Best Books of 2018/I’ve Missed You!!!

Hello everyone!!!!

Oh. My. Goodness. I need to start this post with saying “I’M SORRY FOR DISAPPEARING ON YOU ALL LAST YEAR!!!!” 2018 was an incredibly busy year for me. I got MARRIED, started a new job which had me traveling a bit, we moved and my husband started graduate school. Needless to say, it was a very busy year which meant that blogging had to take a backseat to all of the wonderful changes that happened in my life. Totally worth it. BUT…I did miss blogging and I missed interacting with you all!

So I’m back! I took the first week of the year to reflect on if I wanted to come back and how I wanted to change up some of my blogging for the year. The main change is that I will not be posting individual reviews for every book I read, as that was honestly just becoming too much for me.

• I will be posting monthly wrap-ups with mini-reviews, which I think is a format that will just work better for me. It’ll keep me more motivated to take notes and then write the dang blog post.
• This will also allow me the extra bandwidth to occasionally write full reviews for the extra stand out reads that I encounter throughout the year. For the books that blow me away, I want to have the bandwidth to dedicate to writing full blog posts that actually talk about why that book particularly blew me away.
• I also get monthly books from Book of the Month (my FAVORITE book-ish subscription service out there) and I’m contemplating doing BOTM spotlights. I do try to read my monthly book during the month that I get it, so I thought it would be fun to do a “worth it” kind of post with these BOTM picks. Would you be interested in this?

With all that settled, I thought it would be most appropriate to kick off my first blog post back of the year with my top 10 favorite books read in 2018!!! Thanks to the fancy Goodreads “Year in Books” stats review, I have some fun reading stats to share with you all! 🙂

 

Thanks Goodreads for the fun look back on my 2018 reading year!! 🙂

Now cue the top 10 list of 2018!!! 😀 (Preface: 9 of the 10 books are in on particular order, but my #1 book truly was my #1 book of the year!)

10. “Down Among the Sticks and Bones” by Seanan McGuire

This is the second book in the Wayward Children novella series and definitely my favorite thus far! This book was creepy, a little scary and quite profound for a less than 200 page book. I really resonated with Jacks’ character and she just made me feel all the things.

9. “A Very Large Expanse of Sea” by Tahereh Mafi

This is Tahereh Mafis’ first contemporary book (I think?) and I loved it!! This is an own-voices novel following a young Muslim-American female high-schooler post 9/11, who likes to break dance with her brother and his friends. This book made me feel angry, happy and sad all at once. This was beautifully written, and as this book stems from Taherehs’ own experiences, it was also a heart wrenching read.

8. “A Conjuring of Light” by V.E. Schwab

This is the final book in the Shades of Magic trilogy and this series really solidified V.E. Schwab (Victoria Schwab) as one of my favorite authors ever! I also had the chance to meet her this year at a “Vengeful” signing! 🙂 P.S. She is the sweetest!!! Back to the book, y’all……this finale was beyond EPIC!!! I can’t say much because it is the last book to the trilogy, but all you need to know is that I loved it and it was epically awesome.

7. “The Dinner List” by Rebecca Serle 

This book really felt so serendipitous as it was one of my August BOTM picks, which was my birthday month and this book is centered around our protagonists’ 30th birthday dinner. Oh and did I mention that I also turned 30 this year? Talk about perfect timing! 😀 I didn’t expect to love this book as much as I did, to be quite honest. This was a fairly quick read, but it definitely had a deep impact on me as a woman turning 30.

6. “The Kiss Quotient” by Helen Hoang 

This book follows two protagonists, a male escort and a female data analyst with Asperger’s Syndrome, and their relationship following her paying him to teach her the ins and outs of sex. This was definitely one of the most unique books that I read all year and I loved it. This was a smutty, diverse book, which was so much fun to read! This is also an own-voices novel, which I think made it even more unique and kind of special to read.

5. “Muse of Nightmares” by Laini Taylor

This is the concluding book in the Strange the Dreamer duology and it was MAGICAL! Again, as this is a concluding book in a series I can’t say much, but…all I can say is that Laini Taylor is truly the queen of fantasy and epic world building. This duology addresses themes of war and the generational pain of war, in such a unique way! This duology is a definite must read.

4. “Children of Blood and Bone” by Tomi Adeyemi

This is the first book in an epic high-fantasy West African inspired series, and it truly delivered! This book was fast-paced, super high-fantasy world building and magic system and it was so much fun!!! This book was super intricate and incredibly unique, and I am so excited to continue on in the series! My only true gripe about this book was the romance, so I am interested to see how this continues in the next book…coming out in March!!!

