Reading Update 4.23.20 | Fantasy Overload and Urgent Comfort Reads
Hey hi hello friends, and welcome back to my blog!
Sorry I've been a little AWOL this month. Firstly I haven't really been reading much manga at all so doing Manga Mondays felt a little silly when I didn't have anything new to say (though I still stand by finishing Attack on Titan this month, I still have ten days to do so! Easy peasy lemon squeezy, I say). And while I have been reading a fair amount of novels, none of them have really particularly stood out so far.
Currently, I'm in the middle of five different books. I usually like to read between two and three books at a time in case I'm not in the mood for one or another, but five is pushing it even for me.
I'm still picking at Dragonslayer by Duncan M. Hamilton, which I started back in March. My lack of enthusiasm isn't the books' fault I actually quite like it, but I just get into these weird moods where I either want to read hella high fantasy and just binge read as much as possible, or I don't want to touch fantasy with a ten-foot-pole. At the moment, I'm stuck in the latter. Hence why two other books are also currently being neglected on my Kindle. Fatemarked by David Estes, which seems to be a self-pubbed book on Kindle Unlimited and already has a lot of books in the series despite being published only three years ago. And I'm also like probably fifty pages into The Way of Kings by Brandon Sanderson. I've been meaning to start the Stormlight Archive for years now, and naturally as soon as I get my hold from the library, I fall out of a fantasy mood. Big oof right there.
I'm also half-way through with The Memory Police by Yoko Ogawa, and it's so intriguing. Despite having not read a lot of Japanese fiction (yet) it holds a special place in my heart. I'm interested to see what sort of plot twists will happen with this book, since it's been everywhere recently.
I started The Deep by Alma Katsu a couple of days ago, and I'm honestly super bummed that I'm not loving it as much as I wanted to. Like, paranormal re-imagining of the Titanic disaster? Sign me up! But we flip through like five different perspectives and also go back and forth in time to the voyage and then four years after the sinking, so I feel like I'm getting literary whiplash trying to keep all the voices and names straight. The main character's motivations for certain things are also really vague and I mean I know it'll eventually be explained (well, I hope so anyway) but she just rubs me the wrong way. If I'm not truly enjoying it by the fifty-percent mark, I'm going to DNF it.
I'm going on day three of a migraine (ugh) and have been feeling so off all day. First my insomnia decided to rear its ugly head after nearly two weeks of proper sleep (well, nearly proper, still had my night terrors and all that great stuff (double ugh)) so I got exactly zero hours of sleep last night, instead reading My Hero Academia fanfic on Ao3. Then when the sun finally rose and my parents with it, I started feeling a little better, so I decided to make pancakes for breakfast. Which were delicious, by the way, but the richness and heaviness just brought me right back to queasiness. So I've just been lying in bed trying to stave off the pain and focus on things that make me happy--I watched Frozen II on Disney+ and then played a few rounds of Sudoku, which hardly ever fails to make me unwind and relax.
However I still wasn't feeling up to reading any of the books I'm currently in the middle of, so I decided to pick up Red White & Royal Blue by Casey McQuiston for the third time. It really is just the perfect book to escape with, especially with the current climate of the US right now. It's funny and fluffy and sometimes you just need a well-done enemies to friends to lovers trope to work it's magic. I'm about 100 pages in and I know that I'm going to finish this today, that's not even a question, but I like that you can just sit back and chill with this book, while still managing to read a 400 page novel. That's my favorite form of productivity.
By the way, here's a moodboard I did last year for Red White & Royal Blue:
I do really want to get back into filming and making BookTube videos again, I miss it way more than I thought I would, but honestly it's getting to a hundred degrees on a daily basis now in Arizona and I hate the summer more than any other season, so I'm just so unmotivated to put on proper clothes and makeup and sit in front of a camera and talk while sweating my skin off, you know what I mean?
I also want to make more moodboards. The ones I did make were so much fun and I'm actually properly proud of them (if you wanna see them all, click here) and I'm not entirely sure why I stopped, so I'll probably get working on that again.
Okay, I think that's all I have for today's update. Please all continue to stay safe and healthy and practice proper social distancing. I know it sucks but we really gotta do all we can to clear this pandemic out. Also a huge thank you and God bless to all the essential workers out there doing everything they can to keep our lives as normal as possible. Y'all are real heroes!
