Challenge hosted by Melanie and Mandy

Day #5

13:00

Good morning! Wait, what? Yes, I just woke up about 30 minutes ago. After hours and hours of not doing anything really, I decided to pick up The Casual Vacancy again shortly after midnight – and read the remaining 130 pages in order to finish it. When I was finally done, it was past 3 am, I was tired but incredibly happy to have finished the novel that was the one I was most afraid of. It’s been on my currently reading shelf for so long and I never was in the mood for it.

So what is my final verdict? I really don’t know. It’s not bad. It’s a little bit boring in some parts. For me, it’s one of those novels you don’t want to put down as long as you’re reading but as soon as you have stopped, you forget about it because it’s not that thrilling. It has a very sad GRRMesque ending – figuratively speaking, I wished for the Purple Birthday Party but got something Red instead. Sort of. So I don’t know whether I can recommend the novel. If you haven’t picked it up yet, maybe you should wait for the upcoming TV adaptation to see whether it would interest you.

Oh, and here are the stats for the first three days. Although these are not a lot of pages, I’m actually quite proud I managed that much already. I’m still haunted by a depressing reading slump.

Pages read: 698
Books finished: 3 (+1)

– Deahtless by Catherynne M. Valente
– The Thousand-Dollar Tan Line (Veronica Mars, #1) by Rob Thomas & Jennifer Graham
– The Casual Vacancy by. J.K. Rowling
(- Das Glücksprojekt by Alexandra Reinwarth)

What will I read today? I’m not sure yet. It’ll either be Prodigy by Marie Lu or Die Meisterin by Trudi Canavan. Maybe I’ll read a part of each.

17:45

Huh, why is it so late already?! Instead of reading, I was updating books on goodreads for the last couple of hours. Now, I’m going to grap a piece of cake and then I’ll go searching for my notebook on Die Meisterin so that I can reread my favourite chapters before delving back in. Have I mentioned, that I don’t want to finish it? I really don’t. But I have to.

23:59

And my eyes are still swimming in tears …

This was another very interesting experience. I had about 200 pages left in Die Meisterin

[I’m still a little furious that they made the title all about Sonea when the original title The High Lord is all about Akkarin. Although Sonea is our protagonist, this novel truly is Akkarin’s. God, how much I love him. There’s actually a funny story about how I finally started reading the novels:

In March 2013, I visited my dear friend Silvi in Vienna. She was currently rereading the series and I told her that I haven’t read them yet. She couldn’t believe it and started nagging me – and since she knows me, she started to rave about Akkarin. We were on the bus and at some point, I started laughing so hard, because I just thought that if Akkarin was as hot as his name, I would totally fall for the novels. That’s so me. So when I came home and soon afterwards started the first one, I was already so fired up for Akkarin, that I was jumping up and down squealing every time he was mentioned. And he isn’t mentioned very often in the first novel, which means that I had a lot of bottled-up excitement to release each time. I’m so glad I didn’t read these novels in public.]

but it were 200 of the hardest pages I ever read. I can’t remember dreading to finish a novel as much as I did this one. I could only read a couple of chapters before picking up my mobile to watch some youtube videos. I just couldn’t get myself to continue reading. I can tell you that these 200 pages are really thrilling and exciting and it’s a really great story – I just dreaded the ending because I had a couple of assumptions I really didn’t want to come true. In the end, I cried. I’m still incredibly shaky and vulnerable. This book just tore my heart out and left me hollow inside.

No matter how broken I am, I loved it. I always like the novels best that can trigger a great emotional response in me. Whether it is stunned silence, bubbling laughter, or heartbreaking sobs – I just love when novels make me feel very emotional. Still, it will take me some time to recover, which is why I can’t answer your comments right now.

Tomorrow, I probably won’t have much time to read because I’m out, so don’t be alarmed if the updates come in pretty late.