Review: The Boys Who Danced With The Moon [ARC]

Picture from Goodreads ~

TITLE: The Boys Who Danced With The Moon
AUTHOR: Mark Paul Oleksiw
RELEASE DATE: February 2, 2018

RATING: ★½

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ARC provided by the publisher

Let me preface this review by saying: there's very little objectively wrong with this book. I am 100% certain other readers would like this, however, this book wasn't to my personal tastes. I initially requested this book because the cover and the blurb intrigued me, but this book turned out to be something other than what I'd hoped for.

In the 1990s, 16-year-old Kiren starts keeping a journal. Having been a bit of a loner before, he befriends Maurice (the drinking, rebellious badass cool guy) and Andrew 'Moony' (the deep, hippy nerd). They become the best of friends. This book alternates between following Kiren back in the day and in present day. A large part of this book is also a retelling of things that have happened to him, however I never fully realized if it's Kiren who told this story or if it's basically you reading one of his journal entries. The other 'part' of the book is, like I said, about Kiren in the present day, him now being a successful 30 something living on the west coast until one day, a mysterious letter and news clipping that was sent to him about something that happened 20 years ago makes him return home.

Going into this book, after the first chapter you know there'll be an accident, someone's going to drown, another one will be severely injured and a third one will live. That premise, especially with these ~mysterious newspaper clippings being sent to him and whatnot makes you believe this is going to be a mystery, right? WRONG. Now, this turned out to be something completely different.

In fact, I'm just going to list things that bothered me about this book because I'm having a hard time writing long stretches of text today apparently.

- This book is very slow, and apparently for no reason. Slow doesn't always equal bad but this was, for me, the wrong kind of slow. Initially, I wanted to DNF it up until 40-ish%, but then I decided to continue this even though I was bored. The flow of this book was weird in the way that there was none.

- This was also very confusing in the beginning, another reason for me to want to DNF it. At first I thought it was suspense building up to a big reveal of "who sent these letters" but then that fizzled out into nothing and I realized this book was just straight up confusing, also for seemingly no particular reason.

- The fact that this book is a YA coming of age novel but never did I feel like you were following actual teenagers? A part of this book you were literally following a thirty-something guy, which showed, and when you weren't, you were reading about characters that very much didn't feel like teenagers. Honestly, from my experiences reading YA books, getting the voices of teenaged characters right is hard and this book didn't succeed doing that in my opinion.

- The friendship between the guys didn't seem very healthy and I never really understood what was amazing about it. In fact, the ending of this book is sort of dependent on you as a reader really understanding what was special about their relationship, which I did not. Like there's one instance where Maurice gets unreasonably angry with Kiren because Kiren never told him he was going to go out of state for school, which bothered me a lot. When people are holding things back from each other and also aren't allowed to live their own lives, I feel like whatever relationship is portrayed isn't very healthy.

- Teenaged Kiren was a creep, long story short. His crush on Laura - like he hears her talk and dreams about her and suddenly he's completely besotted with her, to the point he becomes creepy and too obsessed. Let's not talk about how women were portrayed in this book - as shiny, beautiful objects full of mystery and not as real people. Also the ending was a bit??? You've met this girl for all of five minutes in the last 20 years and you realize you're in love with her? Nope.

Genuinely the only reason I'm not rating this 1 star is because there's nothing objectively wrong with this book, it's just that *I* didn't love it. 

Long story short, I feel like this review on Goodreads sums my thoughts on this book up better than I can.

The Warner Bros Studio Tours London, part 2.

Okay, here's the picture heavy post I promised you guys!

A sign in the long corridors you have to walk to get from the security area to the café/gift shop/actual studio tour.

Another sign from the same corridor.

Now, a picture from the actual exhibition. The ice castle from the Yule ball! 

Wigs wigs wgis (including signs saying which actor wore what wig in what movie)

The Gryffindor common room plus some of the main three's costumes. 

Some cool props - Sirius Black's prison sign, the Time-Turner and the Rememberall

Potions props and Snape's costume

From The Goblet of Fire.

Professor Umbridge's office

                                                                                And lastly, Hagrid


Stay tuned for part III.....

