Hi, YouTube, its Kathy, and this is my May 2018 Reading Wrap Up.
If you're not already aware, I do weekly wrap ups of everything I read, watch, and listen to,
but I also do monthly wrap ups of just the books which is what we're doing today.
I'm going to start with the nerdy, hardcore stats and charts and then move into what I read.
In May, I read 20 books for a total of 6602 pages.
This takes into account converting audio book minutes to pages,
so 2834 of those pages were actually 71.5 hours of audiobook.
The age breakdown for these books was 11 adult books and 9 YA books, meaning 55% adult and
45% YA books. I read 16 novels, 2 graphic novels and 2 plays.
This month I read mostly contemporary, at 70%, followed
by 15% sci-fi and 5% each of fantasy at mystery and romance.
If you adjust for the amount of pages in each genre, sci-fi gets a bigger piece
of a pie which is unsurprising given sci-fi tends to have a larger page count,
and mystery decreases because the mystery I read this month was a play.
Most of these books, no surprise, came from the library, but I also read an ARC, borrowed
from a friend, and bought myself a treat. I read 7 audiobooks, 7 hardcover books,
5 paperbacks and 1 ebook. Half of my books were in the 300 to 399 page range,
and 60% of them were published this year or last year.
Most of these books were by female authors but only half of the books had female
protagonists, as I read 6 books where the protagonist falls under the category of ensemble.
I read books set in the United States, United Kingdom, other worlds,
and also a book each set in Japan, Pakistan, Trinidad, and France [also, Canada].
In terms of diversity, I read a lot of queer content, as well as books that touch on race,
were own voices, or had a combination of representation, but about 15% of the
books I read didn't have any discernible diversity. In April, I asked 9 BookTubers
to pick my TBR for May, and since some of them gave me multiple options, I decided
to check 10 books off that list. I did that, although I did end up reading one
of those books, An Ember in the Ashes, at the tail end of April so it won't be in this wrap up.
I'll put a graphic on the screen to denote which books were part
of this project, and I will link that video down below. This was a pretty good
reading month, if you go by star ratings, which pretty much is always the case
because I tend to pick up things I know I'm going to like.
This month I had three 3 star reads, two 3.5 star reads, five 4 star reads, four 4.5 star reads and six 5 star reads.
Let's start with the lowest rated book and work our way to the highest, shall we?
In the 3 star category, we have Black Coffee. This is a play in three acts. It's an Agatha
Christie mystery, and I originally figured I might like this one because it
has Poirot as the main character, but it's incredibly racist, because 1930s, and
it relied really heavily on gender norms, which ...no thanks.
It would, however, be interesting to see a play like this put on if they were to update the language.
Even in the stage notes, there's misdirection so it gives the audience
time to theorize who could have possibly been the killer. The other play I read
this month was also 3 stars and that was Noises Off. This is one of those
plays where it is way more fun to watch it than it is to read it, because half of
the play is basically going through the stage notes of what the characters are
doing while other people are talking "on stage". So although you can sort of
picture what's going on, it is way more fun to actually watch what's going on.
The last 3 star read was Sweet Southern Trouble. This is a contemporary
romance between a football coach and a schoolteacher, and it's both a hate to
love and fake to real relationship book. As I mentioned in my weekly wrap up,
it was fun to read outside of the usual genres that I read, but there were so
many tropes and so many weird little problems that I had with it. To be honest,
it's kind of hard for me to hate a reading experience unless something is
absolutely terrible, so this was fine but it's just not something I would really pick up again.
Moving on a 3.5 star reads, I read A Darker Shade of Magic, which is
the first in a trilogy. This book centres around a character that can travel
between a different versions of London, or more accurately, different worlds that
all seem to have one city called London. I definitely enjoyed this reading
experience, and the magic system was really interesting, and I will probably
finish the trilogy. But early on, I got excited because I thought that the male
main character who can travel between the worlds was having a love affair with
the prince, and then it's revealed that they're brothers, and I was like,
"how did I misread that?" Like, I don't understand. Also, as the book went on they definitely
had more of a familial bond and I want that to continue, but I was just weirded
out that I was like, "oh, yeah, they're lovers. That's fine. Oh wait,
what? They're brothers?" I'm so confused. My other 3.5 star read this month was
Behold the Dreamers. This is about an immigrant family from Cameroon that
comes over to the States and starts working for this very rich, elitist
family that works on Wall Street. And this book actually spans several years.
