Book haul – Simone and Her Books

Book Haul – March 5, 2019

March 5, 2019March 5, 2019by Simone3 Comments

After looking over all the books I received this week, I felt like it was time for a little book haul blog post! I think it was just a coincidence that I received so many books at once. It’s probably because of all the rain we’ve been having here that my mail is delayed. It’s probably because I live in California now.

Anyway, let’s get to the books. Some of these are promotional, some of them are for review, and others are because I’m curious. I want to expand my reading life, so I try to vary my reading.

The ones I’m most excited about reading are:

Whoops, that turned out to be way more than I expected this time around. Stalker is definitely one I’m super excited about. While I’m not a huge fan of thrillers, I do like to indulge in a crime fiction every now and then. I’ve heard a lot about Lars Kepler from Abby at Crime by the Book. I think he’s one of her favorite authors, so I’m going to take that advice and try this one out.

The Weight of a Piano is one I’m also really excited about. I saw Stacey at @prose_and_palate chat up this book the other day and it’s made me super interested to see what it’s about. The story is about…a piano. It’s about the person who first owned the piano and lost it while traveling from Russia to America and the current owner of the piano. The current owner is a little lost in life and needs to sell the piano she never learned to play.

My friend, Haley, is a huge fan of Han Kang and I’ve always wanted to read her work. Her novel, The Vegetarian, is the one I’ve heard of, but I’ve also heard good things about The White Book.

The ones I’ll be promoting later this month are:

I do want to mention that books I promote are books I actually want to read. I’m very careful about the books I request and just want to promote what I want to promote. These books I’ll gladly share a little of my page. Out of all of these, Field Notes on Love is the highest on my list, but I’ve been hearing some really big things about Polaris Rising. Summon and Smoke is also an exciting one especially since it’s the author who wrote The Paper Magician series.

Some surprise mail that I’m excited about:

Foursome is definitely high on this list. It’s a nonfiction novel on the lives of four very big artists. I might give this to my sister for her to read, but I’ll take a little stab at it first.

The Guest Book is a complete mystery to me, but for some reason I’m drawn to it. It says it’s a multi-generational story that hides a big secret with their grandfather. It sounds like of intriguing and it has been a while since I’ve read a historical novel, so I might check that out.

I hope you enjoyed this little list!

I received a copy of this book from the publishers for free. My opinions have not been influenced by the publisher or the author.

Lifestyle

Book of the Month February 2018 Book Haul

February 7, 2018April 22, 2018by Simone10 Comments

I always love the beginning of the month because that means I’ll be picking out and sharing my reads from Book of the Month. As everyone knows, I’m a huge fan of this subscription. Even though I’m pretty broke lately, I’m still picking out books for my Book of the Month. I shouldn’t even be buying more books, if I admit.

But I’ve got my latest box and I can’t wait to read both of these books. Here’s a little more about each.

An American Marriage by Tayari Jones

This novel was just announced as Oprah’s official February pick for the Oprah Book Club. If Oprah is approving it, then I’m definitely reading it. However, I picked the book before the announcement was made, so maybe I just have the same taste as Oprah does. Here’s more about it:

Newlyweds Celestial and Roy are the embodiment of both the American Dream and the New South. He is a young executive, and she is an artist on the brink of an exciting career. But as they settle into the routine of their life together, they are ripped apart by circumstances neither could have imagined. Roy is arrested and sentenced to twelve years for a crime Celestial knows he didn’t commit. Though fiercely independent, Celestial finds herself bereft and unmoored, taking comfort in Andre, her childhood friend, and best man at their wedding. As Roy’s time in prison passes, she is unable to hold on to the love that has been her center. After five years, Roy’s conviction is suddenly overturned, and he returns to Atlanta ready to resume their life together.

The Great Alone by Kristin Hannah

I’ve been a fan of Kristin Hannah’s ever since I read The Nightingale a few years ago. That book was an incredible read about two sisters fighting their own battles throughout World War II. The ending made me sob like a baby while I was sitting on the subway. You have to give a book props for making me cry. I don’t cry easy.