 ❤

Review: Dumplin'

TITLE: Dumplin' 
AUTHOR: Julie Murphy
RELEASE DATE: September 15, 2015

RATING: ★★★★

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Willowdean Dickson, a teenager living in a deadbeat small town in Texas, is the daughter of a former beauty queen. Her small town is obsessed with a beauty pageant that's held in town every year; Willowdean (nicknamed 'Dumplin' by her mother) though, is obsessed with Dolly Parton. Like any other teenager, Willowdean has feelings. Crushes. A crush on a boy called Bo in particular. Willowdean also happens to be fat, and for once her body isn't seen as something that's in need of change; it just is.

Dumplin' isn't a very deep book, it's pretty much your average run of the mill YA romance that features a beauty pageant, some girls backstabbing other girls and a love triangle. Basically it's like your ordinary YA romance, featuring a fat main character. What Dumplin' does differently, though, is to make Willowdean's fatness a part of her character rather than a problem. Willowdean is fat and there's that. In the book, she's subjected to fatphobia both by people at her school but also by her mother, who clearly doesn't understand Willowdean's feelings and relations to her own body. While this is a topic I'm going to continue discussing further down in this review, what this book really is about is friendships during the teenage years and frankly how fragile they are and how easy it is to fall out over something very minor, and also boys. Very much so re: boys. This is something me and other fat people have praised a lot because honestly, I know this book has received some flack on social media about how her weight isn't treated more "seriously"/i.e. hasn't really been put into focus more in this book or why this book didn't deal with fatphobia more. I honestly disagree with this criticism because I really enjoyed reading a book where the fat main character was allowed to be a normal teenage girl experiencing normal feelings. This is very shallow but honestly sod it, it felt really good to see a fat girl being desired by hot and popular guys because there's this super common bullshit trope in media about how being fat equals being unattractive which is some bullshit if I've ever seen any. Not everything featuring fat people need to be political all the time; we're boring ass people too.

The fatphobia this book featured defintitely rang true to me. I've been fat all my life. The fatphobia I've most often experienced is micro agressions. Not something big, overly noticeable unless you know what to look for. This is what this book completely manages to portray in my opinion. Fatphobia, the kind that hurts the most, is people being surprised people want to date you or being surprised you're able to do something, because you're fat. It's a mother sighing when you're trying something on that doesn't fit. It's your mother dropping well meaning comments that aren't meant to be hurtful but are, still. This book manages to capture this perfectly, in my opinion.

While looking stuff up about this book on Google, I realized this book's going to be turned into a movie and I cannot wait to watch it! This book was genuinely a pleasant book and while this definitely has been hyped up a lot, I recommend you all read it.

❤

The Warner Bros Studio Tours London, part 1

Note: this is part 1 of a two-part post about the Warner Bros studio tours in London. This part is mainly informative while the other one will be more picture heavy. 

The entrance  of the Harry Potter studio tours

If you're a Harry Potter nerd like me and just happen to travel to London, England, I advise you to visit the Warner Bros Studio Tours in Leavesden, just outside London. If you're unfamiliar with what this is, it's basically a tour of the studios uses to film the Harry Potter movies. This place holds all the props that were used in the movies as well a lot of inside information, e.g. the director's thoughts on certain scenes, about how the movies were made. The first part of it is like being guided through a museum while you're free to explore for yourself for the majority of the tour. At the start of the tour, you're guided into a cinema where you're given a short movie introduction and then you're let into the Great Hall!

The Great Hall

Next to all displays (these displays are covered with small easter egg like details for the true nerds, look out for those) are informational signs telling you about what you're seeing at that display. My favorite things were knowing about the animals that starred in the movies and seeing the clothes the actors wore on the set! I also enjoyed boarding the Hogwarts Express and visiting the Forbidden Forest.

Platform 9  and three quarters

 The easiest way of getting from London to Leavesden is by train and then by a special bus that takes you from the train station to the studios. We took the train from London Euston to Birmingham New Street and got off at Watford Junction. If you buy an Oyster card, your journey is deducted from your oyster card as Watford Junction is within the TFL zone - oh, and Oystercards are valid even on long distance trains, but please make sure you check for every journey you make as this might vary between different train operators, I am unsure if all train leaving from LE and stopping at Watford Junction allow this. I know for a fact that the London overground runs to Watford Junction as well; however it is much slower (40-something minutes as opposed to the 15 minutes for our train to get there). As you exit the station, follow the crowds and as you excit the station you will see the place from where the buses run (the buses themselves are plastered with ads saying The Warner Bros Harry Potter Studio Tours or something similar, you honestly can't miss it). The bus journey is 15 mintues and costs £2.50 for a return if you hold a vaild ticket for the studio tours. It is strongly advised that you buy your tickets for the studio tours online at least a month before traveling, preferrably more. We got ours two months in advance and by then they were nearly sold out.

