Hey guys, it's Jane!
I am here today
to do my May wrap-up. That's right,
I've mentally prepared myself,
I'm finally ready, and here we go.
In may,
I read 16 things.
How on earth did that happen? Anyway,
there you go, 16 things. I'm gonna just
run through them just really super quickly, I've talked
about almost all of them
before in various videos
and if there's something that you're interested in,
if you look in the description I'll link
to where I've discussed it
earlier. OK,
I read CINDER and SCARLET
from 'The Lunar Chronicles'.
This was for my In Real Life bookclub,
and my basic verdict
is "eeeh".
I read RAT QUEENS
(the first volume) and
the first volume of SAGA.
Yeah, RATQUEENS not so much, SAGA I enjoyed
and I'm going to keep pushing on with,
I re-read AMERICAN GODS
which I loved
again, and I also read a
short story in that world called MONARCH
OF THE GLEN,
which was also enjoyable.
I read a
novella,
AMITYVILLE HORRIBLE
which is about a psychic
and the story itself was quite
cute, but there was this...
man was there this sex scene.
Not for me.
I read
three
first books in
crime/mystery
series,
CHOCOLATE CHIP COOKIE MURDER
I actually did a
Mystery Monday review about, which was
a pretty good cozy,
and Joanne Fluke
has, y'know, launched
a thousand books now, so she clearly knows
how to do it. THE OTHER WOMAN,
which is the first of the Hank Phillipi
Ryan
Jane Ryland/Jake Brogan
series, which has just been winning the Agathas
lately,
THE WINTER QUEEN by
Boris Akunin
which is Russian, it's set in
19th century Russia,
this is a really cute one, I haven't
actually talked about this, but I am planning
to do a review of it, probably
next Monday, but yeah,
THE WINTER QUEEN was fun and I'm definitely going to be reading
more of the Erast Fandorin
books, so that was my
three series that I
had a look at the beginnings of.
There's two more books I have to cover before I get
to my favourites of
the month. There was THE GUERNSEY
LITERARY AND POTATO PEEL PIE
SOCIETY, set in the second
world war, the immeadiate aftermath
of the second world war, and it was looking at the
the German occupation
of Guernsey, one of the Channel
Islands between
Britain and the continent,
and, it was
really sad [laughs] basically.
Really sad.
Y'know, it's a war story, what can you do?
And FIRST IMPRESSIONS
which
was a kind of
suspence/romance thing
about books, and about
Jane Austen. That was a light read,
a really light read, but I was completely in the mood
for it at the time, and I very much enjoyed
it. So,
getting onto
the most memorable, or
my favourite reads of the
month.
MAGIC BURNS, which is the second Ilona Andrews
Kate Daniels book,
I read MAGIC BITES the first one
last month, I'm
actually just int he middle of the third one
at the moment, MAGIC STRIKES.
These are kind of
just popcorn, but they're great.
There's like,
they're tightly plotted, there's
the timing is really good,
the heroine is
interesting, she's
y'know, kick ass, which I love,
but y'know,
she does have a little bit more going on
than just, y'know beating people up
and, yeah, the
side characters are really fun. It's an urban
fantasy I guess is what it is,
it's fun. So, if you're looking for something a bit
fun, that might be up your alley.
In May I also finished THE SWAN
BOOK, which
I just posted a reflection
kind of on, not really
about the book, more about
the experience of reading the book.
I'm going to be chewing on this one
for a time to come, so even
though I don't really know
quite what to say about it
it's certainly memorable,
it's one of the main books that I read
this month. Alexis Wright the author
is aboriginal, it's set
in the future, about a hundred years in the future.
The central
character Oblivia is a young
aboriginal girl, who was
raped very
traumatically as a child,
and since then she's been mute.
All these things that happen
to her including being
taken as
a promise wife
by a man who, an aboriginal
man who has become
the President of Australia.
For me it feels like, deeply
deeply symbolic. Like, lots of the stuff
that's going on feels like its code
for something else,
but I don't really know that I know
a) that that's the case,
and b) if that is the case, what it's code
for. But, who knows? Maybe
one of these days I'll look back
at it, and have another try
and understand it a bit more.
I'm not really sure. If anybody has
read THE SWAN BOOK and
wants to kind of fill me
in, then, I am so
up for being told, I am
ready to be schooled.
SO there's that. I just finished,
just int he last day
on May
ORDINARY GRACE by William Kent
Krueger, and that was an amazing
book. In any other
month that probably would have been my favourite
book of the month
I will be doing a full review of
that one. In a sense it's a murder
mystery. It won a whole bunch of
crime awards last year,
it was released last year,
well, the year before last, so it was eligible for
awards last year.
But it's
it doesn't actually, even though those events are
in there, that's not actually how it reads,
it reads like its
its a meditation
on the human condition
or something. Its
beautifully, beautifully written, and although
there's all these tragic, tragic
circumstances in it, it's told
in such a way that it doesn't weigh you down,
it lifts you up.
It's a beautiful, beautiful book. As I said,
I will be doing a full review of that one.
But, given
that this was actually
not my favourite book of the month, I'm just going to
save this little moment to say
THE OUTSKIRTER'S SECRET by Rosemary Kirstein.
That was a
fantastic book. Now,
even though ORDINARY GRACE was probably
a more important book,
I am just one of those people who just
I just love a good story.
I *love* a good story,
and
THE OUTSKIRTER'S SECRET is such
a good story, so,
yay, I'm going to be picking up
the third one of these
really soon, and I'm really looking forward
to it. So, that is the books that I read, the 16
things that I read. Apart
from that, I'm just going to run briefly
through other videos that I made,
I made one discussion video
about rules
for reviewing books,
based on an article I read
about John Updike's rules for
reviewing books. I really appreciated
all the comments that people left, and
the discussion, that was fantastic.
I did a taster video
for AMERICAN GODS.
My taster videos, I do them every so often,
and basically it's just me
reading an excerpt of the book, so
I did one of those for AMERICAN GODS.
And, I did an Awards
Update
on a mYstery Monday, looking at
the Agathas,
who won the Agathas this year, and the short list
for two categories
of the Daggers
that had been announced.
And the other video that I made
was my birthday
celebration, because my channel has turned
100 videos old, and
I spent a couple of weeks fiddling around and
getting that video ready, and that was a lot of
fun. So, that was it.
That was my month, that was May.
Yeah, I'm not going to mention SEVENEVES
because that's a whole other sad story that
almost needs its own video on its own.
Why don't you tell me what the best book
you read this month was, I'd love to hear.
Hope you're all well,
and I'll talk to you later. Bye!
