book photo – Simone and Her Books

November 2017 Wrap Up

December 1, 2017December 1, 2017by Simone4 Comments

November seemed to go quickly, but also jam packed with news, articles, and great reads. I had a blast this November and here are some of the highlights.

Thanksgiving at my in laws

I’ve never had Thanksgiving at anyone else’s house before. I’ve always had it with my family with the same meal and the same sides to be expected. The same guests too! But this year, I got to explore what other people observe for their Thanksgiving.

If you ask my friends, I always bring up how Thanksgiving is one of those meals that is the same for everyone but different as well. We all have the turkey and stuffing and mashed potatoes. Coming from an immigrant family, many of my Thanksgiving included things like kimchi and rice and even a little lasagna.

I have this great pic from a feast like this many years ago and there, right in the middle of the table, is a pan of lasagna. I’m not sure who brought the lasagna, but it really isn’t Thanksgiving without it on the table.

So this Thanksgiving, I was thankful to have a place to go and share a meal with my other family. The food was slightly different than what I would see, but there were some subtle differences. Like my family never watches football…ever. Also, we don’t have the adults fighting over the desserts. Most of the adults passed over dessert making room for a cup of hot tea.

It was fun to hear family stories and laugh with people who welcomed me into their home. I think it was the most American Thanksgiving I’ve ever seen!

Alright, enough chit chat, let’s hit the books.

Books I read

Links from the Internet

This is probably my favorite part about the entire post! I get to share the articles and essays I found this month and LOVED! Make sure to definitely check these out when you have a chance!

I found this really great article from 1995 about what Little Women was really about. I was doing some research on an article about women and literature and I was just enamored by this detailed article about Little Women. Definitely check it out!

My favorite thing this month was reading this article about Colin Kaepernick and how GQ found him his own team while he still is banned from playing in the NFL. It must be really difficult to follow your dreams only to be thrown out from your dreams because of what you believe in. How do you manage to do both? Are they mutually exclusive? I don’t know, but this article was great to read!

This is a reminder for myself that I need to pick up I Am Not Your Perfect Mexican Daughter by Erika Sanchez because this interview really blew it up for me!

I feel like I should mention this, but I’m super sad that The Mindy Project is done. However, I found this wonderful article about how great the show was and how it really appreciated the romantic comedy genre.

Continuing my work to become a better writer, I found this wonderful essay in NY Review of Books about writing memoirs especially after a family member has died.

I’m such a nerd because Mara Wilson aka Matilda wrote this article for Elle magazine about young female actresses and how they’re sexualized at way too young an age. It also dives into Millie Bobbi Brown and the controversy she didn’t mean to cause, but did because she’s 13 and yeah, that makes sense (eye roll).

I couldn’t be more happy for my friend, Maggie, @mugandnook for opening up and sharing her personal story about being a human with a disability. Thank you so much for sharing, Maggie!

I am so happy that people are seeing Lena Dunham for what she truly is and writers like Zizi Clemmons are taking a stand against her backhanded, racist comments. Take a look at the official statement in this article.

I love me some great essays lately and this one from TheMillions.com talks about how we shouldn’t forget that a walk in the woods in a book shouldn’t replace a real walk in the woods. This was a pretty interesting read!

I love Sophie from Main St. and Maple and how candid she is about her struggles to find work in a very male-dominated career. Good luck! I know that something will find its way to you and don’t give up! Come out to the coasts where women are totally wanted to help break down those barriers!

This was one literary piece from Electric Lit about how women turn themselves into trees when approached by unwanted desire. It’s moving and poetic and makes you want to tear the years of bark growing over you.

That’s it! Thanks for reading my blubber about the Internet. Honestly, I love sharing these articles with you!

Until next time!

Book Recommendations, Books

I’m making an earnest TBR for August because I can’t be trusted

August 9, 2017August 9, 2017by Simone2 Comments

I bought way too many books this month and it’s only day 9! At this rate I’ll be building a fort and living in my books. Also I’ve been pretty lazy with reading and instead have been watching The Bachelorette. I’m still sore about the ending!

