My previous post was fiction series I won’t be continuing, and this post is for manga! So here we go!
I think the only caveat here is Attack on Titan. I have I think 18 volumes of it, and though I honestly have no desire to get any more, I can’t say I never will. I don’t feel like purging them, so the possibility is still there. The others all have been purged already. :p So five definite, one maybe?
That’s it peeps. Next post is fiction series I will be continuing. Peace.
Happy Sunday! Today’s post is another book haul fate post, where I look at book hauls of the past and see if I ever read them, or if I still even have them. This is the tenth time I’ve done this so we’ll be looking at book haul number 10, which was originally posted on July 3, 2016.
Looking at it, it’s a pretty modest haul. Around that time I was on a read-5-buy-1 thing, so I must have been reading like bananas to get four books in a month. This is what I got:
This ended up being one of my favorite reads of the year, and I think this was around when I started buddy reading with Zezee @Zezeewithbooks. (Or was it the third one, I don’t remember).
I gotta tell ya, my willingness to read Winds of Winter dwindles every year. When (if) it finally does come out, I can’t really say if I’ll be keen on it or not. This book here was alright though, so we’ll see.
This one (and the unread book right below this) have both survived multiple purges at this point. I’m still solidly in the ‘I want to read these’ camp, so that’s nice. Though to be honest I don’t know much about this one, other than it’s like… dystopian-y in space? And has something to do with blood color or caste color or something.
Out of both of these unread books, I know the least about this one. Honestly I can’t even tell you if this is historical fiction or historical fantasy. I’m hoping it’s the latter but I’ll be happy with the former as well. I do wanna read it though, the cover just draws me in.
~~~
And that’s it! If you’ve read any of the above, let me know! Happy reading!
Hi! Today’s post is another book haul fate post. This is the seventh one, so it will focus on my seventh haul, originally posted March 29, 2016. Looking at the photo, this was a library sale haul, so the fate of these buddies will be interesting to see. This is what I hauled, and apparently in my original haul, I just posted it in IG and linked so I’m gonna do that again. So shameless link, too? pbtbt.
I can’t quite make out the title from my stellar photo there, and it’s been so long that I can’t even remember what this was. But it’s long gone, man.
I still have this one, and do intend on reading it eventually. That’s how this stuff goes, man.
Technically I had read this before I bought it, so this physical copy has never been read, but I’ve read the book.
There’s a handful of Christie books there, can’t remember the titles off the top of my head and the picture isn’t great. I do still have all of these though, with the hope of actually reading them. It’ll probably be during a readathon or something where I need a short read.
I’m tempted to get rid of this one, only because I’ve now read The Five People You Meet in Heaven by the same guy and while the book wasn’t bad, it didn’t strike me as anything either. If the writing is similar in this, it’ll be another three star book and I don’t know if I wanna devote the time, man. If you’ve read this, please let me know your opinion.
So it shows in this haul in particular, but I went through a phase where I was just buying books I recognized the titles of – well known ones that I knew I ‘should’ read, whether or not I actually intended to read them. I’ve since gotten rid of most of them, having realized that I was being silly and there aren’t books that one ‘should’ read, just ones that one wants to.
This is another ‘should I get rid of this’ book, because it falls into the same category above. If you’ve read it, is it good? Do you think I’d like it?
This book was a gift from my buddy. She bought it for me when she was in Australia. I want to at least give it a try, but I haven’t done so yet.
The main reason I haven’t read this book yet is because I heard that it’s depressing. I have to be in the right mood to read a book like this, hah.
See above for reasoning. This fell into the ‘I should read this’ category with no actual interest on my part. I watched the movie though – it was decent.
This one has fallen into the ‘I want to read it someday but I feel no pressing urge to’ category. I’m starting to see a pattern, aren’t you?
See previous. I’m getting so repetitive!
I’VE READ THIS ONE. And honestly it’s one of my favorite books. I believe I even named it my top favorite book of 2016. This book is really goofy, and if you haven’t read it you really should
Weirdly, I have a lot of Lisa See books, but I’ve only ever read one by her. I really liked her writing style though so I started picking up books by her second hand when I saw them. This is one of those. Will I read it someday? Maybe!
I originally picked this up because I thought it was the source material of the movie The Day After Tomorrow. You know, the environmental apocalypse movie? But apparently it’s a murder thriller. When I found out I’d mistaken it, I got rid of it. My b.