Alaska, 1974. Untamed. Unpredictable. A story of a family in crisis struggling to survive at the edge of the world, it is also a story of young and enduring love.

Cora Allbright and her husband Ernt, a recently-returned Vietnam veteran scarred by the war, uproot their thirteen-year-old daughter Leni to start a new life in Alaska. Utterly unprepared for the weather and the isolation, but welcomed by the close-knit community, they fight to build a home in this harsh, beautiful wilderness.

At once an epic story of human survival and love, and an intimate portrait of a family tested beyond endurance, The Great Alone offers a glimpse into a vanishing way of life in America. With her trademark combination of elegant prose and deeply drawn characters, Kristin Hannah has delivered an enormously powerful story that celebrates the resilience of the human spirit and the remarkable and enduring strength of women. About the highest stakes a family can face and the bonds that can tear a community apart, this is a novel as spectacular and powerful as Alaska itself. It is the finest example of Kristin Hannah’s ability to weave together the deeply personal with the universal.

What did you get this month in your Book of the Month Club box?

Books

June 2017 Book Haul

June 26, 2017June 22, 2017by Simone1 Comment

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I recently received some lovely book mail and I couldn’t be more excited about them. Two debut novels from two new authors means that the world is filling up with more beautiful words and stories for us to read and enjoy.

Flesh and Bone and Water by Luiza Sauma

Published by Scriber Books. André is a listless Brazilian teenager and the son of a successful plastic surgeon who lives a life of wealth and privilege, shuttling between the hot sands of Ipanema beach and his family’s luxurious penthouse apartment. In 1985, when he is just sixteen, André’s mother is killed in a car accident. Clouded with grief, André, his younger brother Thiago, and his father travel with their domestic help to Belem, a jungle city on the mouth of the Amazon, where the intense heat of the rain forest only serves to heighten their volatile emotions. After they arrive back in Rio, André’s father loses himself in his work, while André spends his evenings in the family apartment with Luana, the beautiful daughter of the family’s maid.

Three decades later, and now a successful surgeon himself, André is a middle-aged father, living in London, and recently separated from his British wife. He drinks too much wine and is plagued by recurring dreams. One day he receives an unexpected letter from Luana, which begins to reveal the other side of their story, a story André has long repressed.

Everything Belongs to Us by Yoojin Grace Wuertz

Published by Random House. Seoul, 1978. At South Korea’s top university, the nation’s best and brightest compete to join the professional elite of an authoritarian regime. Success could lead to a life of rarefied privilege and wealth; failure means being left irrevocably behind.

For childhood friends Jisun and Namin, the stakes couldn’t be more different. Jisun, the daughter of a powerful business mogul, grew up on a mountainside estate with lush gardens and a dedicated chauffeur. Namin’s parents run a tented food cart from dawn to curfew. Her sister works in a shoe factory. Now Jisun wants as little to do with her father’s world as possible, abandoning her schoolwork in favor of the underground activist movement, while Namin studies tirelessly in the service of one goal: to launch herself and her family out of poverty.

But everything changes when Jisun and Namin meet an ambitious, charming student named Sunam, whose need to please his family has led him to a prestigious club: the Circle. Under the influence of his mentor, Juno, a manipulative social climber, Sunam becomes entangled with both women, as they all make choices that will change their lives forever.

I think I’m set for the rest of summer 🙂

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Books

June 2017 Book of the Month Club Haul

June 23, 2017June 22, 2017by SimoneLeave a Comment

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I love Book of the Month Club. Most of my hauls from the past few months consisted solely of novels I collect from this subscription service. Reason being is that I don’t have a large budget per month, so I pay a subscription amount for at least one book to be delivered to me every month. But let’s all be serious, I never keep to my budgets.

This month, Book of the Month Club has got some seriously interesting novels and I can’t wait to dive right into them. You’ll probably hear more about these within the next few weeks, so for now I’ll just include the synopses for you to read and ponder.

The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo by Taylor Jenkins Reid

Evelyn Hugo is finally ready to tell the truth about her glamorous and scandalous life. But when she chooses unknown magazine reporter Monique Grant for the job, no one in the journalism community is more astounded than Monique herself. Why her? Why now?