Until next time!
Sorry I've been a little AWOL this month. Firstly I haven't really been reading much manga at all so doing Manga Mondays felt a little silly when I didn't have anything new to say (though I still stand by finishing Attack on Titan this month, I still have ten days to do so! Easy peasy lemon squeezy, I say). And while I have been reading a fair amount of novels, none of them have really particularly stood out so far.
Currently, I'm in the middle of five different books. I usually like to read between two and three books at a time in case I'm not in the mood for one or another, but five is pushing it even for me.
I'm still picking at Dragonslayer by Duncan M. Hamilton, which I started back in March. My lack of enthusiasm isn't the books' fault I actually quite like it, but I just get into these weird moods where I either want to read hella high fantasy and just binge read as much as possible, or I don't want to touch fantasy with a ten-foot-pole. At the moment, I'm stuck in the latter. Hence why two other books are also currently being neglected on my Kindle. Fatemarked by David Estes, which seems to be a self-pubbed book on Kindle Unlimited and already has a lot of books in the series despite being published only three years ago. And I'm also like probably fifty pages into The Way of Kings by Brandon Sanderson. I've been meaning to start the Stormlight Archive for years now, and naturally as soon as I get my hold from the library, I fall out of a fantasy mood. Big oof right there.
I'm also half-way through with The Memory Police by Yoko Ogawa, and it's so intriguing. Despite having not read a lot of Japanese fiction (yet) it holds a special place in my heart. I'm interested to see what sort of plot twists will happen with this book, since it's been everywhere recently.
I started The Deep by Alma Katsu a couple of days ago, and I'm honestly super bummed that I'm not loving it as much as I wanted to. Like, paranormal re-imagining of the Titanic disaster? Sign me up! But we flip through like five different perspectives and also go back and forth in time to the voyage and then four years after the sinking, so I feel like I'm getting literary whiplash trying to keep all the voices and names straight. The main character's motivations for certain things are also really vague and I mean I know it'll eventually be explained (well, I hope so anyway) but she just rubs me the wrong way. If I'm not truly enjoying it by the fifty-percent mark, I'm going to DNF it.
I'm going on day three of a migraine (ugh) and have been feeling so off all day. First my insomnia decided to rear its ugly head after nearly two weeks of proper sleep (well, nearly proper, still had my night terrors and all that great stuff (double ugh)) so I got exactly zero hours of sleep last night, instead reading My Hero Academia fanfic on Ao3. Then when the sun finally rose and my parents with it, I started feeling a little better, so I decided to make pancakes for breakfast. Which were delicious, by the way, but the richness and heaviness just brought me right back to queasiness. So I've just been lying in bed trying to stave off the pain and focus on things that make me happy--I watched Frozen II on Disney+ and then played a few rounds of Sudoku, which hardly ever fails to make me unwind and relax.
However I still wasn't feeling up to reading any of the books I'm currently in the middle of, so I decided to pick up Red White & Royal Blue by Casey McQuiston for the third time. It really is just the perfect book to escape with, especially with the current climate of the US right now. It's funny and fluffy and sometimes you just need a well-done enemies to friends to lovers trope to work it's magic. I'm about 100 pages in and I know that I'm going to finish this today, that's not even a question, but I like that you can just sit back and chill with this book, while still managing to read a 400 page novel. That's my favorite form of productivity.
By the way, here's a moodboard I did last year for Red White & Royal Blue:
I do really want to get back into filming and making BookTube videos again, I miss it way more than I thought I would, but honestly it's getting to a hundred degrees on a daily basis now in Arizona and I hate the summer more than any other season, so I'm just so unmotivated to put on proper clothes and makeup and sit in front of a camera and talk while sweating my skin off, you know what I mean?
I also want to make more moodboards. The ones I did make were so much fun and I'm actually properly proud of them (if you wanna see them all, click here) and I'm not entirely sure why I stopped, so I'll probably get working on that again.
Okay, I think that's all I have for today's update. Please all continue to stay safe and healthy and practice proper social distancing. I know it sucks but we really gotta do all we can to clear this pandemic out. Also a huge thank you and God bless to all the essential workers out there doing everything they can to keep our lives as normal as possible. Y'all are real heroes!
Until next time!
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