WWW Wednesday // 02.13.19

Hey, y’all! It’s finally Wednesday, so you know what that means: my WWW post! I’m constantly changing up what I’m reading/what I want to read, so this book meme is one of my favorites! WWW Wednesday is a weekly meme hosted by Sam @Taking On A World Of Words, where I have to answer three simple questions: what am I currently reading, what I have recently read, and what I want to read soon. I am always reading multiple books at once and queueing my next choices right on my nightstand. So, here we go!

WWW Wednesday // 01.23.19

Hey, y’all! It’s finally Wednesday, so you know what that means: my WWW post! I’m constantly changing up what I’m reading/what I want to read, so this book meme is one of my favorites! WWW Wednesday is a weekly meme hosted by Sam @Taking On A World Of Words, where I have to answer three simple questions: what am I currently reading, what I have recently read, and what I want to read soon. I am always reading multiple books at once and queueing my next choices right on my nightstand. So, here we go!

WWW WEDNESDAY // 08.22.18

Hey, y’all! I’m constantly changing up what I’m reading/what I want to read, so this book meme is one of my favorites! WWW Wednesday is a weekly meme hosted by Sam @Taking On A World Of Words, where I have to answer three simple questions: what am I currently reading, what I have recently read, and what I want to read soon. I am always reading multiple books at once and queueing my next choices right on my nightstand. So, here we go!

ARTEMIS

Written by: Andy Weir
Rating: 4 / 5 stars

Summary: Jazz Bashara is a criminal.

Well, sort of. Life on Artemis, the first and only city on the moon, is tough if you’re not a rich tourist or an eccentric billionaire. So smuggling in the occasional harmless bit of contraband barely counts, right? Not when you’ve got debts to pay and your job as a porter barely covers the rent.

Everything changes when Jazz sees the chance to commit the perfect crime, with a reward too lucrative to turn down. But pulling off the impossible is just the start of her problems, as she learns that she’s stepped square into a conspiracy for control of Artemis itself—and that now, her only chance at survival lies in a gambit even riskier than the first.

DARK MATTER

Written by: Blake Crouch
Rating: 3 / 5 stars

Summary: “Are you happy with your life?”

Those are the last words Jason Dessen hears before the masked abductor knocks him unconscious. Before he awakens to find himself strapped to a gurney, surrounded by strangers in hazmat suits.  Before a man Jason’s never met smiles down at him and says, “Welcome back, my friend.”

In this world he’s woken up to, Jason’s life is not the one he knows. His wife is not his wife. His son was never born. And Jason is not an ordinary college physics professor, but a celebrated genius who has achieved something remarkable. Something impossible.

Is it this world or the other that’s the dream? And even if the home he remembers is real, how can Jason possibly make it back to the family he loves? The answers lie in a journey more wondrous and horrifying than anything he could’ve imagined—one that will force him to confront the darkest parts of himself even as he battles a terrifying, seemingly unbeatable foe.

WWW Wednesday // 06.20.18

Hey, y’all! I wanted to ease back into the blogging by starting with one of my favorite memes. WWW Wednesday is a weekly meme hosted by Sam @Taking On A World Of Words, where I have to answer three simple questions: what am I currently reading, what I have recently read, and what I want to read soon. I am always reading multiple books at once and queueing my next choices right on my nightstand. So, here we go!

WWW Wednesday // 6.13.18

Hey, y’all! I wanted to ease back into the blogging by starting with one of my favorite memes. WWW Wednesday is a weekly meme hosted by Sam @Taking On A World Of Words, where I have to answer three simple questions: what am I currently reading, what I have recently read, and what I want to read soon. I am always reading multiple books at once and queueing my next choices right on my nightstand. So, here we go!

RED RISING (RED RISING #1)

Written by: Pierce Brown
#1 / 3 of the Red Rising trilogy
Rating: 4.5 / 5 stars

Summary: Darrow is a Red, a member of the lowest caste in the color-coded society of the future. Like his fellow Reds, he works all day, believing that he and his people are making the surface of Mars livable for future generations. But Darrow and his kind have been betrayed. Soon he discovers that humanity already reached the surface generations ago. Vast cities and sprawling parks spread across the planet. Darrow—and Reds like him—are nothing more than slaves to a decadent ruling class.

Inspired by a longing for justice, and driven by the memory of lost love, Darrow sacrifices everything to infiltrate the legendary Institute, a proving ground for the dominant Gold caste, where the next generation of humanity’s overlords struggle for power. He will be forced to compete for his life and the very future of civilization against the best and most brutal of Society’s ruling class. There, he will stop at nothing to bring down his enemies… even if it means he has to become one of them to do so.

Disclaimer: I received this book as a Goodreads Giveaway literally like almost two years ago. Whoops.

WWW Wednesday // 2.1.17

Hey, y’all! Sorry I’ve been a little sparse with the book reviews lately, but life happens and unfortunately, reading is not always my #1 priority. To alleviate my time between reviews, I decided I’m going to jump on the meme train! This will be my first one, and I am very excited. WWW Wednesday is a weekly meme hosted by Sam @Taking On A World Of Words, where I have to answer three simple questions: what am I currently reading, what I have recently read, and what I want to read soon. Sounds like my perfect kind of list!

