Hi everyone. I'm rincey and this is rincey reads. Today i'm going to be doing
my December wrap-up part two. So usually in this video I talk about the videos
that I made this month but I did vlogmas and so I'm not going to go over all 24
videos that I created. But I will link to my vlogmas playlist up in the cards. So that way
if you are new here and you haven't seen those videos you can
definitely check those out. There's plenty of content there. Thanks so much
to everyone for watching and commenting and just generally interacting with me
this month. I always really enjoy doing vlogmas because it gives me the
opportunity to do stuff that I don't typically get to do. And you guys
responded really well to it, which is always one of my concerns. Like I'm
always worried that when I do different things
you guys won't like it. But you guys did, which is great. So yeah thanks again to
everyone for being a part of vlogmas with me, whether you watch just a couple
of videos or you watch all of the videos. I appreciate it so, so much. I do want to
say that I did a December wrap-up part one, obviously because this is a part two.
So I will link directly to that in case you are interested in hearing me talk
about some of the books I read in the first part of the month. In this video
I'm just going to be talking about the books that I read in the last couple of
weeks, last two weeks or so. So first up I have long way down by Jason Reynolds.
This is a relatively new young adult release from Jason Reynolds. It was
released a couple of months ago. This is a book that's on the shorter side and I
actually ended up listening to this one as an audiobook. This is a book written
in verse and Jason Reynolds narrates it himself. So when I thought that it was
available at my library, I decided to pick it up. And the entire thing is less
than two hours on audiobook. So I ended up listening to the whole thing on like
a Saturday afternoon while I was like cleaning my house. I just sort of like
stuck my earbuds in and just went for a couple of hours straight through and it
was really great. I really love Jason Reynolds as a writer. And his books to me
already had like a rhythm and lyrical sense to it. So it like made sense to me
personally that he would write a book specifically in verse. So in this story
you are following this character named Will whose brother was recently shot and
killed by someone else. He finds out who did it and the entire story takes place
over the course of an elevator ride as he is heading off to
take revenge on his brothers death. So a long way down is sort of about you know
this long elevator ride that he has while he's on his way to kill this guy.
He himself is wrestling with the decision that he's made and you get to
see him sort of wrestle with that along with other people. It's hard to talk
about this book because it's not super long and I don't want to spoil anything.
But if you are a fan of Jason Reynolds, if you are a fan of books written in verse,
I think that this is really, really well done. I do recommend it on audio if you
have the opportunity. But this is definitely one that you should either
read or listen to in one go as much as possible. Even just me like pausing it
slightly while I was in the midst of cleaning, if I needed to you know talk to
someone or something like that, even bad sort of break I felt like really messed
with the rhythm a little bit for me. So if you can have the opportunity to
listen to this straight through, highly, highly recommend doing so. I believe I
gave this one a four out of five stars. The next book that I finished was the
unexpected inheritance of inspector Chopra by Vaseem Khan. This is a
mystery book and it's sort of like your typical detective type story. It takes
place in Mumbai, India and you are following inspector Chopra. He has
recently retired from being an inspector in Mumbai. There's two sort of main
things that happened one is that this young boy is found who has like
supposedly drowned on the day that inspector Chopra is retiring. And then
the other thing is that he inherits a baby elephant. And so inspector Chopra
believes that there's something up with this boy's death. But because he is of a
lower class, the police don't really seem very interested in investigating it. And
so he sort of uses his free time now to investigate it all on his own. So yeah, I
found this to be a good read. It wasn't anything like mind-blowing or amazing.
But if you like detective novels, I think that you'll like this one as well. It's
really nice how they really reflect what modern India feels like, at least in my
opinion. Obviously I don't live there so I can't say 100% for sure. But they do
talk about the way that the police force and everything sort of functions in
India and the levels of corruption that occur there and things like that. Yeah I
gave it a 3 out of 5 stars. I recently got the second book in the series from
Half Price Books. I think if you watched my December book haul I show it off. Yeah.
So I ended up getting the first book from the library just so I could
you know get started with the series. So I definitely will be continuing on.
I found it to be just like a fun detective story set in India, which I always enjoy.
The next book that I read was actually a reread and that was Harry Potter and the
Sorcerer's Stone. I actually ended up listening to this on audiobook. So the
temperature here in Chicago has dropped dramatically. Like the day I'm recording
this at the high was like 12 degrees or something a long those lines. So I have
stopped like reading books on my e-reader for the most part and have
mostly converted over to listening to audiobooks while commuting because I
don't want to have like my hands out of my pockets basically. Like I have gloves
but even still it's super cold. So anyways, I was looking to see what
audiobooks were available on my library or through my library and Harry Potter
was available, the first one. Which was very exciting to me because I've never
listened to the Harry Potter audiobooks and I haven't reread the series in a
really long time. Like maybe seven years? Possibly more than that. So yeah I
listened to the audiobook. It was delightful. I kind of want to keep going
with the audiobooks as they're available. Because, like I said, I haven't read this
series in a really long time and it was a good reminder of just how much more
there is in the books themselves. Because a lot of what has been retained in my
memory is through the movies because obviously like seeing that visually it
like helps retain certain details. But there's obviously so much more that
happens in the books. So yeah, I kind of want to keep going with the series. I may
or may not. We'll see what happens. I probably will. The second ones was already
available too so I ended up checking that one out as well. So yeah, I mean,
I love Harry Potter. We all love Harry Potter. It's a delightful book.
