Hi, YouTube, it's Kathy and this is my December 2018 Reading Wrap Up.
Happy New Year! If you're not already aware, I do weekly entertainment wrap ups of
everything I read, watch, and listen to, but this video will be just the books from December.
I'm going to start with the nerdy, hardcore stats and charts and then move on to what I read.
I don't have a chart for this fact but the total amount
of books I read in 2018 was 237; that is the most I've ever read in a year.
That was a total of 73,036 pages, and also resulted in 50 Book Pledge creating a
new badge, because I told them there were no badges after you hit the 200 book mark,
so they made this ->... I'm pretty happy about it. So you know I'm gonna have to
try for that this year. In December, I read 25 books for a total of 7,283 pages.
That takes into account converting audio book minutes to pages so 2,369 of
those pages were actually about 68 hours of audio. The age breakdown for these
books was 12 adult books ,12 YA books, and 1 middle grade book. I read 18 novels,
5 graphic novels and 2 anthologies. This month, the biggest chunk
of what I read was contemporary, but I did have some SFF, historical fiction,
nonfiction, and mystery. If you adjust by page count, fantasy and historical
fiction inflate because those books were massive .Most of these books, no surprise,
came from the library, but I also borrowed some from a friend, and got one through
Life's Library, and read one I already owned. I read 9 hard covers,
8 paperbacks, 7 audio books, and 1 ebook. Nearly half of these books were in
the 200 to 299 pages range, and the vast majority were published in the last decade.
Almost all these books were by female authors, although I did read a few
male authors and a non-binary author. Most of the protagonists were female,
with a few male protagonists and some ensemble casts. In terms of setting, more
than half of these books were set in the States, with others being set in Nigeria,
the US Virgin Islands, Finland, Japan, other worlds, the United Kingdom, and Canada.
In terms of diversity, there's absolutely no shock that there was a
bunch of queer content, as I hosted the second round of Queer Lit Readathon
earlier this month, but we also have works involving race,
translated works, feminist work,s and works that had intersectionalities ,which
is what combo means. In terms of star ratings, this month I
had five 3 star books, seven 3.5 star books, seven 4 star books, wto 4.5 star
books, and four 5 star books. Let's start with the lowest rated book and
work our way up to the highest, shall we? Now, if you happen to watch the entirety
of my Best and Worst Books of 2018 video, I already talked about the worst book on
this list and the best book on this list, but I have a theory there are at least a
couple of people that held out so they could see the list in entirety.
My first read was Fair Play by Tove Jansson. This book is done in a series of vignettes
about these two women who live in the same building .It's queer, but very
careful about it, because this one was published in the 1980s, so although these
two women are definitely in a relationship, you wouldn't necessarily
know it just by reading it, unless you knew that ahead of time, or unless you're
queer and you're looking for that type of content. Besides some of the notions
being outdated, there really wasn't much wrong with this it just wasn't really my thing.
Next we have Hurricane Child by Kheryn Callender. This was the one middle grade book I read this month, and I
read it for Queer Lit Readathon, because there was a space that asked for a middle grade read.
This one features a girl who was born during a hurricane, which is seen as unlucky,
so she's picked on a lot at school. hHr mom just up and left her and
her dad a little while ago, so there's a mystery element as to where she is and
if she's ever coming back, and then a new girl comes to her school and she
immediately has feelings for her. At times, the writing in this was beautiful
but I kind of got genre whiplash and didn't really know where the book was
going to go ,and what was going on, and it was also very insta-lovey, which I
understand is a very twelve-year-old thing, but just wasn't for me.
Next was another Queer Lit Read, and that was Wandering Son, Vol.1. This is a manga
about to fifth graders, one who was assigned male at birth but is female, and vice versa.
This was a cute story but because of the way the art is done, a lot
of the characters look very similar, and I don't understand the way that naming
practices work in Japan so I had a hard time following who was who, but obviously
the points that I did follow I really enjoyed. This was stinking cute and there
are so many volumes of this. I just not running to pick them up. The next book on
the list is Future Home of the Living God. I read this one as an audiobook
and the narrator did a really good job, but I had a lot of questions when this
book ended. Like, was her partner actually an angel? Because you said
he was, and there's mention of him having to, like, tuck up his wings and stuff, but
that wasn't really explored or explained at all, which was very confusing.