We learn about the family's life in Cameroon, we learn about the process of
moving to America and how the husband was actually there for a couple of years
before his to-be wife, and their child, was able to come over as well. He gets a
job with that prominent family and has it for a little while, but this is set
during the huge financial crash that happened in the States, and we see how
this impacts both of these families differently.
There are often parallels between the families and it was interesting to see
how each of them adapted to the new situations. I also enjoyed that the
author wrote a lot of the dialogue or even just description in pidgin English,
and included sections that weren't in English at all and didn't explain them.
There was also a lot of talk about the different food that they ate, that was
Cameroonian, that I have never had before, and if I still ate meat I would probably
want to try every single one of those dishes, and since I don't, I would just
have the ones that don't have meat in them. My first 4 star read was
Anna and the French Kiss, and I read this way at the beginning of the month.
It's about a girl named Anna who is sent to Paris for her last year of high school because her
dad is a rich novelist and, basically, it said like a status thing where he's like,
"I can afford to send my kid to high school in France, so that's what I'm gonna do"
and doesn't even ask her if that's what she wants. I personally would
have no problem with this. If anyone wants to send me anywhere to study
things, please do because I like studying and I like traveling. In any case, while
she's there, she falls into this group of friends. She has his boy back home that
she's sort of crushing on, ans she thinks that when she goes back for winter break
they're going to pick up where they left off, but then she also has a crush on a
boy in the friend group. It's cute, it's fluffy, it's enjoyable. If you don't think
too hard while you're reading it, it's fine. If you start thinking about it too
hard you go, "Anna, you're in Paris and you love movies; how did you not know there
is a huge movie scene in Paris? Like, how does it take you, like, six months of your
trip to find this out? My god, you have the Internet." My next 4 star read also
has Anna in the title and in the book and that is
Anna In-Between. This book is about a woman who was born in Trinidad but has been
living in the States for the past 20 years, and she's back home visiting her parents.
While she's there, she finds out that her mother has breast cancer, and
not only that, but she's been hiding it for a couple of years, basically ignoring
it and thinking, "if I don't say anything, and nobody else will say anything,
I will never have to deal with this." This book is an incredibly slow burn and
has a lot to do with the character development of these family members as
well as the people around them, and talks a lot about what it's like to be in between.
While she's back home in Trinidad, she's seen as not really still
from the island because she's been in New York for so long, and while she's in
New York, she is seen as African-American, which, fine, is true, but ignores so much else of her experience.
The next 4 star read was another cute, fluffy
contemporary and that's To All the Boys I've Loved Before. This book is about a
biracial girl named Lara Jean, who, every time she falls in love with somebody and
wants to fall out of it, she writes them a letter and doesn't send it. She gets
quite a surprise when one day boys start coming up to her saying, "hey, I got your letter".
Awkward. One of the boys happens to be
her sister's ex-boyfriend and to extricate herself from that situation,
she pretends to be dating somebody else. This book also had a fake to real
relationship trope, but I found it written in such a charming way that I just didn't care.
My next fourth I read was Obsidio, which
is the third in the Illuminate Files trilogy. Not much I can tell you here, as
this is the third in a series, but this is written in a dossier format and I
listened to the audiobook, which is a full cast recording, but if you get the
physical books, they're also really interesting to look at. You get different
doodles and diagrams, and sometimes when people are speaking in chats they're
sending emojis and stuff like that. Not quite emojis, but, like, that older version
of emojis we had where you would have to like use different keys on the keyboard
to create a picture, basically. And my last 4 star read was My Brother's Husband.
This is a manga about a man whose twin has died recently and his
twin brother's husband comes to visit him in Japan. The art in this is really cute.
I really love the protagonists daughter, as well as Mike, the husband, and this
deals a lot with the protagonist reflecting on his deep-seated homophobia,
that comes very strongly with the culture. Eventually there will be a
second volume of this I really want to read it. Onto 4.5 star reads! The next one
is actually another graphic novel and that is Sugar Town.