Butterbeer ice cream. Very yummy!

At the studios, upon getting through the security there's a small restaurant/café and the gift shop. Now, the gift shop is a heaven for nerds like me, however it is very expensive. Once you exit the tour you will end up at the gift shop again so there's no need to buy lots of things there before the tour. The tour is split between two huge hangars with a small outdoors space in the middle, displaying things such as Privet Drive and The Knight Bus and right before the end of the first hangar there's a cafe that sells butterbeer and butterbeer flavored ice cream. I had the ice cream which honestly was very good. There's another gift shop located where the Hogwarts express is - that is, towards the end of hangar 1, and that place was so much better than the other gift shop. I limited myself to getting two mugs and some candy at the studio tours but I honestly wanted to buy everything I saw. I did get a Hogwarts Express themed Christmas mug though! I'm still ridiculously chuffed about that purchase.

Inside the gift shop

Honestly if you're a fan of the movies and don't really care about things being commercial/touristy I strongly suggest you visit! If you allow yourself enough time you could probably spend hours getting lost in the magical world that is Harry Potter. I went with my mother and we were there for nearly four hours - I probably could have stayed way longer had my mom allowed me to!

Ida recommends a book: The Smell of Other People's Houses

Hi lovelies,

I'm going to try something new out. I've always wanted to recommend more books because I don't do it nearly enough. This is my attempt to actually recommend books more, okay here we go.

I feel like booktube/the book community online tend to hype up the same books over and over again and instead of looking out for more new releases - especially by less known authors - they hype up the same books over and over. This is my attempt to recommend a book I feel like has been slept on too long.

This book is a lovely YA historical fiction novel called The Smell of Other People's Houses. It's written by Bonnie-Sue Hitchcock and was released in 2016.

Set in Fairbanks, Alaska in 1970, this is a lovely slow paced character driven slice of life type of YA novel. It follows four different teenagers dealing with different kind of, for YA, mature issues such as teenage pregnancy, poverty, abuse and family relations, and racism. The characters Ruth, Dora, Alyce and Hank navigates life in a setting where the setting itself is as much a character as the characters itself. Ruth's dad died in an air crash and she now lives with her grandma, Dora is a native girl from an abusive houshold who manages to escape the abuse, Alyce is the ballet dancer who instead of auditioning to ballet school works with her dad on his fishing boat, and Hank is the boy who runs away from his mother and her new husband after his father dies.

This is definitely slow paced but not boring, it deals with topics that most YA novels usually steer clear of and is a lovely slice of life that made me grow fond of and sympatize with the characters. I genuinely cannot recommend this book enough, you should definitely read it if you happen to come across it.

 ❤

Review: A Position in Paris [ARC]

Picture borrowed by Goodreads

TITLE: A Position in Paris
AUTHOR: Megan Reddaway
RELEASE DATE: August 20, 2018

RATING: ★★

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Galley provided by publisher

I am the first person to admit I have a thing for historical romances (or historical fiction in general, to be completely honest with you). My favorite setting when it comes to historical fiction is easily the first half of the 20^th century (I have no idea why), which is why I decided to get this ARC off Netgalley.

This book is set right before the armistice. James Clarynton is a wounded high-ranking military veteran who lost an eye and a leg due to shrapnel. He’s told by a friend to keep a diary just to fill his days with something, which leads to him wanting to write a book. In order to write said book, he asks his friend to hire him a secretary. This friend comes up with a person fit for this position: 21-year-old Edmund. While this book is set in Paris, both characters are British, and the book feels very British too. James is living in an apartment in Paris that he’s inherited from a wealthy relative and also to receive treatment for his wounds, and Edmund is already based in Paris due to him having had a position with the Red Cross there.

