My #SundayYAthon TBR!

Hello everyone! I hope you all had wonderful Christmases, got everything you wanted and ate your own body weight in roast dinners, chocolates and biscuits.
Rachel from #SundayYA (@_sectumsemprah) has organised a little read-a-thon to keep everyone turning pages over the holidays, and I've decided to participate. Things are quite crazy with work, and out of the four days I'm working full days on ALL of them... It might mean that I can't get anything finished, but I'm going to try!

Rachel's challenges

1. Read a Christmas novel: I'm going to try to read Jay Asher's 'What Light', because I've heard lots of good things about this new release. I haven't read any of Jay's other novels, so this will be a nice place to start.
2. Read a novella: 'Unboxed' by Non Pratt. No question.
3. Read a short story collection: This has to be 'I'll Be Home For Christmas'! For every copy sold, £1 was donated to Crisis - it's such a good cause, so I ran out and bought my copy the day it was released.
4. Read a new book: Okay, I'm going to cheat on this one. I'm going to finish a new book, because I've been slowly chugging my way through 'The Fate of the Tearling' and I want to get it finished already!
5. Read a book from your TBR: Well, all of the above books are on my TBR, so if worst comes to worst at least I'll finish this challenge in conjunction with one of the others. Ideally I'd like to read 'The Dry' by Jane Harper (not YA, but I'm excited about it!) or 'A Quiet Kind of Thunder' by Sara Barnard. 

I hope you enjoyed this TBR! Are you participating in the #SundayYAthon?

BookTube-A-Thon wrap-up

Last week, I decided I was going to take part in the BookTube-A-Thon. I created a TBR for the week, and I was supremely determined that I was going to complete all of the challenges - easy peasy.

So how many challenges did I complete?

The answer to that is...

3.

Yep, I completed less than half of the challenges. I only managed to complete three because I counted finishing 'Paper Towns' towards two of them: both the book to movie adaptation and the book by your favourite author (okay, 'Looking For Alaska' is my favourite book and I hate all of the other John Green books I've read, but it counts!).
I managed to get halfway through 'The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy' - it's really not long, so I should have been able to finish it, but I was taking my time because I wanted to enjoy it and remember it rather than rush to the end. I also managed to get halfway through Sarah Mlynowski's 'Don't Even Think About It', but the narrating style is really odd... I can't connect with it, so I'm struggling with that one.
That means I've only finished two books in the last week and a half! I'm definitely not back in my reading slump, because there's a very good reason for me to not be reading.
I mean I could use the excuse that I was spending a lot of time with my friends (well, one friend in particular... But we don't need to talk about that!), but I'm going to be completely honest: Pokemon Go is addictive is hell and I haven't been able to stop playing it since I got my new phone.
So really, the only thing I've managed to do successfully this week was getting to level 10 on Pokemon Go in less than 5 days.
Oh yeah. It's that bad.

BookTube-A-Thon TBR

Tomorrow marks the start of BookTube-A-Thon, a week long read-a-thon with seven challenges.
"But Alyce," I hear you cry. "But Alyce, you aren't a BookTuber!"
It's a bloodydamn good point, but I'm going to participate anyway. Just try and stop me.

1) Read a book with yellow on the cover

My copy of 'The True Meaning of Smekday' by Adam Rex has a lot more yellow on the cover! I've mostly chosen this one because it's due back to the library fairly soon, so I need to get it read. 

2) Read a book only after sunset

For a book to read only after sunset, I needed to choose one that I thought I could read quickly. It had to be 'Don't Even Think About It' by Sarah Mlynowski - I've been anticipating it for a while, so I think I'm going to speed through it. 

3) Read a book you discovered through BookTube

This might be cheating! I discovered 'The 5th Wave' through BookTube, and I'd intended to read the sequel a couple of months ago... Technically I wouldn't have heard of it without hearing about the first book, so it can count towards this challenge. 

4) Read a book by one of your favourite authors

'Half Bad' is one of my favourite books of all time, and I keep procrastinating instead of reading 'Half Wild'. This'll be the perfect incentive to finally pick it up and continue Nathan's story. 

5) Read a book that's older than you

One of my friends loves this book, and he straight up asked me the other day whether I'd read it. I bumbled through some bullshit excuse about the fact that I wanted to listen to the original radio play rather than reading the book, but the truth is: I'm lazy when it comes to older books. It's why I'm forcing myself to do the classics challenge! So I'm going to FINALLY read 'The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy'. 

6) Read and watch a book-to-movie adaptation

As soon as I saw this prompt, I instantly thought of 'Paper Towns'. I know I can read John Green's novels insanely quickly, and based on how adorable the trailer was hopefully I'll be able to speed through the film too. 

7) Read seven books

If I can finish all of the books above, I'm going to throw myself headfirst into reading 'We Awaken' by Calista Lynne. I have a brilliant guest post from Calista just waiting in my inbox, because I want to read and review her novel before I post it... I should definitely work on this! 

Are you going to participate in the BookTube-A-Thon? It doesn't matter if you don't make videos, come and join me in my rebellion! 

