in. I clutched the open pages to my chest no less than five times over the course of one page near the end! There will be no hope for me at the end of this trilogy and I hope my friends survive my inevitable rantings and ravings!

Ok, so The Black Prism takes us into a world where people regularly have magic manifesting in their ability to turn colors into objects. Think of the Green Lantern with the full rainbow. The magic isn't in everyone and those with it can have it to varying degrees, only able to handle one color to multiple ones. Then there is the Prism, the one guy in a generation who can control all the colors, using the light each day to help balance out the world of color and serving as a type of priest between the people and the god they worship, Orholam. Only, sixteen years ago Orholam decided to pick two Prisms, brothers, and this spurned a war. In the aftermath, sixteen years later, the world is still slightly off balance and people are still affected by everything that occurred. Not the least of which is the Prism, Gavin Guile, who bares the greatest affects and consequences of the actions of him and his brother.

What ensues is a winding tale following a few selected characters, none of which I will name or how they are important because there is just too much and you need to discover stuff for yourself for the greatest effect! Weeks always does a great job of looping, threading, entangling story-lines for the reader to slowly follow and discover news in ways that always leaves me gasping even though I kinda almost half expected it in the back of my mind already. And of course his characters are never as simple as the Hero and the Villain. Hell they aren't even as simple as the Hero and the Anti-hero. Even the Hero is sure he is a monster but just maybe he is a better monster than the other possible monster, but he can't be sure of it. Oh so much chaos! And I am only done with the first book!

So I am going to pick up the next one tomorrow. I am already kicking myself for thinking I wouldn't finish this one before I went home from our stay-cation at a friend's house because I could already be a hundred pages in! Anyway, expect the next review soon because Weeks has sucked me in and there is no escape until I have made my way through as quickly as possible! Pick this book up! Join me in the madness! You'll love every minute of it with this incredible story-telling!

Shada : A Doctor Who Story

Feb. - Books published after 2011

Where do I even begin about this book? Let me start with a little backstory, a "Why it was written" of sorts. Did you know that Douglas Adams was a writer for the original Doctor Who series back in the 70's? I did not. As a great fan of Adams in my late teens, I was unaware of what he was doing outside the Hitchhiker's series. In my defense, as an American I wasn't exactly the target audience for the BBC show. In 2005 when the show started back up I heard about it from all my college friends, some of whom went to Harlaxton for the study abroad program out University offered simply to be closer to all things British they loved so much. It was in 2006/7 that I discovered BBC, falling in love with random episodes of Graham Norton, Doctor Who, even Law & Order: UK! Don't even try selling me on the American version of Being Human because it is crap compared to the original. But being sucked into the world of The Doctor failed to fill me in on one of my favorite author's former hand in the show, even as I watched numerous older episodes. So imagine my excitement when I unwrapped this book one holiday or other and became nearly giddy with the possibility of mixing Adams and The Doctor!

Reading this book, Adams' hand in creating The Doctor has never been more clear! Of course his mind helped shape the Time Lord's personality! How could I never see it before! The Fourth Doctor could have been best friends with Arthur Dent!

This brings me a little further into the story behind this book. Shada was the episode they were working on when the BBC went on strike. The story line never came to an end. And while everyone was distraught over it, Tom Baker (the 4th Doctor) admitting they all cried at the loss, Adams couldn't help but be relieved. Because the story was not what he had wanted. He had been forced to leave things out, drop off whole lines of thought, characters appeared only to leave the plot with no explanation!

Enter Gareth Roberts. I don't know how he got the script, why he was asked to write this book, but I am eternally grateful he did. Gareth did an incredible job of capturing Adams's voice and writing a book that I could almost believe was written by the late author I so loved. Many times I found myself sinking into a place I hadn't since first reading Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy. Other parts had me laughing out loud and wishing I could start up some episodes of the 4th Doctor because I definitely heard his voice in my head throughout the story.

Simply put this is such an awesome book. Perfectly told in the way of a Doctor Who episode. With all the humor, chaos, twists, and close calls one would expect to accompany The Doctor. So if you have ever read any of Douglas Adams' work and loved it, or seen an episode of Doctor Who and been enraptured, pick this book up. It is completely worth the read!

::EDIT:: I am marking the scheduled publish date on this for Feb. 29th so it will be listed on the Feb bracket, even though I didn't finish the book until March 15th.

Sleeping In Eden

There are two stories to tell here. Dr. Lucas Hudson is a small town doctor trying hard to hold onto a failing marriage. And he definitely regrets answering the phone when his friend Alex called, because he did not like the thought of acting as coroner with the body of the town's most reclusive alcoholic hanging from the rafters. But it's too late to change the past and things are about to get far too complicated for Lucas to pull back now.

