digne

A New York Supreme Court justice ruled in favor of embattled Broadway producer Ben Sprecher May 12, finding publicist Marc Thibodeau in breach of contract for sending anonymous emails that scared off a potential investor on the Broadway musical Rebecca.

digne

All right, the Super Bowl was depressing. So, SO close!

So many good ones here. The Body Electric confirms that Beth Revis is one of my favorite authors ever. And I especially loved Snow Like Ashes, The Kiss of Deception and Beautiful Creatures.

Kiss really surprised me, I wasn't that into it for about 70% of it but by the end I just loved it.

My totals for December:
2 books
5 audiobooks

My totals for January:
3 books
3 audiobooks

TOTAL FOR THE TWO MONTHS: 13

What I read in Dec. & Jan.

Click on a title or cover to read my review on GoodReads.

Crown of Midnight

by Sarah J. Maas

Maybe 3.5 stars I was really getting fed up with this book at about 60% of the way through it. When it suddenly improved. I loved the last quarter or so

Princess of Thorns

by Stacey Jay

Just wonderful!,

Throne of Glass

by Sarah J. Maas

This was a lot of fun. There are a couple things that seemed a little shaky here and there (ex: referring to characters by their occupations repeatedly got annoying). But overall the story really worked. The characters were believable, t...

The Kiss of Deception

by Mary E. Pearson

Wow! This book really grew on me. It starts out slow. Really slow! And at first the set up and other things struck me as kind of hockey. The heroine is kind of annoying to begin with. But then I caught on to the point-of-view devise the ...

The Saturday Big Tent Wedding Party

by Alexander McCall Smith

Mma Ramotswe is good for the soul! This book is another keeper!

Snow Like Ashes

by Sara Raasch

Maybe 4.5 stars but I absolutely loved this. Just wonderful! The characters were great and all very believable and identifiable. Meira is a fantastic heroine. The magical world held together although I had a couple problems with the logi...

Winterspell

by Claire Legrand

I liked it. It was a little uneven at times. I had trouble sympathizing with Clara's desire to save her father given how messed up her father is and at times Nicholas seemed a little underwritten. But the core themes of a girl growing in...

Beautiful Creatures

by Kami Garcia

Fallen

by Lauren Kate

I've been listening to the audiobook of this book for about the last week or so and I finished it today. And I was left most feeling very "meh" about it. I had so much trouble deciding what I felt about the book that I can very very clos...

The Body Electric

by Beth Revis

I'll say 4.5 stars. This was fantastic! Revis has the ability to not just write compelling science fiction, but beautiful science fiction. The last 40 pages of this book are stunningly beautiful. My mom doesn't read much sci-fi and I kn...

Cloaked

by Alex Flinn

Maybe 3.5 stars. I didn't mark this when I read it but I finished it around Dec. 11. But I'm not sure.

Torn

by Amanda Hocking

3.5 Stars. Almost 4 Stars but not quite enough to push it to 4. I did really enjoyed this but it didn't quite come together as nicely. I got a little annoyed with the love triangle. And some of the logic seemed a little too simplistic a...

Switched

by Amanda Hocking

This is perhaps the best book by Hocking that I've read. It seems a lot more logical and thought out than her Watersong series. The Trylle society's structure seems logical. I loved Hocking's explanation for why the Trylle used Changelin...

digne

I’m a little late finishing this but here are highlights of what I read in 2014. Although I never posted my December reading (must do that still). This is an expanded version of something I posted on Tumblr.

By the Numbers:

I read (or listened to) a total of 97 books in 2014.

• 88 of these books were new to me books and 9 were re-reads.
• 36 of those were books and 61 were audiobooks.
• 13 of these were published in 2014.
• 3 books had two authors
• 15 were written by men and 85 by women ( See noteCollapse )

(not counted above: Anything I didn’t finish reading in 2014 and 1 book I quit without finishing)

My Favorites:

• YA Fantasy:
  The Winner's Curse by Marie Rutkoski
  This is probably my all around favorite book of the year. It emotionally destroyed me … but in a good way.

• My OTP of the Year:
  Pandemonium by Lauren Oliver
  I don’t care what the 3rd book says. This is another book that emotionally killed me.

• Favorite New-to-Me Author:
  Beth Revis
  I read her Across the Universe trilogy and The Body Electric and I am in love with all of them! She's now on my auto-buy list.

• Adult Fantasy:
  Some Kind of Fairy Tale by Graham Joyce
  I really need to read more of Joyce’s books. What he does here is amazing.

• Adult Memoir:
  Call The Midwife: A Memoir of Birth, Joy, and Hard Times by Jennifer Worth
  It’s just as good, if not better than the TV series!

• Adult Non-Fiction:
  The Reason for God: Belief in an Age of Skepticism by Timothy Keller
  Wow!