It's just an itty-bitty little graphic novel about this girl named Hazel who's on
winter break in Portland. She's bisexual and polyamorous, so she's updating her
boyfriend back home about her adventures while also dating a dominatrix.
For such a tiny graphic novel, there is so much representation: bisexuality, polyamory,
kink, and sex worker. The art is adorable, and if another volume comes out I would totally read it.
My next 4.5 star read was Puddin', which
is the follow-up to Dumplin', and the happiest surprise about this book for me
was that it is a dual narrative between two different girls that we met in the
first book. Now, usually when we have a dual narrative in YA it tends to be
between a girl and a boy who you figure probably gonna fall in love, and this
book kind of flips that on its head, in that these are unlikely companions and
yet by the end of the book they have a lot of love for each other.
I was also enamored with how many times the two different protagonists stories
seemed to be on the same track. Millie is used to people judging her based on her
appearance, but so is Callie, and although she's classically beautiful, and that's
the judgment that Millie has for Callie, she's also biracial and that causes some
people to look down on her just from looking at her.
I loved all the intersectionalities, the side characters were really well fleshed out, and I
enjoyed this book. My next 4.5 star read was Before Ever After. This one concerns
a woman whose husband has died and a couple of years later a man shows up on
her doorstep looking exactly like him. This book kind of balances between five
years in the past and what's going on at present, and five years in the past when
she met her husband, she was on this road trip of Europe. So immediately I'm drawn
in because I love traveling; having a road trip novel that is also a romance
is adorable to me. But then you also have this extra intrigue of this guy who
looks exactly like him, and trying to figure out how all that fits in.
In addition to those five years ago flashbacks, every time he tells a story
on that tour, we also flashback those hundreds of years to that story.
I loved learning little tidbits of history when I go on trips like that, so
I just adored this, and now I just really want to go on a trip of Europe... again and always. Forever.
My last 4.5 star read was Eleanor Oliphant is Completely Fine and no, no, she's not.
Eleanor had a very unconventional upbringing. She's currently living in Glasgow, but used to live in London
with her mother, and one of the best things about this book is it lets you
figure out over time just how unconventional her upbringing was.
It doesn't lay out all the facts right at the beginning; it keeps you guessing
until you finally know exactly what happened in her past. Eleanor is
incredibly well read and well versed in literature but is not well versed in
current social norms. I felt that the way the character spoke and even thought
was the most interesting part of the writing because she was incredibly
verbose but she was also incredibly judgmental. There's a lot that happens in
this book, and I do not want to spoil any of the little twists, so I just really
highly recommend that everyone pick this up. Onto my 5 start reads, the first
one being a reread, which is Leah on the Offbeat. I found out after I read my
physical copy of the book that Shannon purser does the audiobook, and I just had
to listen to that. she read it pretty much exactly how I pictured Leah in my
head, so that was good. I've seen a lot of people talk about how this is actually a really
light and fluffy read that doesn't have very high stakes and
therefore they can only really give it, like, a 3 star rating. And for me,
star ratings are so subjective. I mostly go on "how did reading that book make me feel?"
and did it have a good impact on me. In my view, something doesn't have to be
an important piece of literature to be a 5 star read. My next 5 star read was
Only Human, which is the third in the Themis Files trilogy. Much like Obsidio,
I can't tell you much about this because it is the third book and it finishes out a trilogy.
This one is also written in a dossier format and I also listened to this
one because, again, it has a full cast recording. So if you've read and enjoyed
the Illuminate Files, and you want something similar, but adult, this is where you go.
This one is very high stakes, I absolutely fell in love with
the characters, and I needed to know if the human race was going to still exist
by the end of it. My next 5 star read was Ship It, which is the ARC I read and
it came out early this month. This is about a girl who is huge into the fandom
of this TV program that is very much like Supernatural and when she finds out
that the cast is coming to a Comic Con near her. She goes to it and goes to that
panel and something a little bit disastrous happens. You see, Claire writes
fan fiction and it's a popular headcanon of the fans that the two main characters
are in love; however, one of the actors on the show and on the panel
kind of snorts at this derisively and it causes a huge PR nightmare.
