hardbacksandcoffeeshops-blog

[hardbacksandcoffeeshops-blog]

Books I Want To Read This Year

I’m a book hoarder. I don’t deny this, I have hundreds upon hundreds of books in my possession, most of which I’ve not read. Previously I was a huge reader, I read almost 80 books in 2010, but this really went downhill when I went to University, had books to read for class, and with that plus social life and other things, I stopped reading as much. And that was fine, but last year I started reading once more, picking up books very quickly and getting through them even quicker. I was amazed when I read 50 books last year, so I’m happy to say the love of reading seems to be back with a vengeance and I’m extremely excited to read this year.

So, I thought I’d do a bit of a post on a few of the books I am so excited for this year, whether they are books I want to read this year that I’ve owned for a while, or books that are coming out this year that I’m so excited for, this is a small list of maybe ten books I’d really like to read this year.

1. Magnus Chase and the Sword of Summer by Rick Riordan.

I’m a big fan of Rick Riordan, I’ve read all the Percy Jackson books, all the Heroes of Olympus and one of the Kane Chronicles. Now, that’s all well and good, however, I started this book the week it came out, and I haven’t finished it. I don’t know if it’s because I’m pulling away from Middle Grade books, or because sometimes things come off too silly when Rick Riordan writes some things, but part of me just wants to jump into it, and other parts of me is wary. I did get quite far into it, but it’s sometimes difficult to get into it. I really want to give it another shot this year and hope that it’s more of a timing thing than a writing thing.

2. Spontaneous by Aaron Starmer

A book about spontaneous combustion. I mean…it sounds super weird and pretty awesome. I’m excited to see what exactly it has to do with it, and I think it’ll be a fun read.

3. Throne of Glass 7 by Sarah J Maas

This book. I need it. I need this book so much in my life it’s unreal. Anyone who’s a fan of Sarah J Maas will know that this book has been pushed back twice. It was supposed to come out September 2017, and she pushed it back to bring out Tower of Dawn (not complaining, that book is one of my favourites from the series), and then it was said to be coming out May 2018, and then she decided to bring out the novellas for A Court of Thorns and Roses. I need this book. This book is the finale of one of my all time favourite series, and I’m desperate to know what happens and how it’s going to be rounded off. I will probably cry if it gets pushed back once more.

4. Muse of Nightmares by Laini Taylor

I bought and adored Strange the Dreamer last year, and honestly I’m so desperately in love with Laini Taylor’s writing that I’ve recommended her books to so many people. I’ve never read anything so beautiful as her descriptions of things, and I so desperately want this book to come out so I can fall in love with her words and her lyrical descriptions. She’s also just a genuinely lovely woman. I cannot wait, I’m hoping this book comes out this year.

5. The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood

This is a book I was loving, got half way through and didn’t finish. I really need to finish it. I put it down because I had other things to read at the time and I really wanted to finish it before I went to a signing, but it’s definitely one I need to come back to because it was such a beautifully written book and it was so raw. I don’t think I’ve ever read anything as chilling and creepy as this.

6. Truthwitch by Susan Dennard

I have heard some really good things about these books, and I bought it so long ago. I really want to read it and I think it’ll be fun. I just need to get around to it.

7. An Absolutely Remarkable Thing by Hank Green

I am a nerdfighter. If you understand what that is then awesome, if not that’s cool. Hank Green is one of those people who’s very inspiring, and he has done a lot for an online community, and most people will only know him as John Green’s brother, which is fine, but at the same time, I think from hearing Hank Green’s scripted videos and such, I’m excited to see what this book turns out as. I also just want to support the people that I know make a difference no matter how big or small it is.

8. Obsidio by Amie Kaufman and Jay Kristoff

I’m a huge fan of the Illuminae Files, they’re so uniquely written that I’m so excited to read the final book and to see what happens in it. This book cannot come faster for me. Seriously that’s going to be amazing.