I got rid of this one because I was spoiled big time on it, and what’s the point of reading a thriller if you know the end?
I picked this particular copy up because it’s so old. This copy was originally published in the 60s, not too long after the book itself had come out. I have a newer, movie-cover copy that if I actually read the book it’ll be that one. I don’t want this one falling apart.
And that’s it! I gotta say, this one was pretty bad. I’ve read a total of two of these books, and half of them I’ve gotten rid of.
As stated, these were from a library haul, and my bar for picking up books from there is pretty low. I’ve actually since stopped going to them too often because of just this reason. On the plus side though – I paid five bucks for The Martian, which I read, and then five bucks for the rest of them put together (it was a $5 fill-a-bag thing). So I’m not really out much money at all. I’ll just pretend I bought a latte.
So if you’ve read any of these – particularly ones I still own – and think I’d like them, do let me know! Happy reading!
So I know at this point that everyone and their mom has read The Hunger Games, but I reread it recently, for the first time since 2011, and figured I’d do a thing on it since I bought the prequel and relevancy and yada yada. This’ll hopefully be the first out of three posts, one for each book as I read them.
When I originally read this book, I was 21, heading into my senior year of college, and while I had been reading books for years and years at that point, young adult was still a relatively new thing to me. I owned young adult some books but in my mind, ‘young adult’ wasn’t a separate genre from all the other books I had. Honestly I don’t even remember if my bookstore had it separated it out as a separate section or if it was all just mixed in with everything else. I had a Goodreads account, but otherwise I didn’t participate in the online book community whatsoever. So the only reason I knew this book was hot stuff was because the cashiers working at my local Borders kept telling me about it. So I picked it up.
What I remember about reading it the first time was mainly two things: One, that I flew through it. I’m talking read it in a day, maybe two. I remember missing dinner one night because I couldn’t put the thing down. Two, I remember adoring it. 21 year old me gave this book five stars, no question. I loved it.
When the movies came out in the following years, I remember getting a large group of friends to go see it together in theaters. We made a whole event out of it: We went out for dinner first to a pizza buffet place, and then once we were stuffed beyond capacity, we hobbled our way to the theater and basically took over two rows. It was so much fun, and I remember more or less liking the movie adaption.
I’ve since rewatched the movies a few times (never last one though, weirdly. I’ve never seen it) so going into it this time, the overall plot was still pretty fresh in my mind.
This latest read I did as I said in prep for reading the prequel. This time I was (am) 29, and I’ve really defined my reading tastes over the last nine years. This book was still within them, mind you, but I wasn’t so blindsidedly smitten this time around. It got a four star rating from me instead of a five.
One thing I noticed was that I was more aware of Katniss’s lack of romantic interest throughout the book. I mean it’s obvious as she’s faking it for the cameras, but I’m talking that I better got where her inner dialogue was coming from. I know more than one person after reading the books was neither in camp Gale or camp Peeta, but instead in camp Nobody, because Katniss wasn’t in the right mindset to actually fall in love and keep a healthy dynamic going. When I was 21 I was firmly a Peeta fan, but now I’m not saying I don’t like Peeta, but I can also see why Katniss just wants to chill on her own. She admits herself that she doesn’t feel like she can keep up a relationship, real or fake. It’ll be interesting to see if I keep this mindset after the other two books.
The writing this time around too struck me as more simple than I remember it. I don’t mean that as a negative: simple writing often means I’m able to fly through the book, which I was. I think it took me three or four days this time around, which by my reading standards today is pretty speedy. I was really glad that the story kept me hooked just as much as it did in 2011. It was just as captivating. I forgot how much detail that the movies left out, so getting to read it all again was almost like reading it for the first time.
The biggest of those things was really all the inner monologue from Katniss. You really didn’t get any of that whatsoever in the movies, and I honestly forgot what the content of most of it was. It was really nice, and the books felt fuller to me than the plot I remember from the movies as a result.
I guess overall what I’m trying to say is that in my opinion, this book has withstood the test of time, and I’m rather psyched about it. Often I’ll rewatch or reread things from my childhood/teenagerhood/etc and it just doesn’t hold up, but with The Hunger Games, I don’t think it suffers that issue. I think the author did a really good job with it, and it’s still a solidly good book, twelve years after publication.
Maybe I’ll read it again in another ten years, or have my future kiddos read it and see what they think.
