The Grisha

October is definitely my favourite month of the year. However, with the Frankfurt Book Fair, it’s also incredibly stressful. I didn’t manage to read as much as I wanted, but there were quite a few books I really enjoyed.

I read and reviewed Shadow and Bone in 2013. Spoiler: I didn’t like it much, which is why I never bought the sequels. A small part of me, however, was curious how the story would continue so when I got my new library membership, this was the first book I picked up. And what can I say? I’m glad I didn’t invest in the English hardcovers. I just can’t warm up to this series. Maybe I’m a little more critical than I usually would be because I didn’t like the first one. I don’t want to get too much into details here to keep it spoilerfree, but I’ve got a couple of things I want to address …

Hey, I’m even a little over a month earlier than last year! As always, I semi-prepared this but didn’t finish in time, but wanted to finish it nevertheless. It’s supposed to be functioning as a memory aid for my future self. Anyway, here are some of the books I’ve read in 2016 and my thoughts on them …

They divide books into delicious morsels ready to be devoured – and sometimes we decide to eat up the whole serving tray in one go resulting in a major hangover with the flavour of our huge disappointment that there’s nothing left. They help us remember where we left off – well, at least those people who have awesome memory. Everyone else lets the good old bookmarks do the remembering. They are wonderful excuses to procrastinate – “Just let me finish this.” – “Only one more.” – we’ve all been there. Sometimes, they make us tear out our hair because they leave off with a cliffhanger and we have to stop to do annoying real life stuff or have to read half the book to get back to this certain point of view – or even one and a half books, in case you’re reading A Song of Ice and Fire. They come in different sizes and even more shapes to look their very best.

Oh my, such a disappointment! After a wonderful, exotic, very gloomy and atmospheric 100 pages that got my hopes up, the awesomeness petered out. The world, the story, the characters – everything had so much potential! Unfortunately, the writing couldn’t live up to it and soon everything lost its glamour: the enthralling mysteries became far too obvious, the rugged beauty had to make way for a boarding school atmosphere and could never truly recover, and the characters turned out to be as flat as a pancake . . .

Even though my reading month of August ended a little early since I went on a short holiday on the 26th until the 3rd of September, I was able to improve my stats ginormeously. I increased the number of pages read and finished a smashing number of nine books. This makes August my third best reading month so far this year. Most surprisingly, I was able to fulfil my goal of reducing my TBR pile by two books this month. This is only the second time this year that I get a lottery ticket in the TBR reduction extreme challenge. I still can’t believe it for I went book shopping in both Munich and Berlin! …

There are so many books that I’d love to read over the summer! Here are the top ten books I just have to read in the next couple of months …