I think my thoughts on this book sadly can be summed up as “boring”. I had quite high expectations of this book but sadly this let me down. There were two major things that bothered me; how extremely slow paced this book was and also the format in which it is written. There’s nothing about it that I actively hate but it’s still enough to make me properly annoyed.

There are slow burn books and then there are slow books and for me, unfortunately, this book is the latter. Sometimes there’s definitely a reason for books to be slow and I love me a slow burn romance but to me, this book isn’t any of that. It’s just very slow paced and I’m honestly failing to see a reason for that. The slowness isn’t used to build up anticipation for the coming relationship; instead it’s just there. Their interest in each other doesn’t begin to build up until quite far into the book and they don’t kiss until 77%. You might wonder what happens before those 77% and honestly, not much. They work on the book and that’s pretty much it. Since the kiss happens so far into the book, what’s left of the book is pretty much spent on introducing and resolving some relationship angst. Since this book goes from kiss to angst in like, two seconds, in my opinion the angst is introduced a bit too suddenly with pretty much no build up before it. Also, since this book leaves itself such short time to resolve the angst, it feels somewhat forced and I end up caring not a whole lot. I think the reason why I’m not really connecting with the story is the format, though.

This book is written as a series of journal entries and letters, mainly from James’s POV. Writing books like this is hard and I have rarely seen it done very well. Written in this style, books are constantly being forced to retell things instead of showing them as they happen, and I think that sort of takes away the reader’s involvement in a story, in a way. To me, this way of telling stories makes me feel detached which eventually leads to me not caring a whole lot about the story nor its characters in the end. I also believe the format affected the pace of this story. Since the journal entries and letters mainly are written by James, there’s not a whole lot of Edmund’s POV which leaves me feeling like there’s a huge gap from his POV. I just think a whole lot in this book could have been so much more, had you gotten to experience the drama instead of having it retold through journal entries and letters. Moreover, this book tries to be very melodramatic but sadly, I end up just not caring a whole lot for either character which I believe is due to the format of the book.

Something I did enjoy about this book was the language. James’s and Edmund’s kiss was also very cute, and I enjoyed the ending too.

Review: The Apocalypse of Elena Mendoza

(yes I totally use my stove to take pics (mainly because the light is very bad everywhere else))

Title: The Apocalypse of Elena Mendoza
Author: Shaun David Hutchinson
Release Date: February 6, 2018


Rating: ★★★½

I've spent the last couple of days giving this book a big think because when I finished this book I came out of it honestly not knowing what to think of it.

If you were to ask me who my favorite YA authors are, Shaun David Hutchinson would definitely be one of them. While he's never written anything that's completely blown me away to the moon and back, he's a solid writer and I always enjoy reading his work, to the point where I follow him on social media and wait for his upcoming releases. Sadly enough, there's always a teeny tiny something lacking with his books for me, and this is unfortinately also the case of The Apocalypse of Elena Mendoza.

In this book you're following Elena Mendoza, a Cuban American girl who's in high school. She's a total outcast because...yup, you guessed it. She was born through virgin birth (a scientifical anomality, not a miracle) and thus earns herself the nickname Maria. Elena lives with her mother, her mother's new abusive boyfriend and their two kids, Elena's little sister and little brother.

As is always the case with Shaun David Hutchinson's books, this books mix (1) queer kids and (2) weird shit. In this book, it happens to be bisexual Elena crushing on a girl called Freddie (yay, wlw crushes are my fave!). Elena, who works at a Starbucks, approaches her long time crush Freddie. Freddie is then shot by a boy called David; Elena realizes she can heal people and as she heals the girl she's had a crush on since forever, David is beamed up into space in a beam of light. Is this all weird shit that's happening in this book? No, of course not. Elena also hears voices that belong to whatever creature happens to inhabit inanimate objects that also happen to have faces, like a Lego Gandalf and the girl on the tampon box.

This book is constantly juggling things. It's juggling seemingly normal teen stuff like crushes, friendship and abusive parents while also dealing with a more out there subject; the apocalypse. Because that's what the voices are saying time and time again to Elena and the only way of her to stop the apocalypse is to do as they say. Quickly the question arises; can you trust the voices? Are things always the way other people say or are they more ambigious? What is the right choice? And how do you judge what's right? These are questions this book is juggling.