Hello, happy Saturday! I’m officially on vacation, therefore this is pre-written and I am probably sleeping. Pbtbtbt.
Today’s book haul was originally posted on Jan 2nd, 2016.
This is what’s happened to the books since then:
I think I have up through volume 18 or 19 now, all of them read. This is a pretty decent series
I ended up rather adoring this series, and I haven’t read it since I originally did. I’d definitely reread this series!
Hehe, book two of a series where I still haven’t read book one. One day, one day.
This one I received as a gift in a reddit secret santa event! Still… unread. :”D
I believe I picked this one up to fulfill a free shipping dollar amount, hawhaw. I do wanna read it, eventually. I’ll get there, I’ll get there.
I actually just read this recently! Like… last month, haha.
I read this one a while ago. It was weird! Good, but weird.
This one ended up being a five star read for me, and honestly if you’re looking to get into sci-fi and don’t know where to start I definitely recommend this one
One day. I saw the movie and thought it was neat.
And that’s it! Happy reading!
Hi, today I wanna talk about DNFing books and the struggle I tend to go through while contemplating it.
Let me preface this by saying that I tend to buy books. I do have a library available to me as well, but this discussion is specifically about after one has spent money on a book and decides it’s not great. So saying ‘just get it from the library’ isn’t a good solution when the dollars are already gone from my wallet.
Late January, a book came out that I was highly anticipating. You can probably guess from my ‘Currently Reading’ post if you saw that, but I’m not going to state which it is specifically because I’m still not sure if I’m going to quit it or finish it.
So, I bought the book new from the bookstore – new release as stated, kinda impossible to get it super cheap. The list price of the thing was $30, but with coupons/etc I got it for $20. Twenty is still a lot for me to pay for a book. I like used books and heavily-couponed/discounted/on sale books. So really, if I pay more than like $13 or so for a book, I really really want that book. I did really want this book, so I forked over the twenty bucks without complaint.
Then, I started reading it. I knew within fifteen pages that I wasn’t going to love it, but I kept reading because ‘You spent twenty bucks on this thing’ popped into my head and I hate wasting five bucks on an unfinished latte because it got cold (pop ice in and boom: iced latte) let alone twenty bucks on a book that I hadn’t even read 10 percent of.
Now, I do not have a problem in general with DNFing books – I have a shelf on goodreads of all the books I’ve put down. But I noticed a trend with them after having difficulty with this current book. All the DNFs were either library books, borrowed from friends, or purchased used or discounted. None of them were.. well, a twenty dollar book. And that made me think…
How much time are we willing to waste on something we don’t enjoy, and does it change with how much money is involved?
Because… if I had spent $5 on this book, I would have put it down by now. I’m absolutely certain. The money-to-time-spent ratio is more… justified, I guess. (For the coffee mentioned above, I get that thing for thirty minutes before it’s cold – you bet your butt I’m finishing it.) If I had spent $10… would I have? I don’t know. Why does the amount of money spent on a book determine how much time I’ll spend not enjoying it?
How much do I feel my time is worth? It’s easy to say ‘I’d rather eat the five bucks and move on to the next book’ but saying ‘I’d rather eat the twenty bucks and move on’, that’s harder. And I don’t feel that it’s tied to my income either – when I was in college I was making minimum wage, and I’d still quit a five dollar book no problem.
And does it change, depending on the person? If you spent $20 on a book, were half way through, and were certain it was going to end up a 1 or 2 star book, would you finish it? What if the book made you angry? What if it made you bored? What if it made you confused?
I think the emotion felt while reading a disliked book also plays into it.Â
I definitely tend to finish books that make me angry. Hate-reading is its own source of enjoyment and motivation. I tend to hate-read a lot of bad romance trope-containing books. I go in them hoping to love them by the way, but by the end, my rage gives me life fuel.
Boring books though… it’s much harder. You know, it’s funny, I was thinking about this topic last night while I was reading the book I’m contemplating DNFing, and came across this quote:
A man will suffer misery to get to the bottom of truth, but he will not suffer boredom.
And my brain read that and went ‘Heeeey did you know you’re making me bored? Because that was uncanny.’ But it’s right (and it’s the one line of the book that I have enjoyed so far) I’d rather hate-read than be bored by a book. I’d rather read something that makes me highly uncomfortable than be bored. And because this book is making me bored… right now the twenty dollars doesn’t sound like a terrible price to escape it.
There’s also the ego to consider.