I was going to do more, but I think that’s a good number of books for now. I’m going to be writing another review for a book I just finished and posting it on Friday, and yeah, I think this is going to be an interesting year of reading for me. I would like to point out if I don’t get to all of these books this year, it’s not the end of the world, it’s just a bunch of books I’m interested to read.

[hardbacksandcoffeeshops-blog]

Non-Spoiler Review: The Bone Witch by Rin Chupeco

Book: The Bone Witch Author: Rin Chupeco Publishing Date: March 7th 2017 Publisher: Sourcebooks Fire Page Count: 411 Age Suggested: 15-17 (personal opinion) Goodreads Rating: 3 out of 5 stars

Blurb:

Let me be clear: I never intended to raise my brother from his grave, though he may claim otherwise. If there’s anything I’ve learned from him in the years since, it’s that the dead hide truths as well as the living.

The beast raged: it punctured the air with its spite. But the girl was fiercer.

Tea is different from the other witches in her family. Her gift for necromancy makes her a bone witch, who are feared and ostracized in the kingdom. For theirs is a powerful, elemental magic that can reach beyond the boundaries of the living- and of the human.

Great power comes at a price, forcing Tea to leave her homeland to train under the guidance of an older, wiser bone witch. There, Tea puts all of her energy into becoming an asha, learning to control her elemental magic and those beasts who will submit by no other force. And Tea must be strong-stronger than she even believes possible. Because war is brewing in the eight kingdoms, war that will threaten the sovereignty of her homeland…and threaten the very survival of those she loves.

Non-spoiler review:

I bought the book purely for the opening line. I was extremely curious as to what exactly the book would entail. The unfortunate thing was I was not a fan of the way the story was written. The characters were interesting, the plot sounded very intriguing, the problem was that when it comes down to it, there’s not actually a lot of plot, and even less resolution when it comes to wrapping up the story.

Let me try and clarify. Throughout the story we get two different time periods, the character’s present, and the past for the main character. The snippets of the present includes our main character, Tea, telling her story to a man she calls the Bard. They progress the plot forward in their realm, but do not actually add that much to the story. The main bulk of story involves Tea as she goes through how she became the exiled bone witch we see interacting with the Bard. Basically, we see Tea telling her story through the Bard, so we have her story told by her through him. I’m personally not a fan of this form of story telling, and because these flash forwards happened before each chapter of the main story, it took us out to remind the reader that other things were going on. Not only that but we see two sides of our main character, what she is now and what she was then. This makes us stuck with the fact that we know exactly what type of person she’s going to turn into, revealing a lot about the plot without saying much at all or driving the plot forward. We know she’s going to be exiled, we know that something bad will happen, but we are forced to learn it through seeing a future that we know it’s already happened. Any and all of the danger she faces throughout the novel isn’t all that worrying to the reader because we know she’ll survive it. Usually this wouldn’t bother me as much, but I think that’s because usually it’s a prologue to the story and not a lot more. We forget that it’s happening, but because it happened before ever single chapter, it was hard to fully immerse myself in the novel, in the world, I was pulled out of it to be reminded that there were two parallel parts to this story that I had to keep remembering.

Going onto the characters, I’m going to discuss three in depth. Our protagonist, Tea, her brother, Fox, and her mentor, Mykaela. Once I’m finished I’ll go into a little bit of depth for some of the more secondary characters.

Tea is our protagonist. We see her go from a young teen to a mid teen in the main story arc, and see her as a more confident seventeen year old in the flash forwards prior to each chapter. In both different settings she’s stubborn, slightly awkward, doesn’t take no for an answer, and pretty headstrong. In the main bulk of the story we see her growing up, learning who she is and what her powers do, because of this I don’t blame the change in character between the two different times. I think it’s very likely for people to change over time, and I think that’s something that I could understand and was done to a pretty alright extent. The problem with this though, is that because this isn’t a fully finished series, it’s one book, and we don’t see the entire transformation of her from one thing to the next. We see the beginning of it, but not the full picture. I don’t feel as though we get to experience her to the extent that I wanted to. I was curious about her from this extremely strong capable witch from the first pre chapter that starts the book off, and then continuing forward I don’t feel as though we saw enough of that girl, we saw the girl she was prior, the girl who was young and inexperienced and not as well written. Don’t get me wrong, I loved reading the prechapters, but I feel as though this seemed like more of a prequel than the start of a story. We got a taste of what she’s doing now and honestly I wanted more of that than I wanted what it took for her to get there. There was a lot of character building for her with little plot which was rather frustrating.

