My reading goal for 2016 was to read 25 books. I only got through 19. I'm a little bummed I didn't make my goal but shit happens. I'm going to keep my goal at 25 for 2017. Go big, right?
Dustin got me a new kindle for Christmas which makes reading and buying books that much easier. Also I'll be getting a couple more books in my next two Owl Crate shipments. So it's going to be a busy upcoming year on the book side of things. I need the escape now more than ever.
1. The Royal We by Heather Cocks & Jessica Morgan - I'm not ashamed to admit that I love all things royal. Real royals, fake royals - whatever! I don't know why that life is so fascinating but it is. This book is very much Prince William and Kate Middleton fan fiction. Prince meets American studying abroad and fall in love. Although it's not that simple because, duh, it never is. I really enjoyed this book except I thought it was about 100 pages too long. There was a part in the middle-endish of the book that just dragged for eternity.
- "Imagine taking the time every day to write pages and pages to someone about how wonderful they are. Now people just send texts with half the right letters missing."
2. Wildflower by Drew Barrymore - I love Drew. I've seen just about everything she's been in and loved 98% of it. She just seems so genuine and friendly. This book is a collection of stories from her life. It doesn't follow any kind of format and jumps around from her childhood to adulthood. I personally liked this style. It was really interesting reading about her parents and the way she grew up. I can definitely relate on some level. I also loved reading all the behind the scene stuff on several of her movies. If you love her, you'll love this book.
- "My mother and father were both incapable of being parents, and I don't fault them for it. My therapist would disagree, but the truth is they gave me a great blueprint through their behavior of what not to with my own kids."
- "I am lucky that I got dealt some cards that showed me what it's like not to have a family, and I am much luckier to now have the chance to create my own deck!"
- "Be authentic. Be yourself. And most important of all...make it personal."
- "I know there is suffering so to escape it for a second is truly powerful. That is one church I am staying loyal to. The Church of Laughing. "
- It's ironic that we rush through being "single" as if it's some disease or malady to get rid of or overcome. The truth is, most likely, one day you will meet someone and it will be gone. And once it's gone, it's really gone! Why does no one tell us how important it is to enjoy being single and being by yourself? That time is defining and amazing and nothing to "cure"."
- "I came from the blueprint of what not to do, and I wouldn't even consider having children until I had the tangible antidote to my experience."
3. Emmy & Oliver by Robin Benway - Oliver and Emmy have friends their whole life until Oliver is kidnapped when they are 7. Fast forward to 10 years later and Oliver is found safe and sound. This book is about Oliver being re-introduced to the world he was taken from. Now that I'm typing it out it sounds so dark but it's really not. I really liked the story. The only thing that bugged me was Emmy's parents. They were so over protective I wanted to scream.
- "Who just crosses their eyes at someone? Four-year-olds, that's who. Four-year-olds and people who need corrective lens wear."
- "I was definitely warmer, but wearing wet bathing suit bottoms under jeans can be filed under the category "NO FUN EVER."
- "I wish people still wrote letters", I said to Oliver as we both emptied the boxes. "Wouldn't that be cool? Like, you'd go to the mailbox and there'd be a letter just waiting for you?"
4. Every Day by David Leviathan - This is the story of the soul 'A' . Every day A wakes up in a new teenage body. A learns to keep a low profile and not change the lives of the bodies he inhabits. Things change when he meets Rhiannon while in the body of her boyfriend Justin. This was one of the most original stories I've read. I loved the premise so much. It was fascinating to me. I had so many questions while reading. Some got answered and some didn't. I saw/met David Leviathan when I went to the Orange County Library in 2014. I was there to see Rainbow Rowell but when he started answering questions about this book I was very intrigued. It totally lived up to what I envisioned it to be.
- "I am a drifter, and as lonely as that can be, it is also remarkably freeing. I will never define myself in terms of anyone else. I will never feel the pressure of peers or the burden of parental expectation."
- "There is a part of childhood that is childish, and a part that is sacred."
- "Kindness connects to who you are, while niceness connects to how you want to be seen. "
- "Some people think mental illness is a matter of mood, a matter of personality. They think depression is simply a form of being sad, that OCD is a form of being uptight. They think the soul is sick, not the body. It is, they believe, something that you have some choice over. I know how wrong this is."
- "I don't have the heart to tell him that's the wrong way to think about the world. There will always be more questions. Every answer leads to more questions. The only way to survive is to let some of them go. "
5. Did You Ever Have A Family by Bill Clegg - June is the only survivor of a house fire that kills her daughter, her daughter's finance, her ex-husband, and her boyfriend. This book was a hard one to read. It starts off so tragically but it weaves in and out so beautifully unfolding truths of those lost in the fire.
- "Some people, she decided, magically surface in these horrible moments knowing exactly what to do, which spaces to fill."
- "Funny how you think people are one way or the other and most of the time you end up completely wrong."
