Fairytales for Wilde Girls ~ Giveaway winner!

 

While this giveaway didn't accumulate many entrants I'm still glad that I did it. Here's hoping that the winner will fall in love with this book, as I have done so.

The winner is:

Emma from Sydney!

Once again, check out my Fairytales for Wilde Girls review and maybe even add it to your Goodreads?

I absolutely adore the cover for this book (and the illustrations inside!) and so I asked everyone to say what their initial thoughts on the book were based on the cover alone. The general opinion was that the cover indicated something dark and fairytale-ish. Seems about right!

Review Bites (#2): Beastly, The Night Circus and more

Image credit: ♥

I don't write reviews for every single book I read, at least not here on the blog, but that's just because I don't have enough to say for some of them. Review Bites is here to remedy that.

The books which I will be reviewing are mostly books I haven't received for review but have been sitting in my to-review pile. I still feel like I have to talk about them. So while these reviews are much, much shorter than my regular ones, I feel satisfied in knowing that my own words have been said about them.

Reviewed in this post:
- Beastly by Alex Flinn [swap]
- The Night Circus by Erin Morgenstern [gifted]
- Someday, Someday, Maybe by Lauren Graham [Netgalley]
- Emerald by Karen Wallace [for review]

[Review] Siege and Storm by Leigh Bardugo

{goodreads}

(#2, The Grisha)

Shadow and Bone | Siege and Storm | Ruin and Rising

Publication (dd/mm/yyyy): 26/06/2013

Publisher: Hachette (Indigo)
Pages: 400 (311 in this ARC)

Source: Publisher
Genre: YA (14+) - Fantasy

Violence | Sexual Content | Profanity

Book Tunes
♪ x ♪

My Rating: 

Ambitious and surprising

My thoughts

I doubt I will ever master the art of reviewing sequels but I'll try my best. Let me preface by saying there will be spoilers for anyone who has not read the first book, also it has been months since I read Siege and Storm so this review is relatively short and possibly lacking in accuracy.

Top Ten Tu...Saturday (5): Books that scare me

Top Ten Tuesday is a weekly meme hosted at The Broke and the Bookish.

It's not even Tuesday...and this is actually last week's topic, but I really really wanted to take part in this, add in my little list and send it off to the world. Ten is barely anything, but here's the top most freakishly long or ambitious or old or over-hyped or all the above titles that equate to my feeling the intimidated feelings. Mostly classics--big surprise there, am I right?

Top Ten Most Intimidating Books

• Margaret Mitchell - Gone with the Wind
• It's such a highly-revered American classic, plus it's massive!
• George R.R. Martin - A Game of Thrones
• Length, hype, epic.
• Thomas Hardy - Tess of the D'Urbervilles
• I had to read this for high school and only made it half-way. It was such a chore but now that I don't have to write an essay or overanalyse it I want to try it again (because people seem to like Hardy) but... memories.
• Victor Hugo - Les Misérables
•  It's lengthy, it's "intellectual", or at least highly descriptive and political and about the French Revolution of which I have a very limited knowledge base.
• Leo Tolstoy - Anna Karenina
• Again, length. And I just want so badly to love it, but there are so many characters and I worry that it's going to lose me within the first 50 pages!
• Any Stephen King novel
• Surprisingly there are some titles of his that have gained my interest. 11/22/63, The Stand, Under the Dome... Ultimately I worry that I won't connect with his writing the way that lots of people seem to do.
• Vladimir Nabokov - Lolita
• The subject content intimidates me quite a bit. But it also scares me just so fascinated I have become towards this title. Like, I really want to read this.
• Emily Brontë - Wuthering Heights
• It's like a forbidden star-crossed love gone wrong, right? I'm scared to read any Bronte to be honest, but this one...this one.
• Any Charles Dickens other than A Christmas Carol
• Loved A Christmas Carol. But Dickens is so horridly verbose... I want to read all of his novels eventually but I can't deny how intimidating the task is!
• J.R.R. Tolkien - The Lord of the Rings series + The Hobbit
•  Well, I fell asleep in the first ten minutes of the first movie (I know, it's sacrilege), so there's that. I won a box set a while back, I just have to muster the gusto to pick them up.

And because I'm incredibly lazy (and it's quite late as I type this) I won't leave Goodreads links. Because you all know these titles. You have to be illiterate to not know them, right? (Or at least not a reader, and then I would have to pose the question What are you doing here? Get yo' gluteus outta here!)


Hoo boy. I'm going to have nightmares tonight... the books are going to attack me!

[Reading the Classics] Mrs Dalloway by Virginia Woolf

[Arranged from Vintage Classics ©Random House, 2004]

Add to Goodreads 

Author: Virginia Woolf

Publication Year: 1925

Pages: 208

Violence | Sexual Content | Profanity
  

Verdict: A poetic stream-of-consciousness narrative that follows the mundane day in a life of a middle-aged woman, Mrs Dalloway, as she prepares for her party. This party far from ordinary--a certain old flame from her past will be in attendance. Woolf portrays middle-class society in a sobering fashion; and yet, oddly, there is an uplifting quality that gives tribute to the preciousness of life.

My thoughts

[Source: Gilmore Girls + Tumblr]

Mrs Dalloway is kind of a British The Great Gatsby in the perspective of a middle-aged Daisy who meets up with Gatsby again, for the first time since war-time. With even more language than The Great Gatsby, more angled perception (by varied points of view) and the perspective of post-war depression to boot. The general feeling I was left with by the end mirrored that of Gatsby--this is a very serious novel, a dense piece of literature that speaks volumes, that unsettled me to my core.