3. “The Astonishing Color of After” by Emily X.R. Pan 

This book was a truly special contemporary book following a young girl (half-Taiwanese, half-white) who lost her mother to suicide. After losing her mother, Leigh is convinced that her mother has come back in the form of a bird that she sees here and there. Leigh and her father are now trying to put their lives together after this horrible tragedy. Leigh receives correspondence from her maternal grandparents in Taiwan that she’d never met. Curious to learn more, she goes to Taiwan to stay with her grandparents and she goes on a moving journey about family, culture and learning more about her mother. This book was extra special to me as an Asian-American who has struggled with mental health disorders/suicide attempt, as these are topics that aren’t talked about enough in the Asian/Asian-American/API communities. This book will forever remain a special book in my heart.

2. “Little Fires Everywhere” by Celeste Ng 

I cannot even begin to describe this book because the synopsis does not do this book justice, so all I’ll say is that this was an incredible book about family, womanhood, motherhood, being a WOC, being an immigrant woman, etc. I was amazed at how much was in this fairly average-length book and the story that was woven together was just mesmerizing. This book also addresses white progressive liberals, in a way that I could never talk about and I think that is so important to read.

1. “Pachinko” by Min Jin Lee 

And of course…my true #1 book of not just the year, but of my entire life was this book. This book is a beautiful and tragic multi-generational historical fiction book following a Korean family displaced to Japan spanning the 1900s to the 1990s. As a Korean-American, this was unbelievably special to read. Min Jin Lee did an incredible job portraying generational pain, and it was an incredibly profound experience. This was a book where when I finished it, I on and off cried for the next 20-30 minutes. This book will forever hold a special place in my heart and I absolutely urge you all to read it if you haven’t!! 🙂 ❤

Overall, I had a fantastic reading year on top of an amazingly special year!! 🙂 ❤ I have some exciting reading goals for 2019 and I’ll share them with you in the coming days. I hope you all had great reading years and I wish you all another amazing year of reading in 2019!!! 😀

Quick Take: Every Heart A Doorway

Every Heart A Doorway (#1) by Seanan McGuire

This was a definitely highly anticipated read of mine as I have heard nothing but rave reviews among the bookish community. I thought it would be a great thing to read during the Spook-A-Thon, but alas, I didn’t finish it in time to count.

All I knew about this book was that it’s about the children who have gone into fantastical worlds and have come back into our reality. The kids are sent to a children’s home in order to help them “acclimate” back into our reality as no one in their original lives believe their adventures. What I didn’t realize about this book was that it ended up being a murder mystery, which definitely made it the perfect read for October.

Overall, I quite enjoyed it! It was super creepy and eerie, way creepier than I expected the book to be. I was super intrigued with the storyline and I thought it such a creative twist on your typical portal fantasy story. What I loved most about this book was the extremely diverse representation of LGBTQA+ characters. I loved seeing a protagonist who identified as an asexual and that wasn’t the only thing that defined her character. It was definitely her most salient identity, but it wasn’t the only thing that we focused on.

I am definitely intrigued to the rest of the books in this series. I am particularly interested because of the way that this book ended! Slight cliffhanger…or…was it? I don’t know! If you’re looking for a spookier, eerie read, then this is the book for you!!

Charmed by Capricorn

Schooled by Gordon Korman

Oh my hippie-loving-heart, this book was the cutest! It has been sitting on my to-read list for the longest time–to the extent that I forgot how it got on there in the first place–but I’m so glad I finally got to it!

A homeschooled long-haired hippie kid named Capricorn has to go to the local public middle school while his grandmother recovers from a fall, and has to learn about things like checkbooks and what a “starbuck” is. There is also the hiccup of thirteen year olds not exactly being allowed to drive school busses , but licenses aren’t really a thing inside the commune. And when he finds out about the whole school locker system, he says things like:

“When we lock things away,” he said with conviction, “we’re really imprisoning ourselves.”

I mean come on, that’s at once both funny and adorable. The popular kids of course try to pick on him, in particular by getting him to run as class president, but Cap’s naiveté and kind nature help him move blissfully forward and naturally draw people to him.

This is geared towards middle schoolers, which I am definitely not, but I think it holds its own. Even though the characters can seem a bit charicature-y, they are far from two dimensional. And aside from delightful quotes like the one above, the book is also full of incredibly touching moments that completely caught me by surprise. I look forward to grabbing my own copy of this one for whenever I want an afternoon of some quick, cozy reading. A not-so-surprising five stars from this closeted free spirit hippie chick!

More than Half-Bored

Half Lost by Sally Green

I loved Half Bad, the first book in the trilogy. The second, Half Wild, was decent enough. But this? This was an exercise in willpower.

I think I started reading this book about three times before finally finishing, and even then it took an age to get through a measly 340 pages. All the edginess, the intensity I felt towards the the start of the trilogy, was wiped away only to leave behind an over-the-top narrator and an overarching conflict I no longer cared about.