What's great about this is it's a dual narrative between Claire the fan and Forrest the
actor in the show, and there are definitely points where both of them go
over the line of what's appropriate. Claire basically makes it her mission to
have this head cannon and confirmed on the show,
whereas Forrest is trying really hard to get the lead in this big, video game
thing that he loves, and any bad press releases or PR that makes him out to be
anything but "The Manliest Man of All Time" (TM) it's just really not gonna help his cause.
I love this book because of a fandom element, the queer element, and
just seeing different perspectives. My next 5 star read was Written in the Stars,
and I was not prepared for it. For some reason, going into this I thought
this was going to be a contemporary fluffy type of thing, and it starts out
that way, and I think it's very deliberate that it starts out that way,
and then things go very wrong. This is about a Pakistani-American girl who is
not supposed to have any boyfriends because her parents are supposed to pick
her husband, but she has had a boyfriend for about the past year. He is also
Pakistani-American. Her parents find out and they take her on a trip back to
Pakistan to show her her roots, but really they're there to arrange her marriage.
This book goes incredibly dark, so trigger warnings for physical and
sexual assault, and it is not something I expected to see in YA literature and I'm
so glad that I did. The author notes at the end that she is part of an arranged
marriage and that they can work, and they can be great, but, also, often children are
forced into marriages still and nobody really talks about it. I read this cover
to cover without getting off my couch and if you haven't read it yet you definitely should.
My next 5 star read was All Our Wrong Todays.
This is a time-travel novel and it is written in such an interesting way. First off, if you
have the option, listen to the audiobook because it's read by the author and he
does a phenomenal job. This book starts out talking about other forms of time
travel in media and how they are wrong because the science behind them is not
solid, and goes on to talk about how the protagonist's father has actually fixed
those problems and is about to send people back in time as, basically, a
tourist operation. You see, Tom, our protagonist, lives in a very utopian
version of 2016 and somehow accidently ends up in our version of '16 which is very dystopian [to him].
Something that's very fun about this is
it plays with the grammar of talking about time travel. There's so many tenses
you need to use that you wouldn't use in normal life because nobody talks like that,
actually, but if you're talking about something that would have happened
but didn't happen because of a different timeline, it gets confusing, but he makes
an effort to make it as clear as possible which is helpful.
Also, throughout this book we really see the protagonist grow as a person, which is so
important because he starts out as a 32 year old who has kind of lost and
aimless, and really has to grow up to survive this situation.
This is definitely my favourite book that deals with time travel, by far. And my last 5
star read, and my favorite book of the month, was The Brightsiders by Jen Wilde.
I've been waiting for this one for quite a while and I loved it. In fact, I
ended up getting it from my local book store a few days early, which is the
story I've already talked about, so I'll link that. In any case, The Brightsiders
is about a girl named Emmy King who is part of a band called The Brightsiders,
and they are child rock stars. She, however, does not have a great home life.
Her parents are ex rock-and-rollers who never gave up a partying lifestyle, so
she basically raised herself. In fact, even though she's only 17 when the book
starts, she's been living in a hotel for the last six months because she cannot
stand living with her parents anymore, but is not old enough to legally buy a house.
Now, as can happen with some child stars,
she starts to go off the rails a little bit, and realizes she needs to figure out
what she's doing with her life, what's wrong, and the people that are wrong for
her, and get them out of her life, and figure out how to exist so that the band doesn't break up.
From the get-go, we as readers know that Emmy is bi; she's, in
fact, dating a girl when this book starts, but she hasn't come out to her fans yet.
Alfie, one of her band mates is genderqueer and has been out since
before the band started, but for some reason, because she's the only person in
the band that uses she/her pronouns, she gets a lot of shit from the media.
Part of that is because of the patriarchy and part of that is because she does make
some terrible life choices. This book is about finding a support system that is
healthy for you and thriving in it. I absolutely adored it and I can't believe
I have to wait until 2019 for Jen Wilde's next book, because I want to read it now, please.
I read the synopsis a couple of months ago and I'm just like, "can I have
that book now? Cuz it's - so I want it now." If you want to hear me talk more about
these books, or other books for the matter the playlist for my Weekly
Entertainment Wrap Ups is always linked down below. If you have read on any of
these, please let me know about it down in the comments below. 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 next time.
Bye!
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