Hi, YouTube, it's Kathy, and this is my reading wrap up for January of 2018.
So this is a little bit of a different format for me because I do weekly wrap ups of what
I read, mostly because I figured by the time I get to the end of a month, I won't remember
enough about the books from the beginning of the month to speak about them eloquently.
However, I decided I might as well give it a shot, and try to do both weekly and monthly
wrap ups because my weekly wrap ups also include things that I watch and things that I listen
to, whereas this will just be books.
Also, I started tracking my reading even more closely than I used to, so not only do I use
Goodreads, not only do I use 50 Book Pledge, I also use Litsy, and a spreadsheet that gives
me way too much information about the books that I'm reading.
So I figured it I was doing that spreadsheet anyway, I might as well share that with you,
and if this is something that is interesting to my audience, then I'll keep doing it.
So, in the month of January, I read 18 books for a total of 5,751 pages, keeping in mind
that about 1,540 of those pages are actually 50 hours of audio books, so I just converted it.
I would also like to mention that I did not create this beautiful spreadsheet.
It was created by Brock Roberts over at Brock's Book Bag, which I will tag down below.
He's kind of put it out there for free for anyone to use and you can adapt it to how
you need it, and ignore columns if you don't want to know that data, and I just thought
it was kind of fun to share with you.
Of those 18 books, 12 are adult and 6 are YA.
And something that's super new for me is the spreadsheet lets you give a star rating, but
it lets you give it by the .5 star, if you like to, so I have 6 different categories
of star ratings of books that I'm going to share with you, starting with the lowest and
going up to the highest.
And then within these star ratings, I haven't tried to change which one I thought was the
"better 3 star book" - I've just kind of left it in the list that it was on in the spreadsheet.
Because at this point, even the .5s are kind of splitting hairs, and I really don't know
how to feel about that.
But I had the option, so I used the .5s.
So, I'm going to read this off my computer, because there's no way I'm memorizing it:
this month I had one 2.5 star read, I had three 3 star reads, I had five 3.5 star reads,
I had six 4 star reads, I had two 4.5 star reads, and I had one 5 star read.
Also, for anyone whose just here for the stats, I'm gonna do a little bit more of that before
I go through every one of the books that I read - fairly quickly, because I've already
talked about them in those weekly wrap ups, which you could watch, weekly, if you are so inclined.
So this month I read mostly contemporary, about 55.6% contemporary.
22.2% thrillers, 11.1% fantasy, and then 5.6% sci-fi and non-fiction.
The cool thing about these charts is you can also adjust it by pages read, so if you adjust
to amount of pages read in each genre, it changes a little bit because that one sci-fi
book was super long.
And also, no surprise here, but 17 out of 18 of these books I got from the library,
and the last book, I already owned at the beginning of the year.
If you'd like to break it down into physical formats, I read one ebook, I read two graphic
novels, I read four paperbacks, I read four audiobooks, and I read six hardcovers.
Nope!
Seven hardcovers.
That's how math works.
I also really like that the spreadsheet breaks down what kind of diversity was in books that you read.
So, to be fair, a chunk of mine this month didn't have diversity, or I just didn't notice
any of the diversity in them, but the three biggest chunks of the pie for me this month
were race, mental health, as well as LGBT.
As well as some own voices, and at least one book but that [a] combination of those of
those categories.
This spreadsheet lets you keep track of things like how many pages the books were, or what
what year they were published, whether or not the book is part of a series or it's a
stand alone, and also the gender of the author.
You can also keep track of publishers, but obviously I don't really care which publisher
I'm reading from, because it was all sorts of publishers.
Not to mention, I'm not smart enough to know which sub publishers are part of bigger publishers.
And I'm not going to waste my time trying to figure that out.
Alright, starting with the lowest rated book this month, we have Into The Wild Nerd Yonder.
This one I picked up because it was recommended to me because it's kind of a fandom read,
and yeah, it kind of is.
Basically, what happens in this books is the protagonist and her two best friends kind
of have a falling out during the Summer/beginning of the school year, and she needs to find
a new group of people to hang out with.
The reason why this is rated so lowly for me is because the protagonist is super judgemental.
And it made me think that she didn't really deserve the friends she ended up with because
she thought that, like, she was better than them for some reason.
On to 3 star reads, I read Read Responsibly, which is a bind up of a comic called Unshelved,
which takes place in a library.
I love reading these strips but there's nothing that super stands out about it, which is why
it's only a three star for me.
The next 3 star read was The Obelisk Gate, which is the second in the Broken Earth Trilogy.
The weird thing about 3 star reads for me, is isn't not that I didn't enjoy the book,
it's just it wasn't anything spectacular for me.
I really liked the first book in this series better than the second book.
It might be some form of middle book syndrome that has me disliking it, or the fact that
there were just so many characters, and I had to remember back to these tiny characters
from the first book.
I didn't dislike it, but I didn't like it as much as the first book.
The last 3 star read was Hero, which follows a protagonist who is queer and has super powers,
and his dad hates both of those things more than anything in the world, so obviously that
causes some issues.
This book is about 10 years old, so it had some problematic language to it, and just
the way that a lot of the female characters were treated, I was just like, "really? Okay..."
But overall, I was glad to add another book to my queer super hero list.
On to my 3.5 star reads, the first one is One Kick.
This follows a girl named Kick who, when she was a child, was abducted, and rescued by the FBI.
And this follows her about 10 years after that incident.
This one deals heavily with mental health, but it's also, kind of, and action/thriller
type of book, and outside of, like, psychological thrillers, you don't really see mental health
and action together all too often.
And when you do, it tends to be in movies, and the psychological part doesn't necessarily,
usually be portrayed in a very good way.