And because this very basic question wasn't answered, it really detracted from me
enjoying this book. Also, this isn't really the type of book that you're
really aiming to enjoy, per se, because it's a post-apocalyptic situation where
humanity is kind of regressing and women are being captured so that when they
give birth, they can find out whether or not these people are giving birth to
homo sapians or something from the past. It led to some pregnancy nightmares
and I was not here for that. My final 3 star read was Queer Eye by the Fab Five.
This is basically a coffee table book about the creation of the reboot
for Queer Eye, and then the characters who are on it. By characters, I mean actual
real human beings, the Fab Five. It's about the Fab Five.
I say it's a coffee table book because although I read this cover to cover, it's
not really that interesting if you read it cover to cover. it would be more
interesting as something you leave on your coffee table and pick up and flip
through every once in a while. But I kind of knew going into this that nothing in
this was really going to blow my mind away. I just wanted more content from the
Fab Five and that's what this was. On to my 3.5star reads, first
we'll go with Bingo Love by Tee Franklin. This one is a graphic novel about two
women who met when they were in their teens, fell in love, and then their family
split them up, and then they meet again years later playing bingo. I really enjoyed this.
There were a couple of points in this where the narrative was
broken and you were told to go find web exclusive content to see how some
subplots were played out, and that really bothered me. I do understand that they
came out with a new edition called The Jackpot Edition that has that content in
it so you don't have that issue, which is great, but that's not the issue I read.
I felt personally attacked by the last panel; it almost made me throw the book
across the breakroom because I thought I was gonna start
crying in the break room, and I just don't like crying at work, so thanks for that.
My next 3.5 star read was Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistle Stop Cafe. This one was a book club pick.
This one is very centered around women telling their own stories, so it jumps back and forth
between the present, which is the mid-1980s where an old woman is in a
nursing home and this other woman is there because she's supposed to be
visiting with her mother-in-law but they don't really get along, so these two
women end up forming a friendship, and the older woman starts telling her about
her past in Whistle Stop, Alabama. Then, of course, we were flashing back to
Whistle Stop, Alabama throughout the 20s, 30s, 40s, maybe into the 50s even?
I can't quite remember. In that timeline, we're focusing on two women who end up having
a relationship and opening a cafe together. And the strange thing is the
points in the past a narrative where it kind of lost me and I thought the book
was going on too long was when it was focusing on characters outside of those
two characters, basically. If those characters weren't in that chapter,
I wondered why that chapter was there, even though interesting things was being
said about race and the class of the time. So it's a little bit of a mixed bag
but I was kind of impressed with some of it, to be honest, and this is one of those
queer classics I'm glad I've checked off my list. Next is This is Kind of an Epic Love Story,
also by Kheryn Callender. I also read this for the Queer Lit Readathon.
this story features Nate, who wants to study film, and he has a good group of
friends, and right before his senior year starts, his old best friend moves back
into town. This book really starts out with letting us know that something
happened between them but it doesn't let us know what it is, and it slowly reveals
that, and this previous best friend becomes a love interest. The love
interest was also Deaf, which is something I was interested to see in the
text, but my friend Rogan, who is Deaf, also read this book and from his
commentary, a lot of that storyline wasn't handled the best way. The author
could have done much more research as to how the schooling system would have
worked for somebody who's hard-of-hearing, and from what Rogan says,
it looks like they did very, very basic research and they just kind of
plunked it in, and said, "yeah that'll be fine". Outside of that aspect, this was
pretty light and fluffy and queer, and I enjoyed it for that reason.
Next was Quicksilver by RJ Anderson. This is the second in a duology; the first one,
I read years ago so I actually really didn't remember what was going on when I
went into this, but it did a really good job of kind of catching you up on what's
going on in this world filled with aliens and powers, and obviously some intrigue.
This book I mostly picked up because I knew that the protagonist was
ace and I was excited to read another book with an ace protagonist.