Monique is not exactly on top of the world. Her husband, David, has left her, and her career has stagnated. Regardless of why Evelyn has chosen her to write her biography, Monique is determined to use this opportunity to jumpstart her career.

Summoned to Evelyn’s Upper East Side apartment, Monique listens as Evelyn unfurls her story: from making her way to Los Angeles in the 1950s to her decision to leave show business in the late 80s, and, of course, the seven husbands along the way. As Evelyn’s life unfolds through the decades—revealing a ruthless ambition, an unexpected friendship, and a great forbidden love—Monique begins to feel a very a real connection to the actress. But as Evelyn’s story catches up with the present, it becomes clear that her life intersects with Monique’s own in tragic and irreversible ways.

White Fur by Jardine Libaire

When Elise Perez meets Jamey Hyde on a desolate winter afternoon, fate implodes, and neither of their lives will ever be the same. Although they are next-door neighbors in New Haven, they come from different worlds. Elise grew up in a housing project without a father and didn’t graduate from high school. Jamey is a junior at Yale, heir to a private investment bank fortune and beholden to high family expectations. The attraction is instant, and what starts out as sexual obsession turns into something greater, stranger, and impossible to ignore.

The unlikely couple moves to Manhattan in hopes of forging an adult life together, but Jamey’s family intervenes in desperation, and the consequences of staying together are suddenly severe. And when a night out with old friends takes a shocking turn, Jamey and Elise find themselves fighting not just for their love but also for their lives.

Theft by Finding by David Sedaris

David Sedaris tells all in a book that is, literally, a lifetime in the making.

For forty years, David Sedaris has kept a diary in which he records everything that captures his attention-overheard comments, salacious gossip, soap opera plot twists, secrets confided by total strangers. These observations are the source code for his finest work, and through them he has honed his cunning, surprising sentences.

Now, Sedaris shares his private writings with the world. Theft by Finding, the first of two volumes, is the story of how a drug-abusing dropout with a weakness for the International House of Pancakes and a chronic inability to hold down a real job became one of the funniest people on the planet.

Book Recommendations, Books

New Reads from Scribner’s

March 17, 2017March 15, 2017by SimoneLeave a Comment

I recently got a package from Scribner’s Books with a couple of great reads publishing right now. Both of these books have already published this March and I’m super excited to get into them. Sadly, I suffer with “too many books in my TBR” syndrome.

However, if you have a chance, definitely pick them up or at least check them out.

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Title: One of the Boys
Author: Daniel Magariel
Publishing Date: March 14th, 2017
Synopsis: A riveting and emotionally harrowing debut about two young brothers and their physically and psychologically abusive father—One of the Boys is 176 perfect, stunning pages by a major new talent.

The three of them—a twelve-year-old boy, his older brother, their father—have won the war: the father’s term for his bitter divorce and custody battle. They leave their Kansas home and drive through the night to Albuquerque, eager to begin again, united by the thrilling possibility of carving out a new life together. The boys go to school, join basketball teams, make friends. Meanwhile their father works from home, smoking cheap cigars to hide another smell. But soon the little missteps—the dead-eyed absentmindedness, the late night noises, the comings and goings of increasingly odd characters—become sinister, and the boys find themselves watching their father change, grow erratic, then violent.

Set in the sublimely stark landscape of suburban New Mexico and a cramped apartment shut tight to the world, One of the Boys conveys with stunning prose and chilling clarity a young boy’s struggle to hold onto the dangerous pieces of his shattered family. Harrowing and beautiful, Daniel Magariel’s masterful debut is a story of survival: two foxhole-weary brothers banding together to protect each other from the father they once trusted, but no longer recognize. With the emotional core of A Little Life and the compact power of We the Animals, One of the Boys is among the most moving and remarkable debut novels you’ll ever read.

Title: Next Year, For Sure
Author: Zoey Leigh Peterson
Publishing Date: March 7th, 2017
Synopsis: In this moving and enormously entertaining debut novel, longtime romantic partners Kathryn and Chris experiment with an open relationship and reconsider everything they thought they knew about love.

