Hi, YouTube, it's Kathy, and this is my January 2019 Reading Wrap Up.
If you're not already aware, I do Weekly Entertainment Wrap Ups of everything I read, watch, and
listen to, but today we're just doing the books.
Additionally, in January I was participating in Read Yo' Shelves, which focuses on just
reading books that you already have on your shelves, so I own all of the books I'm about
to talk about.
I also blacked out the bingo board with a few books to spare.
I'm going to start with the nerdy, hardcore stats and charts, and then get into what I read.
In January, I read 17 books for a total of 5,858 pages.
This takes into account converting audiobook minutes to pages, so 2,144 of those pages
were actually about 63 hours of audio.
The age breakdown for these books was 12 adult books and 5 YA books.
I read 15 novels and 2 graphic novels.
This month, the biggest chunk of what I read was fantasy and contemporary, followed by
scifi, mystery/thriller, historical fiction, nonfiction, and speculative fiction.
If you adjust by page count, the categories stay pretty much the same.
All of these books were books I already owned prior to January, but since you all backed
me up in saying that audiobooks from the library for books I already own count, I did get some
of those as well.
I read 10 paperbacks, 5 audiobooks, 1 hardcover, and 1 ebook.
Nearly half of my books were in the 300-399 pages range, and the vast majority were published
in the 2010's.
Almost all of these books were by female authors and most of the protagonists were female.
In terms of the setting, more than half of the books were set in the United States and
United Kingdom, with others being set in Canada, Austria, Botswana, Italy, and other worlds.
In terms of diversity, there was queer content, feminist content, reads to do with race and
mental health, but about 30% of the books had no significant diversity.
In terms of star ratings, this month I had one 2 star book, one 2.5 star book, two 3
star books, four 4 star books, seven 4.5 star books, and two 5 star books.
Let's start with the lowest rated read and work our way to the highest, shall we?
If you happened to watch my vlog for 24in48, this 2 star read read will come as no surprise.
It is Spook Country by William Gibson.
This one just wasn't for me, and that's why it's a 2 star read.
Also, it was the second in a series that I had never read the first book of.
This book revolves around three main characters - one who used to be in a band and is now
a journalist, another one who you get the idea he's kind of in some sort of mafia, and
the third one being an informant of sorts for the government.
They all start in different locations but all eventually end up in Vancouver, British
Columbia for a heist of sorts, which I laughed a lot about because that's really close to where I am.
I mostly had this on my shelves because a friend of mine really likes his books.
This is the person that came up with the term "cyberspace" after all.
And it was kind of fun to see what he thought nowadays would kind of look like verses what
it actually is.
Some of the stuff surpassed what we have technology-wise, and some of the stuff he was talking about
was antiquated by today's standards.
My 2.5 star read was an ARC of Carmilla, which is coming out, I believe, in July.
This is a novelization, basically, of the web series, and I definitely preferred it
as a web series.
There were points in the web series where things happened off camera, and this book
had the chance to explore them on the page, and really... didn't do them justice.
Any time it was discussing something that didn't happen on camera, it just kind of said
"this happened, this happened, this happened" and then back to something that happened on camera.
Additionally, in the text, it referred to the non-binary character as "she" over and
over and over again, so I really hope that gets caught before it goes to print.
On to my 3 star reads, the first one being The No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency.
This one I read for my local Nerdfighter book club.
It was interesting.
It... mmm... the thing about it is it seemed like a series of short stories and the stakes
were never really high in solving these detective cases, and it actually took a really long
time to get to the detective agency.
There was even a point where the main character's deceased father had this whole section about
his life working in a mine, which was interesting, but didn't really... fit.
If that makes any sense.
It would have been more interesting if she were telling stories about her dad as flashbacks,
as opposed to this info dump of his life.
Additionally, nobody at my book club liked the ending of this book.
It was kind of bullshit.
My other 3 star read was Inkspell.
This is the second in the Inkworld Trilogy, and it was fine.