- "Mostly, I've made peace with the mistakes I've made, but every often I bump into a memory and it will sit me right down."
6. Red Rising by Pierce Brown - This one is complicated so here's the summary from Amazon:
Darrow is a Red, a member of the lowest caste in the color coded society of the future. Like his fellow Reds, he works all day, believing that he and his people are making the surface of Mars livable for future generations. Yet he spends his life willingly, knowing that his blood and sweat will one day result in a better world for his children. But Darrow and his kind have been betrayed. Soon he discovers that humanity reached the surface generations ago. Vast cities and lush wilds spread across the planet. Darrow and the Reds like him are nothing more than slaves to a decadent ruling class.
Red Rising started a little slow for my taste but once it got going it was really good. I can totally understand why Darrow is being compared to Ender or Katniss. He certainly rises up. Pun intended. I still need to read the rest of the trilogy to see how the whole thing wraps up but this book was a great start. I loved the whole Mars-dystopian society feel. And even though this is categorized as "young adult" it can be pretty brutal in places.
- "It's like staring at the ground as you fall from a height. Seeing the end coming doesn't mean you can dodge it, fit it, stop it."
- "And what was that about blood brothers? That means absolutely nothing. You might as well have said you were pinecone cousins. Nothing binds like pain shared."
7. Extraordinary Means by Robyn Schneider - This book has been called "The Fault In Our Stars meets Eleanor and Park" which I agree with. It was certainly up there in the heartbreak level. Lane, a teenager with tuberculosis, gets put in Latham House for kids suffering the same illness. The kids live and go to school together and receive medical attention at the same time. I had interest in this because I loved another book by this author (The Beginning of Everything) and it was just as good. But it'll leave you sobbing.
- "There's a difference between being dead and dying. We're all dying. Some of us die for ninety years, and some of us dir for nineteen. But each morning everyone on this planet wakes up one day closer to their death. Everyone. So living and dying are actually different words for the same thing, if you think about it."
- "Latham was my Hogwarts, and protocillin was the cure for my magic."
8. A Man Called Ove by Fredrik Backman - If I could only give one book suggestion for all that I've read this past year I would tell you to read this book. I'm not sure how I came across this one but it got such high reviews that I said "why the hell not" and clicked the purchased button on my kindle.
Ove is a crotchety old man who lives alone. He lives his life full of routine and rules. One day a young couple with two children accidentally back their U-Haul into his mailbox. From there you see this cranky old man (become crankier) but over time his story unfolds and you get a deeper glimpse of who he is and how he became to be the way he is. This story was so incredibly moving and emotional and really fucking funny. Ove reminded me of Dustin which is maybe why I loved it so much. It's always a good reminder to not judge people so much because often we don't know their stories. Maybe some people just are that much of a curmudgeon but I'm sure there's more to it than that.
- "Because nowadays people are all thirty-one and wear two-tight trousers and no longer drink normal coffee."
- "The little foreign woman steps towards him and only then does One notice that she's either very pregnant or suffering from what Ove would categorize as selective obesity."
- "He was skeptical about people who came late. If you can't depend on someone being on time, you shouldn't trust 'em with anything more important either."
- "We always think there's enough time to do things with other people. Time to say things to them. And then something happens and then we stand there holding on to words like "if".
- "Death is a strange thing. People live their whole lives as if it does not exist, and yet it's often one of the great motivations for living."
9. Throne of Glass by Sarah Maas - Celaena Sardothien is a bad ass. She is my new hero. She is an assassin who is picked by The Crown Prince and released from prison to win her freedom by defeating 23 others in various competitions. She is trained by The Captain of the Guard and one by one the group starts to dwindle. There's a lot more to the story of course but it's a wild ride from start to finish. If I were to ever cosplay she would be first on my list.
10. Live Fast Die Hot by Jenny Mollen - Jenny's first book 'I Like You Just The Way I Am' was hilarious and bat shit crazy. I follow her on social media because she is insane in the best way. She's just very entertaining in a dramatic kind of way. Her second book is mostly about her hilarious journey to motherhood. If you're looking for an easy funny read this is the book!
- "...hanging over the side of his crib and dropping my boob into his mouth, feeding him like a hamster."
- "I started to realize that Tinder wasn't about meeting people, it was actually just another way to avoid meeting people. If you can hide behind your phone and get your ego massaged by knowing people want to date you, what's the point of leaving your house to physically engage with them?"
- "He wasn't a dog to me. He was a classy fucking gentlemen in a fur suit."
11. Crown of Midnight by Sarah Maas - This is the second book to Throne of Glass. I don't want to say anything about it since it will kind of ruin the first one. Obviously I liked the first one enough to check out the next in line. There are a few more in the series so I plan to get to a couple of them in 2017.