In an effort to keep myself in check and read more books, I’m making myself a TBR for August. I don’t normally do this because I feel like I always end up changing my mind or reading something else, but this month I’m determined to read all of these books. Don’t try to stop me, Smee!

It’s a pretty long list and it’s got some great reads. I know I won’t get through everything but at least I’ll get through most. Wish me luck!

You can find out more about the books I’m reading after the jump!

Continue reading “I’m making an earnest TBR for August because I can’t be trusted” →

Books

How do readers become writers?

August 3, 2017by SimoneLeave a Comment

As the saying goes "imitation is the highest form of flattery."

There's a lot of readers out there. A lot. Not every one of them is posting pics on Instagram or forming lifestyle choices around their reads. Some people just read.

And we all know that writers read. Reading for writers is as essential as a pen and paper. You can't be a writer if you're not a reader and if you are, please email me so I can read you work.

However, how do you make a reader into a writer?

I'm not talking about legendary tomes of literature or spending years creating the perfect fantasy universe. I'm talking about those average day readers who enjoy what they read. Do you know how it's done? It's what I'm doing now and what you're reading.

When readers read, sometimes it's followed by thoughts and opinions and things that need to be said in some shape or another. That's where the writing comes in.

A friend of mine from a long time ago first introduced me to writing about books after he said he wasn't fully done reading until he wrote about it. I never understood that. I thought you read a book and you pat yourself on the back for reading and move on.

Yeah I would have lingering thoughts going through my head and I'd make some casual notes in my notebook, but it wasn't until I was expressly writing about books that I realized that he was right.

Books were made to make you think or understand or believe in something. Good or bad. Right or wrong. There was always something to make you feel. And feelings sometimes feel good to be said out loud. For me, I write them.

Sometimes I'm lazy about it or the book didn't hand me that spark. Other times I'm so inspired that I could write dissertations on a single scene or glance or shade of blue the character wore.

Sometimes I'm impassioned where I need to reach out to someone to debrief or vent.

Can you imagine all these emotions can be derived from one book?

And so I write. And so we write and we write well. We write and feel and love and inspire by the characters and stories we read. There are tons of blogs and booktubers and bookstagrammers that can't help but to share what they read. Some people even go off to write books themselves perpetuating the lifecycle of a book reader turning into a writer.

Perhaps they're all not writing, but they're all reading and they're all believing.

Books

I just want one book that completely understands me

July 14, 2017July 8, 2017by Simone1 Comment

I’ve been writing a blog post like this for a few years. It’s a topic that comes up every once in a while, but I’ve finally reached a tipping point.

It’s a hard truth for me to admit, but I am a quintessential millennial. I love rose gold and fraps and hate cultural appropriation. I feel #woke, and when you’re woke, you want to read #woke too.

For the past year I’ve been trying to find a book that resonates with a large percentage of the American population: a book about being Asian American and figuring out whether to be Asian or American.

First and second generation Asian Americans (or any X Americans that have parents and grandparents from another country coming to America to give their children a bright future) have the unique challenge of being raised with two conflicting cultures and ideologies. There’s the conservative and very traditional Asian side and then there’s the liberal and “make-your-own-traditions” American side. It’s not a struggle between races and between two people. It’s a struggle within yourself and “where your loyalties lie.”

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Being Asian American, I grew up a little differently from my friends at school. I was born in Flushing, NY but moved out to Long Island for the better schools. I think it’s safe to say that I may have had 2-3 Asian friends in high school and most of my other friends were other races.

There was an Asian contingency at school that I used to call “the Asian mafia.” Honestly, they moved in packs and only wore black. It felt like a really exclusive Asian club where your loyalties laid with the Mother country and not where you lived.

That was something we all experienced. You either chose to be Asian or you chose to be American. If you were Asian, you had a little bit of an accent, went to a Korean church, and hung out drinking boba every weekend with your Asian boyfriend/girlfriend in Flushing.