This one obviously has trigger warnings for abuse, especially child abuse, and that type
of thing, so if that's not your thing, just stay away from this book.
Next, we have A Local Habitation, which is the second in the October Daye series by Seanan
McGuire, and I just really like this series.
I like that all the books have a nod to some specific faerie-based thing in Shakespeare [works].
And I don't know, maybe I'm just a sucker for the trope of somebody who lives in two
completely different worlds; in this case, the fae and the human.
The next book was Leviathan Wakes, which is the first in the Expanse series.
This is the giant novel that I read in the sci-fi genre.
And by read, I mean listened to, and it was 21 hours.
I found this one super interesting because it had different point of view characters
that eventually meet up.
It talked a lot about the bodily differences of people that grew up in gravity on a planet
verses people who have lived their entire lives in space.
And it had a lot of twists and turns in it, and I appreciate that, especially with a book
of this length.
If it's not twisty and turny, then I'm like, "why is this book so long?"
The last 3.5 star book I read was Time's Up, which is a book that I haven't done a weekly
wrap up on yet because I finished it this week and the week isn't over.
And that's why it's going to be interesting to be doing weekly and monthly wrap ups.
This book is about a girl named Maisie who is the youngest in an Irish American family,
and she is in police academy, and is told she has failed the psych evaluation, so she
can't be a cop.
This is terrible because her father and three of her brothers are cops, whereas her mother
and two of the other brothers are lawyers, so, like... she doesn't want to be a lawyer.
She's always wanted to be a cop.
And she figures that she can disprove the psych evaluation that she too thin of skin
if she works for a year as a meter maid.
Because people yell at those people so much, because people are terrible, and she figures
if she can make it through that, and show that she didn't, like, snap, then she can
make her way back onto the force.
On to my 4 star books, the first one being Boy Meets Boy.
This is just a really cute story between two boys that fall in love.
It's adorable.
It's in this weird, alternate reality that I wish was real where you go to school and
there's people that are already out as drag queens, and it's not uncommon to find queer
people, and it's just great.
The next 4 star read was The Whole Art of Detection by Lyndsay Faye.
This is a Sherlock Holms short story book, and I loved it.
I think Lyndsay Faye might be one of my favourite writers, and I would honestly read anything from her.
And just the way she dug into the characters that we know and love from so many different
retellings of Sherlock Holmes, and John Watson, and all of those characters.
She just played with the characters so well.
So if you haven't read any Lyndsay Faye, you should get on that.
My next 4 star read was Elsewhere by Kathryn Burns.
This is a road trip novel that has a lot to do with mental health and also features a
queer protagonist, so as soon as I heard mental health and queer protagonist, I basically
asked the author, just, to give me the book at PodCon.
And she did.
And I'm so happy about it.
The next 4 star book is All The Feels, and this is basically: a girl goes to see the
last movie in a franchise, and it ends terribly, and she has to fix this through the power
of fandom, basically.
This was another book I picked up because I want to do another [video] about Fandom
Reads, because I love reading books where people are passionate about whatever it is
that they like.
The next 4 star read was We're Going to Need More Wine, which is a memoir by Gabrielle Union.
She's a celebrity I did not know all that much about, but I found this book heart-wrenching
and funny, and it would just flip so fluidly between those two.
And if you're looking for something to read for Black Out in February, this is a good
one to pick up.
The last 4 star read of this month was Roots, which is a graphic novel that was actually
a Kickstarter project.
And it follows a woman whose marriage falls apart and she decides that she wants to find
her roots in Ireland.
I particularly liked reading this because I lived in Dublin for a year, so all of the
little Irish-isms that were within the narrative, I was just like, "ah, I miss that time in my life".
On to the 4.5 star reads, first we have The Girl in 6E.
This is an erotic thriller, and I loved it.
Basically this is about a cam girl with murderous tenancies, and that's all you really need
to know to get sucked in to wanting to read this book.
It's sexy, it's bloody, there are so many twists and turns.
The way it's written is so interesting to me, and I'm very excited to read the other
two books in the series.
The other 4.5 star book for me this month was Dumplin'.
It's about this girl who's overweight and lives in Texas, and I absolutely loved this character.
I wanted to be friends with this character.
I also might have had a little bit of a crush on the boy that she had a crush on, because
he was damn cute, too.
And the one 5 star book I read this month was The Hating Game.
What's weird for me is if I only have, like, the 5 stars to choose from, most things end
up in the 3 and the 4 star rating because I don't want to be that person that gives
everything 5 stars; you know what I'm sayin'?
But no.
Honestly, this book is a 5 star book.
It is a super cute hate to love romance, and it's just lovely.
These two people worked for different publishing companies that happened to merge, and they
are vying for the same job, and basically their desks are right next to each other,
and they just snipe at each other all the time, and then they realize over time that
maybe they don't really hate each other.
And even though I knew all of that going into it, it was still such a fluid read to get into it.
I could kind of see the Big Surprise coming that came, and I was totally fine with it still.
So if you're looking for a super cute contemporary, this is the one to pick up.
So there you have it. All of the books I read in January.
If you are familiar with the way that I do my weekly wrap ups, and you watched this video,
thank you for doubling up.
And also, if you could let me know down below if you enjoyed this format, that would be
very helpful for me.
Because I have no problem sitting down and doing this monthly wrap up, but I want to
know that it's something that people want to actually watch.
So feedback... feedback would be nice.
Also, if you've read any of these books and you want to talk about them with me, comments
is where we do that.
On the way down to the comments, if you hit that Subscribe button, that would be very nice of you.
You can like and share this as you see fit, and I will see you next time.
Bye!
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