I just didn't do a very good job of going back and remembering what characters existed
before, so when I went into this I had to kind of pause it every once in a while to
think about which character was which, because many of the characters have multiple names.
So there's a chance this 3 star rating is part the book's fault and part my fault.
That being said, this is the longest book I read this month, and I felt like it could
have been edited down a little bit, although I did really enjoy the different streams of
adventures it was going on, because, obviously, with so many characters, they break off into
different groups and then eventually meet back up, or don't.
I am looking forward to finishing the series, but I think I'll do that during a readathon
I'll be hosting in March - that I'm not going to tell you about yet.
Just tease you with it.
On to my 4 star reads, the first one being Soulless: The Manga.
This is a manga version of Soulless by Gail Carriger, and I actually read both of them this month.
I just rated Soullless higher than I did the manga.
Something about having a preference to the source material.
And, also, you got way more of dirty stuff in the original book.
Since I read these back to back, I noticed that a lot of the dialogue was directly from
the text, which I really appreciated.
I also really liked seeing all of these characters depicted on the page.
I'll talk more about the plot of this book when I get to the book version of it instead
of the manga version of it.
My next 4 star read was This One Looks Like A Boy.
This is an ARC coming out in, I believe, March or April of this year, and originally I was
going to say this was a memoir of transitioning, but it's so much more than that, because so
much happened in his life before he actually transitioned.
Growing up, Lorimer pretty much always knew that he was a guy, but was told that that
can't be possible "because he was a little girl".
And because he didn't transition until a few years ago, actually, a lot of this is about
his life going through and being categorized as the wrong gender.
He also just told his life story - a lot of fascinating things have happened to him over the years.
If you're looking for a memoir to read, I definitely suggest picking this one up once it's published.
My next 4 star book was Broken Things by Lauren Oliver.
I read this one as an audiobook, and I always read Lauren Oliver as an audiobook because
Sarah Drew narrates - at least, she was one of the three narrators of this one.
This book is about three girls, all three who were best friends until one of them was
murdered 5 years previously.
The small town they live in believes that the remaining two girls did it, and even though
they were never convicted of this, the town just believes that they got off on a technicality,
and that they should be in prison.
One of the two remaining girls turns up some evidence while she's clearing out her mom's
house and they decide that it's time to finally who killed their best friend.
This one had a lot of twists, and lot of turns.
I highly suggest listening to the audiobook if you can because the voices that the narrators
do are wonderful.
Also, this is a bookish book because the thing that really brought these three friends together
was a book, and it actually led to the one character dying.
And you know I love a bookish book.
Like I said in my Weekly Wrap Up when I talked about this, if you know of any other thrillers
that are bookish books, I really want to know about them because I want to read them, so
if you know any, let me know.
And my last 4 star read was Solitaire by Alice Oseman.
This was her debut novel, and I really enjoyed it.
I also noticed that this book and Radio Silence are tangentially connected, so I have a feeling
that all of her books take place in the same universe.
This book is about a girl named Tori who is in the UK, in their version of high school,
and dealing with all of that type of stuff.
Also, her brother had some mental illness issues previously, so she's keeping a good
eye on him, and then these weird things start happening in her school.
Somebody who goes by the name of Solitaire has started playing pranks, but they start
to escalate, and all of the pranks seem to be related to her.
This becomes a mystery that other people want to solve, but she doesn't really care about it.
She really only starts caring when people start getting hurt.
I would read anything that Alice Oseman writes, and I highly suggest that you pick up her
entire collection.
On to my 4.5 star reads, the first one being Rat Queens Volume 1.
This is much bloodier and more adult than I was expecting, and I'm okay with that.
This is a fantasy graphic novel that follows the Rat Queens, which is one of the gangs,
if you will, in this fantasy, medieval town.
What tends to happen is these different gangs will go to the tavern, they'll drink, there'll
be a brawl, and they'll all have to make up for it in the morning.
That's exactly that happens at the beginning of this graphic novel, and it puts them on a quest.