To me, a really good aspect of this book is that while there's a lot of scifi elements to this book, Elena is still allowed to be a teenager, to have her dumb crush and to focus on it to the extent that she's neglecting the coming apocalypse. As much as I LOVE WLW, I honestly found Elena's talk of her crush a teeny tiny bit tedious at times. Honestly though, maybe that was intentional? That while she's a miracle girl, she's still an illogical teenager who behaves in the way most teenagers do. I guess my main problem with this is that I never really saw what Elena saw in Freddie to be honest. Like, Freddie's backstory turns out to be really sad and I really sympatize with her but at the same time I think this novel sort of fails to convey what's so awesome about Freddie (even though they admittedly had their cute moments too, of course).

Now, onto the more pressing matters of this book; the science fiction part, which also to a large extent in my opinion touches on the subject of playing God. Who has the right to decide for someone else, and who makes the right decision? When Elena heals people, other people seemingly at random get beamed up somewhere we don't know. And never return. This immediately raises questions of, what's right? Letting someone die when they can be healed or removing people from other people's lives and through that creating a life long sorrow for a seemingly random person's family. I'm not going to go into too much detail because discussing these matters will equal discussing the ending of the book but I'm glad this book fizzed out more than burned out, if you get the difference? Like the ending was pretty mellow and honestly it really suited the book.

The only reason I'm not rating this book higher is because I felt like it was a bit too long, the romance overtook the apocalypse part and things that obviously should have had a really big effect on the characters' lives were brushed over. Still, three and a half stars means I really liked this book nevertheless, and I really did.

❤

Review: Dead Man's Trousers [Mark Renton #5]

Title: Dead Men's Trousers [Mark Renton #5]
Author: Irvine Welsh
Release date: March 29, 2018

RATING: ★★★★★

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So, Dead Men's Trousers. The book I happend to stumble across literally a week before this was released (upon researching stuff for this review, I also realized I'd completely missed out on book #4 i.e. Begbie's book!!). Seeing the title of this book made me incredibly excited to be reading this series again!

For those of you that don't know, Dead Men's Trousers is the continuation of Trainspotting - via the book 'Porno', mind - which I bet most of you recognize through its film version. To summarize things, this whole series follows four drug addicts living in Edinburgh, Scotland. The first book is set in the 1990s, the second book a couple of years later, the third book is technically a prequel to the first book, the fourth book I don't really know since I like I previously mentioned had missed out on its existence, and now this book. Set in 2015-2016.

Except that in this book, the characters are at first not criminals any longer, nor do they do any heavy drugs (well not to the extent of what they did in the previous books). And not all of them even live in Edinburgh any more.

Mark Renton has left his life in Amsterdam to work as a manager for up and coming DJs, mainly flying between LA and Ibiza. Frank Begbie is an accomplished artist, the whole hot stuff, living in LA (or Santa Monica, I genuinely cannot remember). Spud is living in Edinburgh with his tiny dog, Toto. Sick Boy (yuck) lives in London and runs an escort service.

Getting back to these characters was so nice! There's just something with this series that I enjoy. Like it is quick paced, the characters always get put in impossible situations and it's just so very Scottish (a good thing, I might add). And while reading this book I realized that there were things about it that genuinely annoyed the crap out of me but that I found myself able to put up with because it's just how it is with this series. Like some of these characters are misogynistic as heck, there's unnecessary violence and a lot of it is very unrealistic. In a way reading this book is like watching a car crash, albeit a very, very good car crash.

Honestly I can say that had I found this series now, I would have been put off by the things that bother me. But like, the reason why I stay is because somewhere in this book, you can tell that the author is aware of all the problematic things going on, all objectification, all sexism....and, it's not just casual things either, it's definitely an intergral parts of the characters. This is one of the books where you're supposed to dislike the characters in certain ways I guess, and so far it's working out well. While I've enjoyed this series loads, I'm hoping this will be the last installment in this series. I hope this series ends before it becomes repetitive and predictable, because let's face it, there's only so many times you can write about the same set of characters and keep in interesting.

2018 booktube readathon!

Okay so, 2018 was the year I finally decided to participate in the booktube readathon. However, my participation took place a week earlier than the official dates because it fit my schedule better. In hindsight I realize I should have written entries as I read the books but oh well, what can you do.