Being asexual was also discussed a couple of times throughout
the book, which I really appreciated. My next 3.5 star read was an anthology
called Joy to the Worlds, by various authors. Four of them. They're there [on the cover].
I - I didn't write them down. This was a speculative fiction collection with
mystery elements and all the stories were set in the wintertime.
Like with every collection, there were stories that stood out more than others. I really
enjoyed Ol' St. Nick, which was a closed room murder of Santa Claus on a spaceship.
My next 3.5 star read was Jane Unlimited by Kristin Cashore.
This one was interesting because there were, I believe, six different endings to
it and each ending has kind of a different genre.
Trying to film with your roommate around is honestly a mess sometimes.
I think when I left off I was talking about how Jane recently lost her Aunt Magnolia who was the person that
raised her, and her aunt said if she was ever invited to spend some time at
this person's house, that she would go. That happens. This isn't just a house, though,
it is a house on a private island. Super cool, straight up fantasy travel stuff.
Perfect. However, you get to a point in the book where Jane is given the option
of, I think, six different things and depending on which route she takes,
things go very differently. I gave this book a slight disservice, one -
by listening to it, because it would have been better to be able to go back and
read those different options than just letting it play through all of them, and two -
because I listened to a really quickly, trying to finish it for the week,
and I didn't grasp all of the things that were going on. I think I would have
gotten a lot more out of it if I had read it physically. My last 3.5 star book
was The Book Jumper. And this one I saw my friend Taylor's
channel in a super cute book haul, which I love. And when I saw the audiobook
was available, I just downloaded it immediately.
This one is a bookish book, so if you like those, you will like this. If you
don't like bookish books, books that are specifically centred around people that
like books, and aspects of books, and "what if you could do this with a book?" -
it won't be your thing. The plot of this one starts with Amy and her mother Alexis
deciding that they need to escape Germany for a little while, so they go to
the Shetland Islands, which is where Alexis is originally from. Amy's never
been them before. When she gets there, she finds out that she is one of three
humans who can a book jump, which is literally what it sounds like.
She can jump right into books. So she starts training to do this and then
some mysteries come down. I thought it was fun. I thought it was interesting.
I also find it really interesting that both of this and the Inkheart series are
both translated from German and by German authors, because they're very
similar concepts, so maybe there's this whole treasure trove of bookish books in
German that I just haven't discovered yet, and I kind of want to go looking for them.
Onto my 4 star reads, the first one being A Two-Spirit Journey. This one
was my nonfiction for the month and this is the autobiography of a Cree elder
from Ontario, who is still living. It starts with her grandmother's life and
goes forward from there, and we have lived very different lives. A lot of this
was very eye-opening and what drew me to pick this up the most was out of the
LGBTQ+ acronym, the thing that gets left off the
most often well, or I know the least about, is 2 which is for Two-Spirit.
My next 4 star read was Girls of Paper and Fire. This one was actually the group
read for the Queer Lit Readathon, which I thought I wasn't going to be able to
get but while the readathon was happening, the audiobook came in to my
library's subscription service, so I snatched that up immediately so I could
participate, because you know I love to black out a bingo board. This one is
about a society that's broken up into three different parts: people that have
no magic, people that sort of have magic, and then people that have a lot more
magic, basically. And in this society, the Paper people, who are the lowest tier,
are obviously treated poorly, but the King does this thing every year to say that
he's treating them well by picking eight Paper girls to be his concubines for the year.
Due to a series of events, our protagonist ends up being the ninth
Paper girl for that year, and she ends up falling in love with one of the other Paper girls.
As you might imagine from that short synopsis, this one is full of trigger warnings.
There was a lot physical and sexual assault mentioned,
but overall I really enjoyed the writing. The ending really set it up for the next
book to come out, and I kind of want to see where this protagonist will grow ffrom here.
My next 4 star read was Faith: The Faithless, which is the fourth
volume in the Faith comics. I think by now we know that I love Faith; she's fat,
she can fly, and she makes the best pop-culture references. In this volume,
we see a bunch of her arch enemies teaming up to try to take her down.