If you were American, well, you did what any good American kid does in the 90s. Listen to grunge rock while hanging out at the mall all day with your friends and then sitting at Applebee’s with one order of fries to share amongst all of you.

I spent every New Years Day at my grandparents house bowing for lucky money and spending time with my family. I ate kimchi at Thanksgiving dinner. I had a deep and rich cultural identity with a place that I’ve never actually been. My parents breeding my sister and I to be diligent Asian girls who would become diligent Asian women that did practical careers like being a lawyer or a doctor.

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If you asked me what nationality I was, I would say American. However, it’s undeniable that I’m also Asian. I know that there’s plenty of Americans who are also Asian that feel the same way. So, I went out looking for a book that might help better explain the differential and when I was 12 years old and struggling with my identity, I turned to Amy Tan’s The Joy Luck Club.

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Back in the 90s, the only real society-accepted representation of being Asian American was this book and even more so the movie. Asian women all being raised with the best intentions learning that they were neither Asian nor American. They didn’t struggle the way their parents did, but they struggled in their own rite. It was a breath of fresh air to see someone on the same level with me. It resonated so deeply and it wasn’t even about a culture of people that I understood. It was enough and ever since then I’ve been craving more.

So I search and look and find and read as many books as I possibly can related to being Asian and American, but nothing really matches what I’m looking for. This is not to say that books like this don’t exist. I’m pretty sure at the rate publishing houses are going, there has got to be a few books that fit this particular category. However, they’re not surfacing to the top of the book pile. They sit like lumps at the bottom where maybe a few people will find them, but they’ll never be mainstream.

And that’s something we need to change. The importance of reading diverse novels is not only to share knowledge of experiences, but also to give readers who understand those experiences some solace. Yes, we are just like you. Yes, we struggle too. No, you don’t need to cry anymore.

Making a plan to read diverse books is like allowing yourself to go to a first rate college even if you’re not 100% sure your smart enough for it. The fact that you’re going out to a school that’s better than you is inspiration enough to tell yourself there’s more to the world than what’s in front of me.

While we wait for those books to rise to the top like cream in milk, we have shows like Fresh off the Boat that visualizes the integration of American culture into the lives of first and second generation kids. We have multiple authors revealing more about the cultural history of all different kinds of people. We have movies where it’s important that the entire cast be of a specific race or nationality so not only is there proper culture representation, but also they’re not stepping on the toes of appropriation.

All great ways to satisfy the need to understand cultural identification in America, but we need more. I want more and we should all try and find more books that help explain these thoughts, feelings, understandings, and struggles so that people in our future, young people, can read them and create an even more accepting America.

If you have any books that you can recommend, please do! I’m always collecting stories from all over the spectrum.

Book Reviews, Books

White Fur by Jardine Libaire

July 12, 2017July 8, 2017by SimoneLeave a Comment

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Love love love is such a crazy emotion. It’ll make you happy, sad, angry, violent, giggly, stupendous, and scared for your life.

Yet we crave it like a sugar rush and we can’t stop until we have it. Our entire existence revolves around love. Without it, we would be the same people we were yesterday. White Fur proves that love can change any perspective (except maybe for old people).

The plot

32025142 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.

My thoughts

I had my doubts about this book. This opinion developed mostly from the writing style Jardine Libaire decided to use for this book. Choppy, one or two worded sentences to explain the euphoria of love isn’t really my style of writing. I like things simple and straightforward. This book read like I was watching Requiem for a Dream

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HOWEVER, that isn’t to say that this book was bad. No, in fact, the choppy descriptions with little-to-no context really made the story feel like you were high on love.

Elise and Jamey were two people who weren’t meant to be together. Elise is a young high school drop out living in an apartment with another guy and basically trying to get by every single day. Jamey is this uber-rich Yale undergrad who has his entire life planned out for him the moment he graduates. They weren’t meant to be.

