2020 on Goodreads by Various My rating: 4 of 5 stars If there can be one good thing that came out of 2020, it’s that my reading hit an all-time high. I don’t think I’ve read this many books in a single year before! In part, this is due to all the circumstance changes throughout the year with lockdowns and working from home meaning I was more inclined to read in my spare time. I also started a Booktube and…
The Bear and The Nightingale by Katherine Arden My rating: 3 of 5 stars This is floating somewhere between a 3 and a 3.5 for me so I’m hedging my bets with a 3. I really enjoyed the folkloric elements of this story especially Vasya’s interactions with the various spirits she encountered as well as her affinity with the horses as another part of the natural world. The conflict between Christianity and the old ways is a fraught one and…
Gideon the Ninth by Tamsyn Muir My rating: 3 of 5 stars If you’ve come for the “lesbian necromancers in space” then, er, readjust your expectations. There’s no romantic or sexual involvement between anyone. Sure, Gideon fancies women but at no point does anyone identify themselves by a set sexuality – she could be bi for all we know – and while she sort-of fancies one of the other necromancers (not Harrow) for a while, that’s it. She notices when…
Back at the start of the year I published a post with my self-assigned Reading Challenges for 2020 and now it’s time for an update as I have completed the main list! Below I’ve re-listed all the challenges and updated them to include what book I read for them or what/when I completed an activity. I allowed myself to use the same book for more than one prompt initially because I was worried I wouldn’t otherwise complete the list but…
The Whisper Man by Alex North My rating: 3 of 5 stars 3.5 out of 5. An engaging thriller with a hint of the supernatural mixed in. This is a multi-perspective thriller with a good balance between victim/s, killer and police POVs set in England with some internal themes around parenthood – specifically fatherhood – and the relationships between fathers and sons. The added reflection between the different father-son relationships in the book made for some extra content to think…
Convenience Store Woman by Sayaka Murata My rating: 3 of 5 stars This was a bit of a weird one to rate and categorise for me. It’s billed as being ‘darkly comic’ but I didn’t feel anything like that coming through. It’s a tale of a woman who does not fit in and trying to fit in the only ways she knows how. It explores ideas of normalised behaviour within society and how these normalisations can make anyone who doesn’t…
When We Cease to Understand the World by Benjamín Labatut My rating: 3 of 5 stars When We Cease to Understand the World features an exploration of major scientific advances in the 20th century alongside the idea that genius is often beset by madness. It is important to note, however, that there are increasing fictionalised elements as the book goes on and it becomes hard to determine what is truth and what is fiction. I was unsure how to rate…
The Priory of the Orange Tree by Samantha Shannon My rating: 5 of 5 stars This is a book with a lot to offer. We have four POV’s from two main characters and two slightly more secondary characters. The narrative swaps between these four in a chronological fashion, as opposed to simultaneous so the book covers a good period of time and develops events and characters over this. Our two key protagonists are Ead and Tané, two women from opposite…
Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury My rating: 4 of 5 stars There are a lot of things that can be said about this book and given it’s almost 70 years old at this point I’m sure most of what I have to say has been said before. Nevertheless, in trying to keep up the habit of reviewing what I read, here we are. The first thing that struck me about Fahrenheit 451 was how lyrical it is; I was not…