Runners Up:

Least Favorites:

Other Stats:

See my year end review from GoodReads (which doesn’t count re-reads)

See my previous book posts here on Live Journal

The image at the top of this post is of all the books I read or re-read in 2014 that I still own copies of (Note that all the books by Garth Nix were re-reads). Others I got from the library or have since passed on to other readers. The bookmarks mark places I like to re-read.

ETA: Edited later to add the stats for women and men authors as I had them but forgot to add them when I originally posted this.

digne

I’m still finishing up the bootcamp I’m doing so I did a lot more audiobooks this month and not as many printed books. But I found some great audiobooks. Although there are also some extremely bad ones too.

Let’s start with the good.

Lola and the Boy Next Door is everything the title implies. It is the cutest, most wonderful feel-good treat. Although it's not without flaws it is so charming that it totally makes you forget all about them while you read it.

Very different from Lola, but also amazing, is The 5th Wave. It’s beautifully written and very well plotted out. I can’t wait to read the next book.

And now the bad.

I’m still kind of “Meh…” about Alyson Noel’s The Immortals series. It had parts I like and parts I hate. Even though there were things I enjoyed in this second book, there wasn’t as much I enjoyed as there was in the first book. Though ironically, there wasn’t as much that I hated here either. There are a couple plot points I’m still curious about in the next books, but I don’t think it’s enough to motivate me to finish the series.

And I still say that Damen is an awful leading man!

The ugly

By far the worst thing I read this month was Tiger Quest. It was so bad I didn’t even finish it (note: for this reason I didn’t count it in my totals). There are too many problems to mention (read the review below).

7 Audiobooks
1 Book
TOTAL: 8 Books

To read my full review click on a book’s cover or title below.

What I Read in November

Isla and the Happily Ever After

by Stephanie Perkins

Ok. But not as good as "Lola" maybe equal to "Anna" which I didn't particularly care for. But I adore "Lola" and the best thing about this book was the cameo by Lola and Cricket. But I will say that the book overall improved in the last ...

Lola and the Boy Next Door

by Stephanie Perkins

I read the first book in this series a year ago (almost 1 year exactly) and I was not impressed. I knew there was a second book but given how "muuhhh" I was about the first book I decided not to bother about the second. That is, until I ...

The 5th Wave

by Rick Yancey

This lives up to the hype. This is beautifully written and Yancey clearly knows how to tell a story. This is extremely well plotted and the characters are believable. The action picks up right from the beginning and holds you until the e...

The Distance Between Us

by Kasie West

This was super sweet. Considering its genre maybe it should have 4.5 stars. It does just what it's intended to do. It's not super deep, but it is utterly charming. The only real flaw is that certain elements seem to resolve too easily at...

Blue Moon

by Alyson Noel

Meh! 2.5 to 3 stars. I've said it all before I hate the romance in the book. Forget the word romance as a description of what is in this book. Romance is nonexistent here. Damen is the most potentially abusive boyfriend since Edward Cu...

Tidal

by Amanda Hocking

3.5 to 4 starts. Well, I did it. I read the book with the awful cover! (seriously what is up with this cover! It's horrid!) And surprise surprise I actually enjoyed it more than the earlier books in the series. Maybe my expectations we...

Tiger's Curse

by Colleen Houck

Hmmmm ... I'm a little torn here. I liked it and enjoyed it but I felt it had a lot of weaknesses. But I liked it enough that I'll push it up to 4 stars. The on-again-off-again nature of the romantic relationship between Kelsey and Ren ...

THE WORST BOOK I READ THIS MONTH

It was so bad I couldn’t finish it so I’m not counting it above:

Tiger's Quest

by Colleen Houck

I didn't finish. I quit at about 40%. I finally gave up. I finished 6 of the 16 CDs of the audiobook and just couldn't go any further. How on earth does this book have a 4.38 Stars rating on GoodReads? The story has a lovely core idea ...

digne

Hand down the best thing I read this month was The Grisha Trilogy by Leigh Bardugo. Just wow! I read the first book in September and the two sequels, Siege and Storm and Ruin and Rising, do not disappoint. But I did find other books I read this month to be enjoyable. The Grimm Legacy was super cute and Starters was incredibly creepy!

5 books + 6 audiobooks = 11 TOTAL

Click on a cover to read my full review on Goodreads.

What I read in October

Beastly

by Alex Flinn

Really, 3.5 stars but I'll bump it up to 4. It needs a different twist in the final third of the book and there was too much sappiness (the internet chatroom really got on my nerves). But I loved the twists with Kendra and the early meet...

The Perilous Sea

by Sherry Thomas

I'll say 4.5 stars I've said it before, while the fantasy concept is a little shaky the characters are delightful. And I found the mystery here more interesting than the first book. Of course we'll have to wait for the 3rd book to see h...

Enders

by Lissa Price

A pretty good (and creepy) sequel. If it has a fault it's that I felt it flipped things around too many times to the point that at times it didn't feel quite natural. I thought the first book handled that better. Although I appreciated t...