Initially I was so scared because - oh, let's start off with describing what a readathon is, shall we? The booktube readathon is a readathon the booktube (i.e. book vloggers on youtube) have started where you challenge yourself to read seven books in as many books. This year the readathon contained seven different challenges where you had to pick books based on certain criteria. I admit I made life easy for me and picked seven rather short books. Below I shall describe the challenges and also what books I read.

Challenge #1: let a coin toss decide what book you're going to read. I tossed a coin between Sent i november by Tove Jansson and Fans of The Impossible Life by Kate Scelsa, and the coin decided on the latter.

Fans of the Impossible Life is a YA polyamory LGBT romance, following three characters who end up falling for each other. A strong trope in this was found family. I read this book nearly two weeks ago and I can't remember very much of it so I guess this is a safe sign that it wasn't extremely memorable. However, I remember this being cute and fluffy and there wasn't anything in particular that I disliked about it except for the writing and the use of tenses. Since this book was following three different characters, the different chapters were written in different styles (first person, second person, third person) which slightly threw me off but once I'd gotten used to it it didn't really bother me.

Rating: ★★★


Challenge #2: read a book that has something green on its cover. For this challenge I picked a Swedish NA romance that's been sitting on my shelves forever; Nattsagor för sömnlösa by Johanna Wester. In this book you follow 19-year-old Olivia who lives in Stockholm. She's been seeing a guy who already has a girlfriend and she makes a lot of bad decisions that make pretty much everyone hate her. Honestly one of my fave settings in a book is Stockholm, probably because I live here. Contemporary books set in Stockholm where not much of anything happens is my absolute fave and honestly I should have loved this coming of age book, and I totally would have, had I not found a lot of aspects of this book stupid. Like, the things the characters did and especially the main character annoyed me to the point where I can't rate this book any higher than two stars because damn, stop being dumb.

Rating: ★★

Challenge #3: read a book that has a pretty spine. For this challenge I chose Mitt hjärta går på by Christoffer Holst. This book is another NA romance, this time featuring two guys that meet through a dating app similar to tinder/grindr. This is another one of those books that are set in Stockholm were nothing much happens - but this one did it for me! Like this was straight up my alley, so that was lovely. It was cute and heartbreaking but I'd loved for it to be longer because it was almost too short!

Rating: ★★★★


Challenge #4: read a book about someone/somewhere you want to be. For this challenge I chose The Smell of Other People's Houses by Bonnie-Sue Hitchcock. This is a slow paced slice of life book set in Alaska in 1970. This book follows four different characters, neither of whom have had it easy in life. This book has a great rep - it features two native character of different people native to Alaska and deals with topics such as teen pregnancy, abuse, racism, poverty and family issues. This is not a happy book but it is a good one, one which is criminally underrated by the book community. This is easily the best book I've read in this whole challenge.

Rating: ★★★★

Challenge #5: read a book while wearing a hat. For this challenge I settled on a book of poetry; namely Crush by Richard Siken. This is a collection of adult poems that are weighted down with want, sorrow and desparation and it's almost as if the physical desperation shown in these poems come to life and suffocate you as a reader. I really did enjoy these poems though but I realize they're probably not for everyone. But if you're into poetry and LGBT themes, I recommend you check this collection you! And yes, I wore my hat while reading this book...

Rating: ★★★★


Challenge #6: read a book and watch the movie adaption of this book. For this challenge I picked Peter Pan in Kensington Gardens by J.M. Barrie and intended to watch Neverland (which never ended up happening because it wasn't on Netflix). Anyways, this decision was made after I came to the realization that at 26, I'd never watched nor read Peter Pan. And all said and done, I got this from my local library. As a fairy tale it was indeed quite fun, but it certainly hasn't aged well in terms of sexism and racism.


Rating: ★★★

Challenge #7: read another book. For this challenge I chose a book called A Boy Worth Knowing by Jennifer Cosgrove. Honestly, this was not for me. In this book, which is a YA romance, you follow an outcast boy who falls for the new boy at school. Boy 1 is constantly guided by the voices of his dead relatives because yes, he can talk to ghosts. Honestly there's nothing wrong with the premises of this book nor the book itself, I guess it just resembled other books I've already read too much and therefore I was bored.

Rating: ★★

                                                     The books not pictured here are ebooks. 