Yet Jamey found something intriguing about the white fur of Elise’s coat and the both of them started going out. At first, it was easy to avoid the emotions. You just have sex, anywhere and any time and then you disperse. No conversation. No getting to know each other over dinner. Just sex.

But then sex turns into other feelings. It’s like they say how you can never have a friend with benefits. It’s never just friends with benefits. Each moment together was creating this whirlwind of emotions that neither anticipated to feel.

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And just like a drug, love changed them. Elise was a wild child lacking a sense of direction and future, but you can see her gruff exterior slowly smooth away to a nurturing person. She adopts a dog, she plays with kids, she finds responsibility and caring that you don’t see when you first meet her.

Jamey is this uptight rich kid who only saw Elise as sex and fun while he was away at college. Slowly, you find that he lets go a little bit and lets his inhibitions free. He’s smoking cigarettes and quitting Yale and taking on a simpler life.

The two characters evolve so much throughout the novel that by the time you realize how much they’ve changed, it’s already over.

I honestly thought this book was going to be another Gossip Girl story or something out of Gilmore Girls, but it wasn’t. It was better than that because it felt more real. Two human beings who were strangers at first find themselves and each other through love. If anything, it’s the most romantic story I’ve ever read.

Book Reviews, Books

The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo by Taylor Jenkins Reid

July 10, 2017July 10, 2017by SimoneLeave a Comment

I’ve been a huge fan of Taylor Jenkins Reid since I read her other novel One True Loves. Just as similarly as I felt about that novel, I feel the same way here.

The story is fantastic covering the imaginary screen legend Evelyn Hugo and her tumultuous love life only to reveal one big truth; not everything you see is real.

The plot

32620332 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.

Filled with emotional insight and written with Reid’s signature talent, this is a fascinating journey through the splendor of Old Hollywood into the harsh realities of the present day as two women struggle with what it means—and what it takes—to face the truth.

My thoughts

Ok, let’s talk about this. A beautiful bombshell from the 50s and 60s of Hollywood fame finds this one female reporter that she wants to tell her entire life story to. It’s 2017 and Evelyn Hugo is squaring away her affairs to prepare for the inevitable; her death.

Right off the bat, you’re asking yourself a ton of questions. Who is Evelyn Hugo? Why is she asking Monique to write her article about her? What is it about her past that is so illicit that a tell-all book is the only way to say it?

I don’t know if I should spoil it or not, but to give you an idea of what the secret is, let’s just say that it’s something that was completely unaccepted during the 1960s and sort of on its way to full understanding in 2017. People still chastise these humans for being who they are, but they are stronger and more supported than in the past.

And I loved this story. Not only was it exposed and raw, but it felt like this could have easily been the memoir of some other Hollywood starlet. But I think the one thing that truly made this book a joy to read was the constant parade of love spread throughout the whole story.

Even when Evelyn and her friends were faced with some strange circumstances or even when she was the center of the gossip rags, there was always someone there to love her and to be loved and share love. From her fictional life, you can see the years that were wrought with pain and suffering, but no one person suffers the entirety of their life and luckily neither did Evelyn Hugo.

The writing style was also pretty pleasant to read. When Evelyn talked about her life, it was written in the first person. I always find that when you’re reading in the first person it’s like jumping into their brain or a pensieve and seeing for yourself what’s happening.

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The story between Monique and Evelyn was written in the third person. Quite honestly, I wasn’t sure where the heck that storyline was supposed to go. What was the point of Monique being there? But as Evelyn Hugo says everything comes in due time. You’ll find out why Monique was asked to interview her and while it was shocking to hear the truth, it wasn’t that bad.

I just think about how people have changed so much these days. There’s so much more self-expression and self-identification. You really learn who you are and if that means that you’re 50 years old and you find out that you’re gay, then yeah that’s real.