My next 4 star read was If You Come Softly by Jacqueline Woodson. This is the first
of the Lifes Library pics and I enjoyed this. This was a loose Romeo and
Juliet retelling, set in New York. It was published 20 years ago and features an
upper-class Jewish girl and an African-American boy. This is a very slim
book and the chapters are also very slim, and you spend a lot of time getting to
know both of these characters before the romance even blossoms, and I really
appreciated that about it. It also had a lot to say about interracial dating and
relationships that is still very relevant to this day. The one thing I
wish that was different is that I wish I didn't know going into it that it was a
Romeo and Juliet retelling, because I did not want to be looking for the tragedy,
but that's my own fault. My next 4 star read was
My Sister the Serial Killer. This one was set in Nigeria and followed two sisters, one who
is a serial killer and the other one who takes care of her little sister and
cleans up her messes. This one definitely had some dark mystery elements to it it
opens with Ayoola calling her sister Korede because she has just killed her boyfriend.
She says it's self-defense but this is not the first time that people
have died when she has a weapon in her hands. So Korede is very conflicted
because obviously she's going to keep helping her sister, but also she wants to
make sure that other people don't die. This is then complicated when Ayoola
meets the man that Korede has been in love with for three years and then
starts dating him. It was dark, it was creepy, there was sibling rivalry.
You started really feeling sorry for people. I enjoyed listening to this one.
My next 4 star read was Less by Andrew Sean Greer. This the one that I finished at
the very beginning of the month. This one was about a man who is about to turn 50
and the man that he's been in a relationship for the last decade or so
is about to get married to somebody else. In order to not go to that wedding, he
takes a series of engagements around the world, where he'll be speaking at
conferences or teaching classes in Germany. He basically just said yes to
all these opportunities so he wouldn't have to be around when the wedding takes
place, and then of course this book is his series of misadventures. This was incredibly funny.
The writing was funny, the situations he found himself in were funny.
It was also gut-wrenching at times but
in a way that he was able to make light of it. So if you're looking for something
with a lot of funny and a little sad, this is one to pick up. My last 4 star
book was a reread, and that was Aristotle and Dante
Discover the Secrets of the Universe by Benjamin Alire Saenz. This one is read
by Lin-Manuel Miranda, so right there is a really good reason to pick it up, and
this one was the last-minute addition to my Queer Lit Readathon TBR because I
accidentally returned the audiobook that was going to use for that week when I
was trying to return Less, and then of course there was a holds list, so I
couldn't get it back immediately, so I picked this one out. This one is about a
couple of Mexican American boys in the 1980s and it's basically them getting to
know each other, growing up, and finding out about themselves. It is a beautiful
queer story, and I know that some people say that it is a little bit too
optimistic but we need those stories sometimes. Onto my 4.5 star reads, the
first one being To Be Honest by Maggie Ann Martin. This one made me cry, so there's that.
Savannah is a fat, brainy teenage girl whose older sister has just
gone off to college, which means that now she lives with just her mom... which is a problem.
She loves her mom but her mom was recently on a weight loss reality
show which made her lose an extreme amount of weight in a very short amount
of time, and also has made her kind of brainwashed, and she's constantly judging
Savannah for her food choices. On top of trying to manage her mom and her fatphobia,
she's also trying to have a great year of high school, she's trying to
figure out what she's going to do for college, she's managing a crush on her
best friend's cousin. I read this in one sitting. It was highly enjoyable.
Another book I read all in one day, although it took *all day* because it was about 400 pages,
was The House of Impossible Beauties by Joseph Cassara. This one is a
historical fiction set in the 1980s in New York, and follows a cast of
characters who are all part of the same drag house. Now, if you go into this
thinking it's going to be mostly about drag and it's going to be akin to
watching RuPaul, you are not going into this book right. It's not like that at all.