Our main character was the main problem. One could make the claim that Nathan was the way he was due to all the trauma he experienced, but that sort of emotional baggage was never communicated, even though the narration is told through his perspective. He was full of hate and bitterness and thoughts of revenge, yet the emotional intensity had all the depth of a rain puddle. As a result, I just couldn’t bring myself to care about…anything. The battle, the romance, the revenge–I slogged through it all.

Though the last 30 pages or so certainly harkened back to the writing we start with in Half Bad, I still think the whole trilogy could have done with a happier ending. Not all sunshine and rainbows, to be sure, but more sweet and less bitter. That, I think, could have left me with a kinder sentiment to the trilogy as a whole, but now I just wish I had just stuck with the first and let the other two be.

tl;dr nice little halloween story with a tune to match

The Diviners by Libba Bray – 4.5/5

Evie O’Malley has a gift of reading objects to lure out secrets, but not everyone is very accepting of this “gift”. She is sent to live in NY with her Uncle Will after she gets a little drunk and spills some of these secrets about the town’s golden boy. The story is set in the 1920’s, which was interesting for me as I typically do not read historical fiction. But the mix of the time period with the well developed cast and supernatural elements worked out really well here. Can Evie’s gift help solve the cases of the Pentacle killer? And when it does, will anybody believe that a ghost is responsible? Most importantly, will I ever stop singing that creepy song in my head?!

But I probably won’t come back

I Was Here by Gayle Forman – 4/5

To be fair, I never read If I Stay, just saw the movie, but that is what attracted me to this book. The premise here is that Cody’s best friend Meg killed herself. She drank some industrial strength poison in a hotel room, set an email note to delay send by a day or two, and Cody’s life has never been the same.

Without really realizing, Cody is having a hard time dealing with Meg’s death. When something Meg’s brother says makes Cody wonder if there is more to the story, she dives right in to figure it out for herself. Along the way she meets Meg’s ex-lover Ben, her roommate Stoner Richard, a rude hippie named Tree, and a computer nerd with access to answers she doesn’t know she has yet.

TL;DR Perfect post breakup read

To All The Boys I’ve Loved Before & P.S. I Still Love You by Jenny Han – 5/5

I know I said I probably would not be writing a review of these two as Mina has already done that BUT I feel that I haveto.

I picked these up needing a nice light-hearted pick-me-up; and that is exactly what I got. Mina had mentioned to me that she did not like the second novel as much as the first, but I love them so much together (maybe that’s the difference). I literally finished the first and picked up the second to see what happens next. I did cry several times in both novels, as would anyone in this lovely story of first loves and how to handle them.

A Joint Review of Paper Towns by John Green

For a fun change in how we write reviews, Mina and I decided to write a joint review of John Green’s Paper Towns.

Ranie: But let’s start with the basics. The story follows Quentin “Q” Jacobsen and his affection and adoration of his next door neighbor (since they were kids) Margo Roth Spiegelman. They haven’t spoken in about 8 years when she shows up in his window and takes him on a revenge adventure she has planned. Q remembers that he’s in love with her, and is beyond excited to see her at school the next day to see how it has changed his life, but alas, Margo Roth Spiegelman has disappeared/ran away again. Q sets off following clues to find her, dead or alive (dun dun dun).

The Faults in The Fault in Our Stars

The Fault in Our Stars by John Green — Okay. (2 out of 5) 

You read that right. I don’t mean that in the book’s way of using “okay”…I mean it was alright, I liked it okay. Ugh, am I turning into that reader, the one that never likes what’s popular? I hope not! But in this case, I’m doing it. I will turn and face the masses and yell, “This book is not very good!”

I’m feeling a little braver the longer I type, so here I go–the actual review.

Have you ever watched an episode of Gilmore Girls? Many people absolutely loved that show. I absolutely loathed it for one simple reason: I thought the characters were ridiculous. I love wit, wisdom, dry humor, the works. But nobody is witty, wise, and perfectly humorous all the time. It’s impossible! Well, impossible in our normal, boring reality, but totally likely in the John Green universe!

The End of an Era?

Why must you leave me so conflicted?

A review of Shadow and Bone by Leigh Bardugo

If I read this maybe five years ago, I probably would have fallen in love with it. Now that I’m older (wiser?), novels like Shadow and Bone have me worried that my long-standing love affair with YA is beginning to falter. Cue the sad violin music.

Don’t get me wrong, I still think it was a fun book. I finished it in the span of two days in maybe three sittings. Bardugo writes well.  The premise was fun. But it seems like I’m losing the ability to turn my brain off and ignore the sorts of things that usually bother me about YA Lit. Let’s start with the characters.