Starters

by Lissa Price

This is one of the creepiest concepts. It's an amazing piece of YA science fiction! While I was reading it I thought there were a few places where the character motivation didn't quite work but then when I got to the end and I saw how we...

For Darkness Shows the Stars

by Diana Peterfreund

Maybe 4.5 stars. I had a little trouble with the characters at times but I found the world that Peterfreund created absolutely fascinating. And I enjoyed the twists on the Persuasion storyline. Although there still seems to be something ...

Time After Time

by Tamara Ireland Stone

The first 75% of this book is too slow. But it makes up for it in the last 25%. This is a charming, and despite the slow start it's a quick read. I hope there's a third book there's still something that feels unresolved ...

The Grimm Legacy

by Polly Shulman

Very cute story. I saw from the reviews that a lot of people loved the concept but hated the execution of this story. I think it comes down to style. This is a humorous adventure and I think a lot of people wanted something darker. I thi...

Time Between Us

by Tamara Ireland Stone

Very lovely! Just what I was in the mood for. And I raced through it in near record time.

Ruin and Rising

by Leigh Bardugo

I'm in serious trauma now. Wow! Give me hankies. This is an amazing series! I highly recommend it! Just wow!

Siege and Storm

by Leigh Bardugo

Evermore

by Alyson Noel

This book is 2.5 stars but not quite good enough for me to round it up to to 3 stars on the GoodReads index which doesn't allow half stars. Let's start with what I liked: I liked all the twists about what it's like to live as a clairvoy…

digne

The Grisha Trilogy is pretty fantastic! I loved The Shadow Society and Pandemonium ... oh the feels!!! And now I have to wait for the conclusion to the Lunar Chronicles.

Total for the Two Months:
8 Audiobooks / 8 Books = 16 BOOKS

Click on a title or cover to read my full review on GoodReads.

What I read in August and September

Shadow and Bone

by Leigh Bardugo

This book is without question one of the best examples of the YA fantasy genre. Everywhere it excels and avoids so many of the pitfalls and clichés of the genre. The story is still a little bit cartoony in its simplicity -- like most YA ...

Teardrop

by Lauren Kate

Maybe 3.5. This was a fun book with lots of elements I've seen in other similar books but with enough new twists to keep me going. I did however have problems with the logic at times. Things occasionally became too far fetched. For exam...

Lullaby

by Amanda Hocking

Another solid 3 star book. It's too formulaic to rank higher but it is enjoyable. And now I face a problem. I got this book on audio because the library had the first two books in this series as audiobooks. I didn't know at the time tha...

Wake

by Amanda Hocking

A solid 3 star book.

The Burning Sky

by Sherry Thomas

Maybe 4.5. I will second what others have said that the fantasy portion of the plot is the weakest thing about the book. But this is an utterly charming book. And I need the next book now! Though it's not without flaws I really did grow...

These Broken Stars

by Amie Kaufman

Maybe 4.5 stars. Very, very weird. The story starts rather formulaic. It's the plot of so many classic movies (snobby rich girl stranded with working-class guy in strange wilderness; they must come together if they are to survive) excep...

Champion

by Marie Lu

The Pledge

by Kimberly Derting

I'm not sure what I think. Charlie started to strike me a little too slow around the middle of the book and the story became more plot-driven then character-driven. I was having trouble believing that Charlie, Max and especially Xander c...

Overrated: Are We More in Love with the Idea of Changing the World Than Actually Changing the World?

by Eugene Cho

Maybe 4.5 stars.

Pandemonium

by Lauren Oliver

Maybe 4.5 stars. The flashbacks were confusing, but overall this was a much better book than Delirium. There is more action and the story felt much less safe. There was danger and heartbreak. And there was tons of character growth for Le...

Prodigy

by Marie Lu

Hmmmmm ... There's still something that I don't quite buy about this but it is quite enjoyable. The second half was quite a bit better than the first. It really moved. The climax had one goofy moment with Day's speech. It seems a little ...

Delirium

by Lauren Oliver

Maybe 3.5 stars. This in an imperfect book. But it was enjoyable and I thought the last 150 pages really picked up the pace. I'll certainly continue with this series despite its flaws. The biggest problem I have with the series is that ...

The One

by Kiera Cass

[RE-READ] I'd ordered the audiobook from the library in July but it didn't come through till August and so I decided to reread it but this time on audio. It's totally fluff, but fun. I judge books within the context of their own genre, however I didn't give this book 5 stars because even for its genre it does get a little too sappy at times. The last chapter is a little too much. One benefit of reading it again was I was able to try to sympathize more with Maxon this time, and I did a little, but I'm still in America's camp.

The Shadow Society

by Marie Rutkoski

Maybe 4.5 stars.

Cress

by Marissa Meyer

Scarlet

by Marissa Meyer