Freudian theories aside, something is keeping me from putting down this book aside from money. Maybe I just wanna show that I can handle something I dislike. Maybe it’s so I can write a damn review on it and give it a fair rating since I would have read it all. All I know is every time I think about quitting it, my brain goes ‘Oh no you don’t, you’ve come this far’.
Reading books I dislike makes me slumpy.
This is another factor that leads towards not wanting to waste time more than not wanting to waste money. When I’m reading a book I dislike, specifically one that bores me, it makes me not want to read period. I don’t want to read it, and I don’t want to read other books I’ll enjoy more because I’ll feel guilty for not focusing on the boring one. I can already feel the slump setting in, so maybe slowing down the pace of this one and reading other books and coming back to it will help.
So. Will I finish the book? I haven’t decided.
As of right now, I’m still unsure. I just hit the 50% mark of the book, so I feel like quitting it now would be silly (it’s my ego telling me that) but at the same time, the remaining 50% is over 300 pages (…and would be the ‘don’t waste time’ bit) and as mentioned multiple times, this damn book was twenty dollars.
I guess what it comes down to is.. I’m disappointed. I shelled out this money, and my time, and my anticipation on a book that I was sure I would love, and it let me down. I feel cheated in a way, and maybe powering through and finishing the book is my way of compensating for the feeling of, well, betrayal?
Who knows. A review will be up of this book either way eventually – we’ll see if it says ‘DNF’ in it or not. Wish me luck.
So, what do you think? Should money play into it? Does it for you? Is it something you’ve noticed a pattern with? Talk to me, peeps.
Today’s post is a follow up of Tuesday’s, which was my top owned author list. These are the ones I’ve actually read. And hey, everyone on today’s list was also on Tuesday’s list so I won’t go into author detail like I did last time. At least I’m consistent, yeh?
J.K. Rowling – 9 books
Naomi Novik – 9 books
Sarah J Maas – 9 books
Robin Hobb – 11 books
Eoin Colfer – 12 books
As you can see, I’m a creature of habit. Writing this makes me want to do an updated series of posts about unfinished series that I will be completing and ones that I won’t. I think it was around this time last year that I posted them, so they’re about due for an update.
If you’ve read any of these authors, do let me know. Happy reading!
Hello! Today I wanna go over my top-owned authors. For simplicity’s sake, I’m going to exclude manga authors, because they would completely take up the list. When I originally thought to write this post, I thought it would be an update of an earlier post I’d made, but when I looked I couldn’t find anything. Maybe it was in a parallel universe. Hmmm..
Anyways, these’ll be the top authors I own, not necessarily have read. I tend to stockpile books by an author if I like that author. A top read authors posts will be out on Thursday.
Books owned: 8. Neal Stephenson is one of those authors that I’ve stockpiled. I’ve read Snow Crash by him and adored it. I’ve been slowly collecting his works since then, but have yet to actually pick another one up.
Books owned: 8. Considering this author once had two books on my ‘will never read ever’ list, that should just tell me to stop saying such things. While I fully recognize the problematic aspects of her writing, I tend to like Maas’s books overall. They’re just so much fun.
Books owned: 8. The third tied position for fifth place, I have actually read most of these. There are two that I own of Fisher’s that I haven’t read yet, but the other six I’ve really liked. I’ll get to them. Eventually.
Books owned: 9. Naomi Novik is one of my favorite authors. I’ve read 8 out of the 9 books I’ve read by her, the one I haven’t being the next book in her Temeraire series that I have yet to get to.
Books owned: 12. This is one of my favorite childhood authors, and most of my collection consists of just the Artemis Fowl series. I used to go on his website and play in the forums too – I was obsessed, man.
Books owned: 13. Robin Hobb has quickly become one of my all-time favorite authors. I first picked up her books in probably 2015, and I’ve been adoring them since. Ugh she’s so good.
Books owned: 14. Does this really surprise anyone? All of the books I own of Rowling’s are Harry Potter books. The original hardback series, three illustrated editions, and four paperback copies. I don’t have anything she’s written under pen names or any supplementary Harry Potter-related books. It’s literally just this series.
And that’s it! Every single one of the authors mentioned writes fantasy or sci-fi. I love it, man.
Until tomorrow!
Recently, I was reading a book – well, a manga – and in the second to last volume, the plot tied up beautifully. No loose ends, no unanswered questions. It was great. But hark! There was one more volume left!