Meg Painter is a young girl just trying to figure life out, which seems like the usual fair for any fourteen year old. And wouldn't things just be more fun if she was being tossed between the ups and downs of first love, first heartbreak, best friends, and boyfriends, all with two boys in the mix? No. No, it wouldn't be fun. But Meg has been given these circumstances and she is trying to untangle it all.

Slowly these two stories unfold and grow closer together in this wonderfully woven tale by Nicola Baart. At first I hated the alternating chapters, bouncing from one character's story to the next. As soon as I would feel invested in one plot line, she would throw me into the other. But as the stories got closer to intersecting, I found that I was deeply invested in both, needing to know how they came to meet, how things could possibly be resolved, how things had happened. Due to the nature of the story, I was kinda expecting the ending, just a little. I didn't know the finer points, and I was unprepared for the heartbreak that would accompany the details. I tweeted the author when I finished: "Thanks @NicoleLynnBaart for ripping my heart to pieces and stitching it back together with a fine thread. SLEEPING IN EDEN was wonderful." And that is the best way I can say how the ending affected me.

I really recommend this book. To the lovers of mystery, twists and turns, love, and heartbreak, and Hope. This is a great read by a talented author. I look forward to reading more of her work!

2016 Reading Plan

A new year, a new challenge for myself in the world of books. 

This year I am rejoining a book club that my sister and mother started a few years back. We have moved it to Goodreads since I am rarely able to join them for discussions. I love being able to talk books with people, especially these two since they are not only fellow avid readers, but they are writers as well. These traits, along with our diverse taste in books, always leads to some very interesting conversations. I am really looking forward to the year ahead!

So there have been some rule changes for the group since I left and they made the group honestly more appealing for me. 1) We each read 2 book that fit the monthly theme. 2) They don't have to be the same book as the other members, although they have been known to lend the book to the other after finishing. 3) They are books they already own. 

With me having a very wide selection of books, including some random ones neither of the other two would think of adding to their own shelves, and having too many that I haven't yet had the chance to read, these new rules were the best thing! 

This all means that this year I plan on reading at least 24 books. A much more manageable number since I tend to set the bar too high and never reach the number. I went ahead and added a few more books to the number making it an even 30. That's only an extra book every two months. I can do that!

So here it goes! A new year and a new list of books to read and review!

2015 Reading Challenge

A New Year means a new reading challenge! Of course if you are on Goodreads, as I am, you have already been hit with the chance to commit to the challenge by entering the numer of books you want to read this year. Have you picked a number yet? 

At the beginning of the year I found a list on Pinterest and went ahead and pinned it to look at as soon as I could finish the book I had started back at Halloween time when I had time to read and thought I could finish a book. Of course, then came NaNoWriMo, the holidays, moving time, and the book got put on hold. Which was a shame, because it was such a great read! So I finally finished it yesterday and looked at the pin I had set aside. The list is long (well, 52 can be long when you haven't been reading enough lately) but I am determined to finish this year!

So, I am going to post my list here. Maybe you can join me in the list, or you have one of your own? And as I read the books, and review of course, I will let you know which list item the book covers. I really look forward to the diversity that is this list!

Take a look at the list. Do you have suggestions for books? Because I can use your help in finding some! Thanks!

*NOTE* Some books could cross of multiple items, but I am looking for the challenge, so each book will only stand for one list item. Except for trilogy which will have three books, obviously.

A book with more than 500 pages

A classic romance

A book that became a movie

A book published this year

A book with a number in the title

A book written by someone under 30

A book with nonhuman characters

A funny book

A book by a female author

A mystery or thriller

A book with a one-word title

A book of short stories

A book set in a different country

A nonfiction book

A popular author's first book

A book from an author you love that you haven't read yet

A book a friend recommended 

A Pulitzer Prize winning book

A book based on a true story

A book at the bottom of your to-read list

A book your mom loves

A book that scares you

A book more than 100 years old

A book based entirely on its cover

A book you were supposed to read in school but didn't 

A memoir

A book you can finish in a day

A book with antonyms in the title

A book set somewhere you've always wanted to visit

A book that came out the year you were born

A book with bad reviews

A trilogy

A book from your childhood

A book with a love triangle

A book set in the future

A book set in high school

A book with a color in the title

A book that made you cry

A book with magic

A graphic novel

A book by an author you've never read before

A book you own but have not read

A book that takes place in your hometown

A book originally written in a different language

A book set during Christmas

A book written by an author with your same initials

A play

A banned book

A book based on or turned into a TV show

A book you started but never finished