So, all in all: can you believe I actually finished seven books in seven days and thus beat this challenge? No, me neither.

August TBR

Hi guys, today I'm back with another update for you and this time it's going to feature all books I want to read in August. I went to the library on a whim in July and picked up a lot of books. Up until now I've followed a predetermined TBR, which I broke now when I went and picked up basically every single book that I wanted to read, haha. Anyways, you gotta live a little sometimes, don't you? So, here it is - my TBR for August:

I decided to put all my library books on my TBR as well as a very well loved book I'm currently rereading for the billionth time! I go back to work on Monday so I'm actually unsure whether I'll be able to finish all these books in one month (I usually read less when I'm working but here goes nothing).

1. Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone by J.K. Rowling. I'm currently doing a big Harry Potter reread because I haven't reread all the books in years + I went to the Harry Potter studio tours in London earlier this summer, which inspired me to reread them (also remind me to write a post about the Harry Potter studio tours because I really want to write that at some point!).

2. Feral Youth by [several authors]. This is a collection of YA scifi short stories edited by Shaun David Hutchinson. I've been lowkey looking at this book forever because I am a fan of Hutchinson's, so I'm looking forward to reading this.

3. The Apocalypse of Elena Mendoza by Shaun David Hutchinson. Again, this is a YA scifi novel by Hutchinson which was released earlier this year. It's about a girl born through virgin birth if I'm not mistaken? And it's got something to do with an apocalypse. That's literally all I know.

4. Dead Men's Trousers by Irvine Welsh. Released earlier in 2018, this is the fifth installment in the "Mark Renton" series; i.e. set in the same universe as Trainspotting. I'm really looking forward to this book seeing as I'm a big fan of the previous books in this series!

5. Dumplin' by Julie Murphy. This is a YA book featuring a fat MC. That's literally everything I know; I picked this up because FAT MC and I just happened to stumble upon this at my library. I have been intending to read this novel since forever though, and I'm glad I'm finally getting around to it. I recently purchased the sequel - Puddin' - on my kindle and I can't wait to read that, too.

6. The Dangerous Art of Blending In by Angelo Surmelis. This is a LGBT YA romance featuring Greek immigrant characters. I know nothing else about it but I recognized the title at the library and thus decided to pick it up.

7. Girl Made of Stars by Ashely Herring Blake. This is a YA book that deals with rape and if I remember correctly, one half of a pair of twin raped his sister's best friend or something? Anyways, this dealt with rape culture/rape in a way I'd never read it before so I decided to give it a go.


Wish me luck as I'm attempting to tackle this TBR in August, haha.

❤

Reading wrap up: July

Hi guys, it's time for the long awaitened update of the books I read in July!

In July I did the 2018 booktube readathon where I read seven books in seven days (I will make a separate post about that, don't you worry!) which explains the unusual amount of books I went through in the month. I also read quite a few ebooks that are not pictured here.

I will talk more at lenghts about the books I read during the readathon in that post, so for this post I'll be focusing on the other books I read this past month.

# of books read: 12

- Midnight Riot by Ben Aaronoitch (★★★★★)
- Song for a Viking by K.J. Charles (★★★)
- The Summer That Melted Everything by Tiffany McDaniel (★★★★)
- Life After Life by Kate Atkinson (★★★★)
- The Girl With The Red Balloon by Katherine Locke (★★★)
- Fans of The Impossible Life by Kate Scelsa (★★★) *
- Nattsagor för sömnlösa by Johanna Wester (★★) *
- Mitt hjärta går på by Christoffer Holst (★★★★) *
- A Boy Worth Knowing Jennifer Cosgrove (★★) *
- The Smell of Other People's Houses by Bonnie-Sue Hitchcock (★★★★) *
- Crush by Richard Siken (★★★★) * 
- Peter Pan in Kensington Gardens by J.M. Barries (★★★) * 

"*" denotes a book that was part of my readathon.

Best book of the month: Midnight Riot. I found it hilarious and for me as self proclaimed London nerd, I always enjoy London in literature. Mitt hjärta går på and The Smell of Other People's Houses were also strong contenders.

Worst book of the month: this is going to be a tie between A Boy Worth Knowing and Nattsagor för sömnlösa. Neither of them was bad, but the both bored me.

❤