People nowadays dig through the roots of their existence and find these hard truths that thirty years ago would have been frowned upon. NO ONE wants to be lynched for being something different. And even though as a society we still have a long way to go towards pure, unadulterated acceptance, you have to admit that we’ve all come a long way from a life that some of us still remember.

And this is what Evelyn Hugo does for us. She makes us realize and understand that there’s a generation born in the wrong generation. There are people still deeply hidden in the closet. People afraid to walk down the wrong street at the wrong time. And one day we’ll all be free to tell our story the way Evelyn Hugo did without frustration or malice or regret.

When those people are ready to tell those stories, I’ll definitely be one of the ones listening.

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?

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.

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 Reviews, Books

China Rich Girlfriend by Kevin Kwan

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

What if you found out that your long lost father was just as rich as your friends were? What if you went from nothing to something in a blink of an eye? What if all this news brought some more troubling issues into your life?

China Rich Girlfriend is the sequel to the popular Crazy Rich Asians (currently in production, which I might add is super exciting) and carries with it the overwrought drama you would see in a Korean drama. Extremely enjoyable!

The plot

28503789 On the eve of her wedding to Nicholas Young, heir to one of the greatest fortunes in Asia, Rachel should be over the moon. She has a flawless Asscher-cut diamond from JAR, a wedding dress she loves more than anything found in the salons of Paris, and a fiancé willing to sacrifice his entire inheritance in order to marry her. But Rachel still mourns the fact that her birthfather, a man she never knew, won’t be able to walk her down the aisle. Until: a shocking revelation draws Rachel into a world of Shanghai splendor beyond anything she has ever imagined. Here we meet Carlton, a Ferrari-crashing bad boy known for Prince Harry-like antics; Colette, a celebrity girlfriend chased by fevered paparazzi; and the man Rachel has spent her entire life waiting to meet: her father. Meanwhile, Singapore’s It Girl, Astrid Leong, is shocked to discover that there is a downside to having a newly minted tech billionaire husband. A romp through Asia’s most exclusive clubs, auction houses, and estates, China Rich Girlfriend brings us into the elite circles of Mainland China, introducing a captivating cast of characters, and offering an inside glimpse at what it’s like to be gloriously, crazily, China-rich.

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My thoughts

Without being too biased here, I thought China Rich Girlfriend was an absolute blast to read. It almost felt like I was reading a movie or like watching an episode of Gossip Girl where money needs to stick with money and those with new money can never be a part of the inner circle.

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There were several different stories going on at the same time. We first have our Rachel and Nick getting married and starting their life together when lo and behold (SPOILERS) Rachel is reunited with her birth father who just so happens to be this rich politician living in Shanghai.

So off Nick and Rachel go to China to meet her dad and hang out with her new family. Obviously long lost kids don’t just show up and everything is fine, so the story begins to twist and turn as a family tries to figure out how to manage their feelings (and their money) with a new face.

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Then we have Astrid and her sadness. If you read Crazy Rich Asians, then you already know that Astrid is not in the best state of affairs and the story here gets more intense as her husband tries to get a hold of himself with his new money. Remember, old money and new money just don’t mix so obviously drama ensues.

Finally, there’s Kitty Pong. That’s right. Kitty. Pong. The actress that marries the rich guy gets a small story threaded throughout the novel. However, I will admit I was disappointed when I learned about what happened to her husband.

The writing was great. It was eloquent and verbose (I’m working on my vocabulary), but while describing some crazy drama. And of course, there was no limit on the ridiculously rich lifestyles of these characters. Honestly, I felt like I was one of them while I stood on public transportation on my way to my minimum wage day job.

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All in all, I actually thought this novel was better than the first. I’m really happy that the new one is finally out. You know I’ll be compulsively picking that one up.

Book Reviews, Books

It took me exactly one month to finish A Court of Wings and Ruin

June 12, 2017June 10, 2017by SimoneLeave a Comment

Some of you may do this while others take a more traditional approach, but I love to track my books on Goodreads. Being as my day job consists of looking at numbers all the time, I wanted to look at the numbers for a book I was reading. How long does it take me to read a book? What genres motivate me more? What motivates me less? What do I truly love to read? I can find out all that information through tracking.