Guess what the plot device was in this final volume.
Guess.
That series has sparked this post. The manga series (back out now if you don’t wanna know what it is) was Demon Diary. The series overall, I rather liked, except this last volume. I finished it with a bit of a sour taste in my mouth, and it got me thinking.
I cannot recall a time where I’ve seen the amnesia trope done well. Every time I’ve seen it, it seems thrown over top of the normal plot progression, and in each instance, it’s solved riiiight at the opportune moment and then has no lasting effects on the characters.
It’s gotten to the point where if I know it’s coming, it makes me not want to finish the book, or movie, or tv show, or whatever it is. Because I already know how it ends. The character will get their memories back, either in some ‘flash’ or bit and piece at a time, until they’re normal again, and whatever inconvenience was caused by the memory loss will be resolved. Or, even worse, they’ll use it as a plot device to change romantic interests. Character A will be in love with B, but the author has decided that C should be with them. But, they wrote A and B’s relationship too strong. The only way to reasonably get them apart is for A to forget their love for B and instead fall for C. Queue A getting their memory back and entering into a weird love triangle. Yeesh.
Case in point, I’ve been reading the Temeraire series, and I stopped after the seventh book. Why? Book eight’s synopsis hints at the amnesia trope. Sigh, peel me a grape. The Temeraire series is one of my favorites, but I haven’t been able to bring myself to pick up that next volume. Because hey, whatever problems arise from this plot device will be solved by the ninth and final volume of the series.
So, my question to all of you: Have you ever read a book or watched something where the amnesia trope was handled in a novel way? Did the character never get their memories back? Did the plot get utterly thrown off course and could not recover to what path it had been on? Because I cannot for the life of me think of a single instance.
The more I sit here writing about it, the more irritated I become. So many tv shows and movies and books use this goofy trope, and none of them really go into the science behind it, or they do hand waving to somehow make it work. All of these people hitting their heads hard enough to forget their entire lives never seem to get concussions or like.. any sort of brain damage. It’s just ‘oops I forgot math. What is a math, anyways?’ and then poof, back to normal a few chapters later, like their brain was indented and suddenly popped back to its normal shape.
Somebody please tell me there exists literature where this trope is handled well, and in a way that doesn’t involve a bonk on the head. Pleeeeease.
This post sounded much more articulate in my head, but it ended up with me just going ‘UUUUUGH’ and getting annoyed while sitting on my couch.
But seriously, if you have any non-head-bonky, non-cliche, non-predictable cases of amnesia in literature, do let me know. I’m very interested.
Phwoo.
Hello! Last month, I made a post called Konmari-ing my bookshelves – Part 1 where I pulled all my books off the shelves and sorted them into ‘keep’, ‘maybe toss’ and ‘toss’. Today I’ll be going into the end result of that, starting with how I divide the ‘maybe toss’ books, and then going to what my books and book room look like now.
These were the books I was unsure of. This is how they were finally divided:
Kept:
Tossed:
Many of the books I ended up tossing from this pile and in my ‘Toss’ pile have been picked over my friends, who took whatever they wanted. The remaining ones will be donated.
I kept it organized more or less how it was beforehand. I ended up switching the nonfiction and the manga shelves though, and I put the graphic novels above the sci-fi instead of after the classics. And hey, I actually have open shelf space for more books now. After Christmas peeps, still holding out.
I have a small video clip of the shelves – not going to do a closeup for the sake of a bookshelf tour post in December. 😛
Now that the books were done, I decided to finish my long-term bucket list of actually getting a reading chair. So, I bought one! And I’ve bought a lamp since, as well. Well, I bought four lamps, because the one I wanted came in a four pack. Now I need to figure out what to do with three lamps.
But.
The chair!
I’m smitten, guys.
And that’s it! Books are now cleaned up, remaining ones that need to be donated will be soon-ish. Until then, they’re sitting in a pile on the floor.
Happy reading!
Reviews of books to suit every budget and host of Goodreads Monday, Time Travel Thursday and Places My Books Have Taken Me!
This hobby blog is dedicated to movie nerdom, nostalgia, and the occasional escape. In the late 90s, I worked at Blockbuster Video, where they let me take home two free movies a day. I caught up on the classics and reviewed theatrical releases for Denver 'burbs newspapers and magazines. When time is free between teaching high school music and being a dad, movies are standard. Comments and dialogue encouraged!
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