Next we have Fox. Fox is your generic older brother character, apart from being dead. He’s a soldier, or he was a soldier. When he’s brought back his only job is to protect Tea. There’s a few interesting plot points that are started but not fully explored in this novel, but I’m hoping since the next book comes out this month that they’ll be explored further in this series. The thing is, because he is the older brother, and we don’t get to see him before he dies, there’s no real way to know what he was like. I feel as though the overprotective sibling, though sometimes relative, is often not entirely needed. I feel like because there only seems to be one primary goal for this character throughout this book, we don’t get to see him as a fully realised character. He’s almost like a dog. You could never relate to him fully because he’s not treated as a real human. They honestly treat him like a pet. I understand why, as throughout he’s called her familiar, but I think because personally he was one of the reasons I picked the book up, it was disappointing to see so little thought put into his character. Maybe this has to do with how the author wants to reveal things, but unfortunately it didn’t connect with me.

Mykaela was always going to be a different type of character in this novel. Mentor to Tea, she’s the blend of kind and stern that you don’t see in many characters. She tried to show Tea how to work as a bone witch, but also had to do her own job as well. She popped in and out of the story with some interesting plots that weren’t fully explained. I can’t go into too much detail about her character without spoiling, but she was one of the kinder characters, and she had some plot points I was extremely interested about. She never seemed to do anything without reason, and even when we didn’t know the entirety of the story, it didn’t feel like she did anything out of malice. She was a kind face in a lot of questionable characters, and honestly a character I thoroughly enjoyed reading.

I feel as though I have to talk about the Bard. Though not part of the real story, his presence is needed. He gave us the narration for everything going on in the character’s present, giving us a glimpse of who Tea is now. To be honest I found these parts of the novel far more interesting than the main story line, and I wanted to know some of his backstory more, as it was hinted at but not fully shown.

Zoya was probably the character I disliked the most. She brought on my least favourite trope in the book, which is when a character goes out of their way to humiliate the main character. This has always been something that makes me cringe, and here it was no different. I don’t think we were meant to like her, and personally she made the least sense to me as to why she was in the story. A lot of the conflict she brought to the book was so unbelievably petty that I thought it took away from the fantasy side of the story.

There are so many characters in this book that it would take a long time for me to go through all of them and explain things I do and don’t like, side plots that don’t get finished, characters who were introduced, but weren’t fully explored, love stories that were explained in the end of the novel to be fully fleshed out, but didn’t even start to take place in the real narrative. So many things were happening in this book and I don’t know how much of it was necessary, there were some plot points that I loved, but they were entirely unnecessary to this specific book. I may do a spoiler filled review to explain in more detail at a later date.

I don’t like being negative about books. Someone has spent a lot of time and energy to write something they’re proud of and put it out to the masses, so I try to look for the positives. My main one from this book was its ending. I had a rough time getting through this book because it’s not my type of book, however the ending of it made me want to preorder the next one. I wanted to know what happens next, and though I did not preorder the next one, maybe in a few months I’ll order it and give it a shot.

To summarise, this is not my favourite book. There were some interesting plot threads that I wanted more out of, and while some of the characters were very interesting, it unfortunately didn’t make this book what I wanted it to be. I think if you want a very different look at fantasy, definitely give it a try though. Just because it’s not to my tastes doesn’t mean it won’t be to yours.