Endless Possibilities Read-a-thon Wrap-up!

Over these past few days, I've been taking part in the Endless Possibilities Read-a-Thon in conjunction with Good Tales Book Tours. I'd like to say another big thank you to Good Tales, for allowing me to take part in this read-a-thon, it was so much fun!

During the read-a-thon, I managed to complete two books: 'The Lover's Dictionary' by David Levithan and 'Panic' by Lauren Oliver. Not as many as I'd been hoping to read, but I was quite busy with work and going to a concert on Sunday night, so I couldn't apply myself to the reading as much as I wanted to. 

'The Lover's Dictionary' by David Levithan is quite a short book, as it's the story of a couple told through dictionary definitions; each 'chapter' is a word, and the plot on that page relates to the word. The thing I love about this novel is that we don't get any specifics about the couple - they could be young or old, black or white - and we don't get their names either, so it's easy to relate to the story no matter what background you come from. 

I either love or hate David Levithan's writing - he's extremely Marmite to me. 'Every Day' was one of my favourite books, but when I read 'Marly's Ghost' at the beginning of this year I was supremely disappointed. This meant I was quite nervous going into 'The Lover's Dictionary', as I'd been anticipating it quite highly due to the unique structuring of the story.

Thankfully, I was pretty impressed. When you get to the end it is a bit deflating, but because it's a snapshot of a life I was never going to get a resolution that I was completely happy with. The writing style was perfect though, quintessential Levithan, as he has such a talent for putting into words the little feelings that it's hard to verbalise. An example of that would be:

'I don't like it when you use my shampoo, because then your hair smells like me, not you.'

I really don't know why that quote touched me as much as it did, but I'm not ashamed to admit that it did make me shed a few tears - I was already feeling quite emotional from the rollercoaster ride that was their romance, and it really hit home because it was such an ordinary, day-to-day thing to comment upon.
This wasn't my favourite David Levithan book, but I can see myself coming back to this one over and over again in the future - it was a very quick read, taking me only a couple of hours, but I did really enjoy this one.

 

The second book I read during the read-a-thon was 'Panic' by Lauren Oliver. I actually started this one first, but there was so much going on and it was so adrenaline-filled that I needed to take a bit of a break, because I get really emotionally involved in novels like this and I was much too on edge.

Panic is a game played by the seniors of the high school in Carp - every summer you can choose to participate in the game for the chance to win a minimum prize of $50,000. Panic has been going for seven years, and there has been three deaths in the game in that time period, but when you're from a dead-end town the desperation takes over, and nothing will stop you from trying to get a better life for yourself.

This is a dual perspective novel, switching between Heather and Dodge. Heather lives in the Fresh Pines trailer park with her mother, step-father and sister, and at first she only joins Panic to find a reason to be alive - she's just found out her long-term boyfriend, Matt, is cheating on her, and she's feeling pretty down in the dumps. However, Dodge has a much better reason for playing Panic - revenge, pure and simple. In a game of Panic a few years ago, the brakes on his sisters car were tampered with, leaving her paralyzed from the waist down. Now, the saboteurs brother is in Dodge's game of Panic, and Dodge wants to take something from him. "A sister's legs for a brother's life.". 

Panic is addictive; both the game and the book. I thought this would take me a while to read, but with the rapidly passing days and the sudden arrival of new Panic tasks, I flew through this book. This is the second Lauren Oliver novel that I've read (the first being 'Before I Fall') and I still absolutely love her writing, her characterisation and her characters voices. They seem to come alive on the page, and I have a feeling Heather and Dodge will follow me for a long time from now.
There were still a couple of issues with it - something that is meant to be really subtle and surprising was really obvious to me from one of the second chapters, so all of the hints and clues placed throughout just kind of annoyed me. But other than that, this one was an absolute rollercoaster, and I could not predict how it was going to end.
If you haven't read a Lauren Oliver novel yet, you really need to get on with it - you will not regret it, I promise you.

That was all I managed to read during these three days, but I'm pretty proud of it - I'd wanted to read both books for so long but hadn't had any time, and they both ended up being ace. Got some other exciting book things coming on the blog later this week, so keep an eye out! 

Endless Possibilities Read-a-thon TBR!

I'm taking part in the Good Tales Book Tours Endless Possibilities Read-A-Thon next week, so I thought I'd compile my TBR list ready, and let you guys know what I'll be challenging myself to read! I'm going to try and link them all to Endless Possibilities (even if the links will be a little bit stretched!)

1. 'The Lover's Dictionary' by David Levithan: what has more possibilities than a dictionary? All the different words that can be combined together, in any shape or pattern. Just choosing amorous, romantic words minimises the possibilities a little bit, but they're still pretty big, and I can't wait to see what happens in this novel. 
2. 'Panic' by Lauren Oliver: there are so many endless possibilities of things in the world that you can panic about!
3. 'Adverbs' by Daniel Handler: he can only use a selection of adverbs, but the possibilities of which adverbs used are endless!

I'm only going to try to read the three novels, because I'm also gonna try and read a couple of non-fiction books for my investigation into self-help as a genre. Wish me luck!