I really enjoyed this volume and I've been told that it's the best of the series but
I still kind of want to read the rest of the series just to find out for myself.
Also, at least one of the characters in the party is queer, so you know I'm there for that.
My next 4.5 star read was Soullless.
So, this one I picked for Read Yo' Shelves because there's a category where you can create
your own category, and I wanted to read something that sounded preposterous.
This one has vampires, werewolves, the main character doesn't have a soul, and her Italian father is dead.
That just sounded preposterous to me.
That's why I picked it up.
This one is a hate to love relationship, a lot of the same social cues as Victorian England,
but then adding in vampires and werewolves, and it's delightful!
I'm going to need to read the rest of them now.
Next was In the Unlikely Event by Judy Blume.
This one is based on a true story, and the true story being that there were quite a few
plane crashes around the time when Judy Blume was living in New Jersey in her childhood.
That being said, though, all of the characters in the book are fictional characters.
Although this one centres around Miri, and young Jewish girl at the time, it's really
a community piece.
We get to see all of these different lives, how they interact, and what happens when people
in those lives die because of these plane crashes.
I feel like this was masterfully put together.
There were so many moving pieces, and yes, at times I had to try to remember which character
was which because there are so many, but regardless, I wanted to find out how everybody's story ended.
My next book was The Life and Death of Sophie Stark.
This one is told in such an interesting way.
We start out with the perspective of this woman who starts to date Sophie Stark.
Sophie is a film director and soon decides that she wants to put her new girlfriend in
her feature film.
Because I don't want to ruin how that goes, I'll just move on to tell you that the next
chapter is told from a different perspective of somebody who knew Sophie, and then onwards
and onwards.
None of the chapters are told by Sophie herself, and a lot of the description in this book
is itself cinematic.
There are tons of different film references and artistic choices, and if you are a fan
of film, this is a book you should pick up.
The next book on this list is Reconstructing Amelia by Kimberly McCreight.
This one is about a woman whose daughter is caught cheating at school, and the woman goes
to school to pick her up, and by the time that she gets there, her daughter is dead.
I feel like I said that with a smile, but, like, it's a smile because it's such a turn
in twist - it wasn't because I was happy her kid was dead.
What follows is a back and forth between the mother trying to come to terms with what happened
to her daughter and finding out that she might not have killed herself, and a timeline of
her daughter in the past and how it got to this point.
I highly enjoyed this structure and I really liked how the characters were working in tandem.
Even though we knew from really early on that Amelia was going to die, it didn't change
the fact that we really want to know how.
Because you're told in the synopsis on the back of the book in the first line or two that
Amelia ends up dying, I kind of wish that the very beginning of the book was just tightened
up a little bit.
There's a lot of just Kate talking about, like, Amelia's childhood, and all of these
types of things, while she's stuck on the subway to pick up her daughter, and because
any reader whose read the blurb knows that her daughter is dead, I just kind of wanted
to get to that.
However, it's actually weird for me to have read the blurb, so if I hadn't read the blurb,
I probably would have liked that section a lot more.
My next read was Heartless by Marissa Meyer.
This is a prequel to Alice in Wonderland, and it concerns the person who eventually
becomes the Queen of Hearts.
I really fell in love with this protagonist as well as the love interest, and I was...
so torn because I knew how it was going to end.
We all know she becomes the Queen of Hearts, but her struggle throughout the book to do
literally anything else really kept me intrigued.
Cath just wants to open up a bakery with her friend, but because she's nobility, this is
not going to happen.
Because she's a woman, this is not going to happen.
Also, her parents really want her to marry the king; she does not want that to happen.
In fact, when the Cheshire cat tells her that the king's about to propose, she runs away
from the ball and smack dab into somebody who she ends up actually loving.
This book really made me love this character that we all come to really hate in Alice in
Wonderland, and took her on such a journey to get there.
There was heartbreak, there was imagination, she drew from other fairy tales, which I really enjoyed.
So if you are a fan of retellings, and you haven't read this one yet, I highly suggest picking it up.