After nine years together, Kathryn and Chris have the sort of relationship most would envy. They speak in the shorthand they have invented, complete one another’s sentences, and help each other through every daily and existential dilemma. When Chris tells Kathryn about his feelings for Emily, a vivacious young woman he sees often at the Laundromat, Kathryn encourages her boyfriend to pursue this other woman—certain that her bond with Chris is strong enough to weather a little side dalliance.

As Kathryn and Chris stumble into polyamory, Next Year, For Sure tracks the tumultuous, revelatory, and often very funny year that follows. When Chris’s romance with Emily grows beyond what anyone anticipated, both Chris and Kathryn are invited into Emily’s communal home, where Kathryn will discover new romantic possibilities of her own. In the confusions, passions, and upheavals of their new lives, both Kathryn and Chris will be forced to reconsider their past and what they thought they knew about love.

Offering a luminous portrait of a relationship from two perspectives, Zoey L. Paterson has written an empathic, beautiful, and tremendously honest novel about a great love pushed to the edge. Deeply poignant and hugely entertaining, Next Year, For Sure shows us what lies at the mysterious heart of relationships, and what true openness and transformation require.

Books

July 2016 Book Haul

July 12, 2016July 11, 2016by Simone1 Comment

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Back in June, I told myself that this would be my last book haul in a little while. Finances have been rough the past few weeks so buying more books felt like an extravagance that I can do without.

I honestly think I might have a problem.

I sometimes feel like I’m “deprived” from living in the city. You can’t honestly be deprived of anything in New York unless you’re actually deprived. I wouldn’t call myself deprived. I’m getting off the topic. I’m just saying that there are things that come easier to those who live in smaller cities….and have a car.

Bookstores in the city are great, but they’re always so crowded. The Barnes and Nobles are always dotted with homeless people trying to spend a little time in air conditioning or heating. You can also never find a place to sit and you can’t sit on the floor (I’ve personally been yelled at a few times because of that).

So when I’m in the suburbs of some town and I have travel arrangements, I make a trip to a bookstore.

Anyway, I found myself hauling back my haul from Florida to New York over the weekend. Here’s my picks:

You Know Me Well by David Levithan and Nina LaCour – I have heard great things about both of these authors separately, so I’m excited to know what they can do together. This definitely seems like the “slice of life” YA that I enjoy thoroughly.
Sweetbitter by Stephanie Danler – Honestly, I picked this book up because it’s about food. It only has 3.5 stars on Goodreads and that worries me a little bit. Hopefully, I’ll walk away from this book with a higher appreciation.
Dreamology by Lucy Keating – Oh this one I’m really excited about. The premise of this book is that a young woman dreams of a dude and he was awesome. Then, this dude becomes a reality. Sounds like my high school dream.
milk and honey by Rupi Kaur – I was a little bit hesitant on picking this one up mostly because I’m not a fan of reading poetry. I did a lot of that in high school and reading poetry sometimes means you have to find some hidden secret the writer is leaving for you. I read a few lines before I decided to pick it up and I think this might be a little bit off the beaten path.
Everything, Everything by Nicola Yoon – For some reason, when I think of this book premise I think of that movie Bubble Boy with a young post-Donnie Darko Jake Gyllenhaal. Obviously, this book isn’t about that, but you can’t help but to imagine it.
Vampire Academy by Richelle Mead – I don’t know how this happened, but there are some YA books I missed while I was in college and a lot when I was in middle school and high school. Vampire Academy appears to be one of them (I was too busy wrapping up finals in college and there was no booklr at the time).
My Lady Jane by a bunch of people (Cynthia Hand, Brodi Ashton, and Jodi Meadows) – This book has been getting a lot of press lately. While it isn’t the most accurate portrayal of Lady Jane Grey, it’s supposedly hilarious and beautiful. I’m excited about this one for sure.

Now, I’m not a big fan of making TBR lists because I end up straying from that, buying a brand new book, and reading that. However, I will say that I’m excited about these picks and I hope to read them before the end of the summer.

Ok, no more buying books until Comic Con.