[hardbacksandcoffeeshops-blog]

Non-Spoiler Review: The Fandom by Anna Day

Book: Anna Day Author: Anna Day Publishing Date: January 4th 2018 Publisher: Chicken House Page Count: 402 Age Suggested: 13+ (taken from Chicken House’s site) Goodreads Rating: 4 out of 5

Blurb:

Cosplay ready, Violet and her friends are at Comic-Con.

They can’t wait to meet the fandom of mega movie, The Gallows Dance. What they’re not expecting is to be catapulted by freak accident into their favourite world - for real. Fuelled by love, guilt and fear, can the friends put the plot back on track and get out? The fate of the story is in their hands…

Non-spoiler review:

I read this book in less than 24 hours. I wanted to read it by the time I went to see the Q&A/Signing with her and Dan Smith. I have to admit, I didn’t have high expectations for this book, it sounded the cheesiest thing I’d ever heard, but there was a display, and to be honest I like weird fun books sometimes, I think if you’re reading serious stuff all the time, sometimes it gets a bit too much. So I picked it up, and then found she was doing events in a few of my local Waterstones, couldn’t go to the one that I saw originally, but then went to another Waterstones, found she was doing an event there so went to that one. Now I’m going to talk about the book, I promise.

Our main character, Violet, is a super fan of a book and film series called The Gallows Dance, so as you can imagine, as a fan of books, especially YA fantasy and sci-fi, when there’s a super fan, I was pretty invested. She’s awkward, shy, but crazy passionate, and she was so much more well rounded than I expected. She had this really nice balance of awkward girl who has insecurities, but with an understanding of her strengths, which I don’t think we get to see in enough YA protagonists very often. She adapted to the new world she was brought into pretty well, it was one of those things that it wasn’t entirely smooth, but she dealt with it, which was nice.

This book also had a lot of other characters, most of which were really well rounded and flawed and at the same time, for the most part, really likeable. I also would say that throughout all of the characters, Anna Day did an exceptional job of rounding out the characters. I didn’t feel like any of the good guys were one note, I didn’t feel as though the bad guys were just bad for the sake of bad, everything in this world made sense, and I must admit I didn’t expect it from a book about being sucked into a fictional world, I was so pleasantly surprised by how this book was written.

The world that was created I really enjoyed, because the author didn’t just totally make fun of the genre of dystopian, she made it a bit more tongue in cheek, but you could tell throughout there was no malice in it. I think because of this the book worked exceptionally well, it wasn’t supposed to be taken as this big epic story that followed characters down their epic path. We had this self contained bit of fun that was a quick read and a lot less work than some books you have to trudge through. I was pleasantly surprised by it. Also, it’s nice to have a dystopian in England, I’ve not read that many set in this country, and I enjoyed being on home turf.

I have to say this. If you’re skeptical, fair enough, however if you go in with an open mind, and take it as ‘this is going to be a fun read’, go for it. What’s the worst that can happen? I really enjoyed it, and when I went to the Q&A she specifically said she was not trying to make fun of dystopian and she wanted to just have it a bit tongue in cheek, a little bit silly, but not offend the dystopian genre, and personally I think she achieved it. I cried at this book, I got very attached to the characters pretty quickly, and I think it had twists I hadn’t expected. If you’re looking for a fun debut to get into, I’d say try it.

[hardbacksandcoffeeshops-blog]

Non-Spoiler Review: Below Zero by Dan Smith

Book: Below Zero Author: Dan Smith Publishing Date: January 4th 2018 Publisher: Chicken House Page Count: 288 Age Suggested: 10+ (taken from Chicken House’s site) Goodreads Rating: 3 out of 5

Blurb: When Zak’s plane crash-lands on Outpost Zero, a small Antarctic research base in one of the most isolated places on Earth, he discovers a cold, dark nightmare. The power’s out and the people who live there have disappeared. Worse, as he searches for answers, bizarre visions suggest a link to something else - deep beneath the ice - which only he can understand...