Alright and the final book I ended up finishing up this month was Artemis by Andy weir.
I mentioned this in my October wrap-up or November wrap-up that I was having a
really hard time reading this book. Like something about the writing style just
really was not working for me. So I decided that I was going to give the
audiobook version a try instead because I knew that rosario Dawson narrated the
audiobook and I really liked her. I did not realize that the audio book was an
audible exclusive though. So I ended up basically re-signing up for audible.
Luckily they're doing a promotion where if you sign up before the end of the
year, the next three months are only $5 per month or per credit. And then they
obviously do like, do like the first month free. So I basically got Artemis
for free. So yes, I restarted my audible account. I downloaded Artemis and I ended
up listening to it in basically like two days. It's a pretty fast-moving
audiobook. It definitely works a lot better on audio than it does in print.
I still didn't love the book but I definitely was okay with it.
I don't know if that's actually helpful for people. So in case you aren't aware,
you are following this woman named Jasmine who lives on, in Artemis, which is
basically like a colony on the moon. And she is hired to basically pull off a
heist to take down one of the Corporations that works there or to like
stop them from being able to produce I think it's aluminum because someone else
wants to take over producing aluminum for reasons that you will find out when
you read the story. So it's basically a heist story on the moon. The reason why I
didn't really love it is because it gets really bogged down in the technical
details. This is a thing that I heard people say when they were reading the
Martian and it wasn't something that really impacted me. I think because I
read that one as like a physical book and so I basically just like skimmed
over all of the technical details and just paid attention to like the plot and
dialogue stuff. When you're doing an audiobook, you, it's much harder to skim.
The jokes don't really land for me. They felt a little bit stale in my opinion.
But I did end up liking the characters a little bit so I think that's kind of
what kept me going. And also just, I like heist stories. So I kind of just wanted to
see how it was all going to turn out. The one thing I will say is that it felt
like it was too obvious in a certain extent. Like it felt like the
foreshadowing was really heavy-handed. So I saw a lot of things coming. If you're
gonna read this book, I would highly recommend doing it on audio because
Rosario Dawson is really great. She does things like accents for different
characters who should have accents because there are people from a bunch of
different countries represented in this story, which was nice. So yeah I feel like
if you're going to give this book a try, do the audiobook. I didn't find it to be
like super great. If you love the Martian, you're not necessarily going to love
this one as well. It feels a little bit too stale again and it does feel a bit
like a Mark Watney Redux sort of situation. But it wasn't like horrible.
And again if you need an audio book to listen to there are worst ones you could
listen to. So I don't know if that's oh great endorsement or not. Probably not.
But yeah, I got through it. I'll probably give it a three out of five stars.
Alright so that is everything that I have finished this month. Since I was
doing vlogmas, I didn't do quite as much reading as I usually do. But I'm pretty
happy with what I was able to read this month. So I'm currently in the middle
of two other books. The first one is the third volume in the Eleanor Roosevelt
biography. I'm currently about 200 pages into this
one and I'm enjoying it. It's about like 500 ish pages long and I plan on
basically focusing on this one over the New Year's Eve or New Year's weekend.
The second book of that I am currently reading it is the wall of storms by Ken
Liu. This is the second book in the dandelion dynasty series. The first book
is the grace of Kings, which I read two years ago now. Maybe it was last year.
It was 2016 maybe. Again this is the second book in the series. I really
enjoyed the first book a whole lot. It was probably one of my favorite fantasy
books that I've read in the year that I read it. So yeah, I picked up the e-book
when it was on sale for like a dollar ninety-nine at some point and I've been
meaning to read it. And if you couldn't tell by the Eleanor Roosevelt biography
as well, I've been craving sort of like a bigger book. This one I'm not very far
into. I'm maybe like around the 10% mark. But it's another one that I will slowly
be working my way through. The main problem is that again I'm reading this
as an e-book. So usually that would have been my train reading but again I'm
switching over to audio and I don't want to buy it on audio as well and my
library doesn't have it on audio. So anyways, I don't even know if it's
available on audio to be honest. So anyways I don't know how long it's going
to take me to read this book, but that's fine. I think grace of Kings took me a
good month to get through just because these are big fantasy books. Like I wish
I had a physical copy because I, they're like chunkers. Like according to
Goodreads the hardcover version of this one is like over 800 pages long. But I'm
completely ok with that. I'm just gonna take my time with it and we'll see how
it goes. So yeah that was my December. Feel free
to leave a comment down below letting me know if you have read any of the books
that I mentioned here or if you have any questions about any of the books that I
read this month or any of the videos I did for vlogmas or anything in general.
So yeah that's all I have for now and thanks for watching.
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