12. Harry Potter and the Cursed Child by John Tiffany - This was the best-selling book off 2016. Duh. I know a lot of people didn't like it and to that I say "WTF!". I've never read a book in script style before so that was very hard to get used to at first. Since it was published as a script a lot of detail that would normally be in a novel to set up characters or scenes was not there. Of course I would have loved more description but I understand why it wasn't there.
Albus is Harry and Ginny's youngest son and is annoyed having to deal with all the fame and legacy that being a Potter entails. Albus is the complete opposite of Harry. He gets sorted into Slytherin and sucks at Quidditch. I really loved being back at Hogwarts. And although the story focuses on Albus, Scorpius really was the star in my opinion. All in all I enjoyed it a lot. I really liked reading about the golden trio as adults and what the new class of Hogwarts was up to. It felt like coming home.
13. The Astronaut Wives Club by Lily Koppel - I picked up this book used while in Portland's famous Powell's Books bookstore. I wanted to buy at least one real book from there and this was the one I chose. Apparently this got turned into a short-lived TV series at some point which I didn't even know about until after the fact. The book itself goes in date order from introducing the wives of the first astronauts first and so on as more come into the program. It's such an interesting look into how these astronauts came to be and how it changed their whole family. I didn't realize that astronaut families were treated like celebrities back then. They had to hide from paparazzi and got invited to The White House. It goes into detail about how these women supported each other through it all.
14. White-Hot Hack by Tracey Jarvis-Graves - I was/still am obsessed with the first book Heart-Shaped Hack. Kate and Ian just have a chemistry and a wit that is incredibly entertaining. The first book was perfect top to bottom. The second book was enjoyable but not nearly as interesting. I liked it because I like the characters so much but it just didn't grab me the way the first one did. The second book didn't need to be written. The first one got wrapped up just fine so I'm still a little unsure what the point of this one was. It's not bad but it's no where close to the original.
15. The Light Between Oceans by M.L. Stedman - I wanted to read this after I saw the movie trailer. The book had a very melancholy vibe the whole way through which isn't necessarily a bad thing but it's certainly not a feel-good kind of story. It had some slow parts especially in the beginning but the end is beautifully done. Sad but beautiful.
16. Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children by Ransom Riggs - This is another book I picked up because of the movie trailer. (I have to read a book before the movie if I can help it!) Jacob lives a very normal existence in good ol' Florida until one day tragedy strikes his family. He is overcome with grief which leads he and his father to visit an island off Wales where his grandfather told them of a school for peculiar children that he attended until leaving for the war. This book reminds me a little bit of X-Men but is more of a period story. I loved the added photos throughout the book. Although a lot of them were creepy, it really gave me a good sense of what these peculiar children were all about.
- "I did love her, of course, but mostly just because loving your mom is mandatory, not because she was someone I think I'd like very much if I met her walking down the street."
- "...started walking, heading nowhere in particular. Some
17. A Monster Calls by Patrick Ness - Conor wakes up in the middle of the night to find a monster outside of his bedroom window. This story was not what I was expecting at all. It was much darker and deeper than I was expecting. A good read about loss and grief.
18. The Japanese Lover by Isabel Allende - Alma has lived a long and eventful life and now has come to live at Lark House Nursing Home. She befriends her caretaker Irina who also becomes close to Alma's grandson Seth. The story winds in and out of present day at Lark House to Alma and Irina's interesting and sad pasts. It is just such a epic story. There's so many levels to it which made it that much more enjoyable.
- "Childhood is a naturally unhappy period of our existence, Lillian. It was Walt Disney who invented the notion that it has to be happy, simply to make money."
- "There's a lot of good people, Irina, but they keep quiet about it. It's the bad ones who make a lot of noise, and that's why they get noticed."
- "We start to grow old as soon as we are born, we change every day, life is a continuous state of flux. We evolve. The only difference is that now we are a little closer to death. What's so bad about that? Love and friendship do not age."
- "She didn't like humans; she preferred cats. She could only take the human race in small doses: more than three gave her indigestion.
19. Scrappy Little Nobody by Anna Kendrick - This is hands down one of the best celebrity books I've read. Anna is just so genuine and hilarious. I mean, do you follow her on Twitter (she's a hilarious gem on there)? Her book is just more of her amazingly real personality. I like how she told the stories. She didn't drag shit out. Some stories only need a page. That's always my biggest complaint with these kinds of books. Usually it's just a lot of filler. She is my age so her childhood and 90s references were not missed and very much appreciated. I just don't know how anyone can not like her especially after reading this book.
- "I think self-doubt is healthy. And having to fight for the thing you want doesn't mean you deserve it any less."
- "When Jonathan Taylor Thomas cut his hair short enough that it no longer fell in his eyes, it was a betrayal. Zack Morris was far preferable to A.C. Slater."
- "And I learned that before going out you should shine a very bright light at your crotch to make sure you can't see your puss."