Non-spoiler review:

As I said in my Currently reading post, I picked this up because of an event I’m going to on Friday, where Dan Smith, and another author are doing a Q&A and signing. I thought I should read the books before I actually went to the event, so I picked this one up first, and I’m going to pick the second one up as soon as this post is done.

This book is super fast paced, a really quick read, and has a lot of action packed into not a lot of book. At 288 pages of actual writing, Dan Smith has actually done some really good things with it. The writing is simple enough that you can get through it, but doesn’t over simplify anything, with the book taking place at a research base, he explains different pieces of scientific equipment without making you feel as though you’re an idiot for not knowing what it is. 

The characters are pretty well written. We have our main protagonist, Zak, who, from what we can take from this book, is the quiet type. While we don’t see that many interactions with anyone outside of his family in this book, the specifics of what he’s like is difficult to take, but from how he’s presented he seems outgoing enough without being completely in your face.

The other characters we see mostly in this book are his mother, father, and sister. His sister is a pretty well rounded character, being sassy but with some vulnerability that isn’t thrown into the reader’s face, while his parents are more passive. We only need to know a few things about these people, they’re scientists, they’re the reason that they’ve gone to the Antarctic, and they are worried about their children.

Without spoiling anything, this book is well written. I had some problems with some of the things that the characters go through, but that’s from a personal reader point of view over how things are presented.

Overall it’s a good story, a good fast paced plot, and it’s a lot of fun to read. I read it in about three hours, and I genuinely think that it’s worth the read if you’re after a fast-paced adventure novel with a slight dip into a sci-fi horror genre.

[hardbacksandcoffeeshops-blog]

Currently Reading

I’m the most terrible of terrible people who starts books and doesn’t finish them. But, at the moment I’m in the middle of two main books.

The first I’m reading is The Bone Witch by Rin Chupeco. I’m about 264 pages into it, and it’s okay. It’s not my favourite book I’ve ever read, but it’s certainly not the worst. The main premise of the book is a girl finds out she’s a bone witch, or a necromancer, and she’s finding out what she can do with her powers, being taught how to use them. Throughout the book so far before each chapter there’s a page or two of a flash forward with our protagonist, Tea, and a man she’s telling her story to. The concept was interesting, and the blurb and first line of the main chapters starting with “Let me be clear: I never intended to raise my brother from his grave, though he may claim otherwise.” I was so excited to buy this book and finish it. Now being a little over 64% through the book, I can’t say that I’m as excited for it as I originally was. I’m still going to finish it, but probably not straight away.

The second book I started this morning, and that one is Below Zero by Dan Smith. The reason I started this one and I’m powering through it is because Dan Smith and Anna Day (author of The Fandom) are doing a signing in a local Waterstones, and to be honest Anna Day’s book sounded super awesome, and I thought it was probably a good idea to go to a Q&A knowing some of the books. So I started Dan Smith’s and then I’m going to go on and read Anna Day’s hopefully by tomorrow at 7pm! This one is about a boy who’s family has to go to a research base called Outpost Zero, one isolated in the middle of the Antarctic, and some weird stuff happens as we go through the book, like the fact that everyone on the research base has disappeared, the power keeps dipping in and out and there’s a bunch of broken bits of bugs all over the facility. I’m just over half way done with this and it’s pretty good, fast paced, not overly difficult to follow, we have some interesting characters, and giving me very much The Thing vibes, which is cool.

I’m curious to see how these books will end, and I’m hoping to finish Below Zero before the end of the day, hopefully in the next few hours, and once I have I’ll start a post about it.

[hardbacksandcoffeeshops-blog]

Starting a book blog

I have had many book blogs over the years, and I’m absolutely god awful at doing them. But I thought I’d try my best to do it once more. This is my book blog! I’m writing about books I read, books I’m excited for, and probably a few things about tropes and character things I don’t like. I’m going to try and post three times a week, but depending on work/holidays/general stuff I can’t promise that’ll happen. But here’s hoping!