So when I recently finished reading A Court of Wings and Ruin (or lovingly referred to as ACOWAR) by Sarah J. Maas, I did what I always do; I marked it on my Goodreads. And lo and behold, I can see the dates I started reading the book and when I finished.

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Looking closely at the status dates, I started ACOWAR on May 9th and marked it read on June 9th. That is ONE MONTH of reading a book.

I think the last time it took me that long to read a book I was reading 1Q84 and I wasn’t as avid a reader as I am now. That book took me four months, but we don’t have to talk about that.

You must be thinking, a 700-page book and it only took you a month? Please that seems accurate. But it doesn’t feel accurate when the last book you read by Sarah J. Maas was even longer and you read it in eight hours.

Yes. Eight, straight hours.

Granted there are a million excuses for me not reading faster or carving more time out of my day to read this book, but I think the biggest reason why I didn’t read is just circumstance. I was busy getting fired from my job. I was busy looking for another job. I was busy putting all my life possession into boxes, moving to another city, and then unpacking all those boxes. I didn’t have Internet for a week and then I got a new job that I needed to focus on.

And the reason why I bring this up is because life is filled with circumstance. There will be days, weeks, or even years where you don’t have time to read. Just remember that deep down while you don’t have a book in your hand, you’re still a book reader. If it takes you a week or a month to read a book, just be happy with the fact that you’re reading. You’re educating yourself and you’re questioning the understood belief.

People always say that life is short, but it’s only short if you want it to be. If you savor each moment and spend your time doing instead of thinking, then you might think life is short, but it’ll have been the greatest life of all time. Don’t waste your time getting caught up by your reading challenge. If you’re a blogger, don’t feel guilty for not writing a post in a few months. People always find a way back to you especially if they like you.

Anyway, onto my review.

Synopsis

23766634 Feyre has returned to the Spring Court, determined to gather information on Tamlin’s maneuverings and the invading king threatening to bring Prythian to its knees. But to do so she must play a deadly game of deceit—and one slip may spell doom not only for Feyre, but for her world as well. As war bears down upon them all, Feyre must decide who to trust amongst the dazzling and lethal High Lords—and hunt for allies in unexpected places.

This book was difficult for me to get through despite the fact that I had some outside circumstances getting in my way of finishing it. However, I feel like this always happens when you’re reading a book series.

Rating: 4/5 Cauldrons

My thoughts

Aside from the fact that it took me a month to read this, I thought this book was OK. In comparison to the last two, this felt like a mid-series novel where a lot of set up needed to happen in order for the final battle can happen. There was a lot of setting up of meetings and conversations and thoughts and wondering about things and sometimes you need to sacrifice a book to the series gods in order to build up for the big thing. I was worried this book would be a whole bunch of build up and then nothing happens. I thought Sarah J Maas was going to leave us on the edge of our seats and wait for the next book to come out. However, she doesn’t. Actually, I loved this ending (and endings are a bit of a sore subject for me), but where will she go from here?

Another big thing about this book is that we see the true nature of the characters that Sarah J. Maas created. I was kind of shocked to see that some of them were “playing the game” while others were just hurt and sad. It’s true to reality where we wear these masks of pride in order to hide what we truly feel. In the end, masks are removable and for the characters, no one can hide for long.

I was reading a few reviews of this book and someone brought up the fact that Feyre has had it pretty easy for her. Without knowing spells or having the talent or the little tidbit where she was human, she’s been able to manage through the Fae world pretty easily without being too injured or too abandoned. I guess that blogger is right. It’s been pretty easy for her, but I do hope that things get a little bit tough. Granted, I don’t want to see anyone die, but perhaps that’s what’s in store in the future. Perhaps we’ll see something go wrong.

But it’ll probably be another year before we all find out, so I guess for now all we can do is wait.