What am I currently reading?

      

So, I’m that person that some bibliophiles cringe when they think about, who keeps three books open at a time and piled on top of each other to boot. My interests are always changing, so my book choices do as well.

• First off, I’ve got my nonfiction choice of the week: Hidden America by Jeanne Marie Laskas. Each chapter of the book follows some misunderstood or underrated occupation, ranging from coal miners to air traffic controllers to Bengals cheerleaders. It’s an incredible commentary on how there are so many things that we take for granted, and that someone, somewhere, is tasked with doing. I’m only about halfway through, but I already think it’s going to be a four or five star review.
• Secondly, I’ve got my YA choice: Clockwork Princess (The Infernal Devices #3) by Cassandra Clare. I love the Shadowhunter world, but unfortunately, I kind of read them all out of order. This is the last of the books I have to read to finish up all of the separate series, so I am very excited to see how it ends (although the Mortal Instruments kind of already ruined it for me).
• Last but not least for my current reads, my sci-fi choice: The Lost World (Jurassic Park #2) by Michael Crichton. I’m about 75% through with this book and am finding that it suffers from the same issues the second Jurassic Park movie did. I struggle to connect with any character, wondering why they are stupid enough to go back to the island and go through everything all over again. Crichton has obviously spend a good amount of time researching everything for his story, but I often feel like he tries too hard to use the dialogue to explain the deep science of the story. Either way, I’m interested to see where this story goes, because I still think Jurassic Park is an incredibly unique idea.

What did I recently finish reading?

        

• Homegoing by Yaa Gyasi. I’ll likely be posting a review of this within the next week, but I gave it four stars. It’s an amazingly beautiful story of two different lines of the same family, rooted in Africa, after one sister gets sold into slavery and the other marries outside of her village in the early 1800s. Each chapter is told my a new member of the family in the next generation, expressing the differences between the two cultures and the different eras, and finally connecting beautifully in the end.
• Hard Eight (Stephanie Plum #8) by Janet Evanovich. I love this series. This series follows a hot mess of a bounty hunter named Stephanie Plum who lives in New Jersey and constantly gets herself into all sorts of trouble, having her cars blown up, getting stuck between her two lovers, and refusing to have a gun with her even though she’s constantly getting shot at. The books are all incredibly easy to read, and one of my guilty pleasures.
• The Casual Vacancy by JK Rowling. I’m planning on posting a review of this within the next week as well, and it’s about a 3.5 / 5. It took me an incredibly long time to get through this book, but once I picked it up again about two weeks ago, I rushed through the last 200 pages or so. Rowling, unsurprisingly, is an incredible writer, but this is even further accented by the fact that she made me even be interested in local British politics, of which I have no previous knowledge. If you wanted to ever try it out, I’d definitely recommend it.

What do I think I’ll read next?

        

• Faithful Place (Dublin Murder Squad #3) by Tana French. This has become one of my favorite series, as it is a complex and well thought-out crime set of books, and French, at the helm of it, has become one of my favorite writers. Each book follows a minor character from the book before it, which is such an interesting idea. I can’t wait to read about Frank, who I wanted to learn so much more about in its predecessor, The Likeness.
• Six of Crows (Six of Crows #1) by Leigh Bardugo. I loved her Grisha Trilogy series, and was immensely excited when I heard she had another series, and in the same universe to boot! I’ve also read a lot of good reviews of this book, so I’m eager to start it.
• Callings by Dave Isay. I’m on a selection committee for my university to choose book for incoming first years next year, and this is one of my assignments. I love StoryCorps videos, and am looking forward to reading this book, with excerpts from all the best interviews about people discussing what they do and why they love it.

STATION ELEVEN

Written by: Emily St. John Mandel
Review: 4.5 / 5 stars

Summary: One snowy night Arthur Leander, a famous actor, has a heart attack onstage during a production of King Lear. Jeevan Chaudhary, a paparazzo-turned-EMT, is in the audience and leaps to his aid. A child actress named Kirsten Raymonde watches in horror as Jeevan performs CPR, pumping Arthur’s chest as the curtain drops, but Arthur is dead. That same night a terrible flu begins to spread. In one week, it is estimated that 99% of the world’s population is dead. Twenty years later, Kirsten is an actress with the Traveling Symphony. Together, this small troupe moves between the settlements of an altered world, performing Shakespeare and music for scattered communities of survivors. But when they arrive in St. Deborah by the Water, they encounter a violent prophet who digs graves for anyone who dares to leave.

Spanning decades, moving back and forth in time, and vividly depicting life before and after the pandemic, this suspenseful, elegiac novel is rife with beauty. As Arthur falls in and out of love, as Jeevan watches the newscasters say their final good-byes, and as Kirsten finds herself caught in the crosshairs of the prophet, we see the strange twists of fate that connect them all. A novel of art, memory, and ambition, Station Eleven tells a story about the relationships that sustain us, the ephemeral nature of fame, and the beauty of the world as we know it.