There are so many things I could say about this book, but the thing that I
want to reiterate is the use of language in this book was phenomenal. The vast
majority of this cast is Latinx, so they switch between English and Spanish
quite freely, and that happens throughout the text of the book. What I love about
that is the Spanish is not italicized, which is the common practice when you're
using a word or two of a different language in a sentence, but that doesn't
happen here. It is free-flowing between English and Spanish,
and if you don't speak one of those languages, you just have to figure out
what's going on in that sentence based on context, and I absolutely loved that.
There was never a point where this broke me away from the narrative and I wanted
to stop to find out what was going on because I could always at least get the
gist of what was going on and just wanted to keep seeing what was going to
happen to these characters. There are a ton of trigger warnings for this book; it
does get very, very dark. There is abuse in it, but there is also happiness and
love and light, and I adored it. Onto my 5 star reads, the first one being
Heartstopper by Alice Oseman. This one is an adorable graphic novel that was
first a webcomic and it's now being published into volumes, and it follows
a character realizing that not only does he like girls, he also likes boys - one boy in particular.
The art is adorable and if it wasn't for the fact that December has
been an incredibly busy month, I would have gone online to read the rest of the
comic because it leaves off in a very cliffhanger place.
Speaking of cliffhanger endings, my next 5 star read was Check, Please! This one
is also probably the cutest graphic novel I will ever read in my entire life.
It's about this boy named Bitty, who used to be a figure skater but in college
joins the hockey team, and it's about that team camaraderie, it's about him
baking pies, him being a vlogger, and him falling in love with the team captain.
Again, this one is also a webcomic so I need to set aside a space of time where
I can just sit down and read it all. My penultimate 5 star read this month
was Inkmistress. I finished this a few hours before the year ended and it was so good!
Asra is a demigod, and she lives in the
mountains above a small village. She was raised by a herbalist who died a couple
of years ago, and basically, when it's Winter, people can't get up to where she
is, which really sucks because she's not really supposed to leave the cave unless
it's very, very important, and also the girl that she loves is down in the
village, and she basically goes the whole Winter without seeing her. Spring is
starting to form and very soon she's going to be able to see the love of her
life, but unbeknownst to her, some things have changed while they've been apart.
After reading that entire book, that is just the tip of the iceberg of what
happens, but I just don't want to spoil absolutely anything for you; this book
stabbed me right in the feelings several times. A lot happens in the plot
and the plot happens over a large amount of time, so when relationships develop
it's not Insta-Lovey, which is very appreciated by me, the demisexual.
The different types of magic in this world are also phenomenal. One of the reasons
why Asra is stuck up in these mountains is because she has a magical power that
if other people know about it, they would capture her just to use the power.
It's hard because I want to tell you so much more about it, but I want you to discover
it for yourself, so if anybody has read this, please let me know about it down in
the comments so we can chat about it, because I loved it. I loved it so much.
It was it was freaking wonderful. My last 5 star read and my favourite read of the
month was In Other Lands by Sarah Rees Brennan. This book also stabbed me in the
feels quite a few times, but also was so funny and sarcastic and I loved
everything about it. The premise of this book is the protagonist goes to a
magical military school and there are two different tracks you can take.
You can either learn to be a warrior or learn to be a scholar, kind of
doing the strategy of war. Our protagonist is a pacifist,
so obviously strategy for him. However, the girl he has an instant crush on is a
warrior so he spends a lot of time knowing what's going on in the warrior
classes, and when she decides that she wants to study both tracks, he has to
help her. This character is incredibly snarky, incredibly smart, incredibly
well-read, and there were several moments throughout this book where I just
started laughing just because of the way things were written. For example, when you
go into a fantasy book, you don't expect the main character to talk about
mermaids as though they're badass, but he definitely does. Our main character is
also bisexual, which definitely comes into play and is discussed at length at
some points, and I again really appreciate this content. If you want to
hear me talk more about these books, or other books for that matter, the playlist
for my Weekly Entertainment Wrap Ups is always listed down below. I've done two
years of weekly wrap ups, which is over 400 books, so there's lots of backlog in
case you find your TBR empty. If you've read any of these, please let me know
about it down in the comments below. On the way down to the comments, if you
hit that Subscribe button, that would be nice of you. You can like and share this
as you see fit, and I will see you very soon. Bye!
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