My final 4.5 start read was Alice Isn't Dead by Joseph Fink.
This is a such a great adaptation of the podcast.
I didn't know going into this if I should listen to the podcast all the way through
and then read the book - if it was a continuation or not - but it does cover the same timeline.
However, it's not just the podcast put into book form, it is put into a narrative form
that is different from the podcast and I really enjoyed the writing.
This book is about a woman whose wife goes missing and is presumed dead.
She doesn't want to believe this.
She doesn't believe this, and just when she's coming to start to believe this, she sees
her wife in the background of a news broadcast.
She then quits her job and becomes a trucker, figuring that will get her to travel around
the country to find her wife.
While she's traveling, she starts to be followed by an entity that she calls the Thistle Man.
This is fantastic horror with a love story, and grief and betrayal, and just so many emotions
to be felt.
Because I'd only listened to about the first season of the podcast, I really didn't know
where things were going, and the way it turned out, and just the things she had to say to
her wife... it was incredibly emotional.
Additionally, the main character has anxiety, and it's the same anxiety that Joseph Fink
has, so that was own voices representation, that he talks about a little bit at the end of the book.
As you probably know, I don't buy a lot of books, but I will always buy books by Joseph Fink.
On to my five star reads - I only had two this month and I feel like I was just being extra stingy.
I don't know what was happening, but the two that I decided when I finished reading them
were five stars are these two.
The first one is The Cottingley Secret by Hazel Gaynor.
This one is a historical fiction that has to do with faeries, and as I was reading this
one, I actually realized that I knew a little bit about this story, but I definitely didn't
know the full scope of this story.
During the first World War, our protagonist moved from South Africa to Cottingley, Yorkshire
because her father was conscripted to be in the war.
While there, she would play in the woods and she often saw faeries.
However, nobody really believed her, so her cousin drew some faeries and they created
this photograph to prove to people that faeries existed.
This was just meant to get them out of trouble, but then this photograph spread and other
people knew about it, including Sir Arthur Conan Doyle.
That's just one half of the story.
The other half of the story takes place in present day.
A woman named Olivia has gone back to Ireland because her grandfather has recently died.
He left her his bookshop as well as this manuscript, which ends up being the story of the Cottingley
girls that we read back and forth from.
Obviously, as soon as I said manuscript, you probably caught onto the fact that this is
a bookish book, so yes, that obviously made me love it.
It was also incredibly told.
I loved the format of going between present day and the past.
The words used were just delightful to read.
Olivia's going through a crisis where she's supposed to be marrying this guy and we know
from the get go that she should not marry this guy.
There was a lot going on, and I loved all of it.
Speaking of a lot going on and I loved all of it, the favourite book this month was
Space Opera by Catherynne M. Valente.
This was so overwhelming in the best possible way.
Essentially, aliens come to Earth and say "look, you're about to be able to explore
the galaxy, so you're gonna find out about all of us, but we need to make sure that you're
sentient if we're going to let your planet continue, so we're just going to pick one
of your musical acts and they're going to have to compete in this competition, and if
they come in last, we're just going to neutralize your entire planet, okay?"
So not only is the act the aliens choose a glitterpunk extravaganza, but we are introduced
to so many different species of alien, and it's honestly mind blowing.
Like, I feel like I was just buried in a tub of glitter and I had to swim my way out to
get to the next chapter, and then it just kept happening.
This is essentially Eurovision in space but to the millionth degree, and oh my goodness,
I never thought I would be happy to be so overwhelmed by a book.
This is one of those books that I could read several times and still not pick up all the
nuances of the different species we encounter.
If you're looking to have your mind blown, this is the book for you.
If you want to hear me talk more about these books, or other books for that matter, the
playlist for the Weekly Entertainment Wrap Ups is always linked down below.
Have you read any of these books?
If so, let me know about it down in the comments.
On the way down to the comments, if you hit that Subscribe button, that would be very nice of you.
You can like and share this as you see fit, and I will see you very soon.
Bye!
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