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My Rating: ★★★★★
My first read this month will probably be one of my favorites for the year. This was my first Shakespeare play so I was super intimidated going into it, but it was actually very easy and quick to read. It was whimsical and funny and had the best set of characters.
Tortilla Flat by John Steinbeck
My Rating: ★★
So this one I actually DNF'd. It wasn't necessarily bad, it just really wasn't for me. I read about 40% of it and still couldn't see a point to the story. Maybe I'll get back to it in the future but for now, I have other things I'd rather be reading.
My Rating: ★★★★★
I absolutely loved this. The only other Tolstoy work I've read is the Death of Ivan Ilych and I thought it was okay, but nothing groundbreaking. This completely changed my opinion on Tolstoy. Family Happiness was frustrating and sometimes sad, but it also had moments that were really exciting. Few classics are so good that they keep me from putting them down, but this one one of them.
Almost Famous Women by Megan Mayhew Bergman
My Rating: ★★★
This is a short story collection about women through history who weren't quite famous but I suppose had the potential to be. The author writes a fictionalized account of their lives imagining what in their life stopped them from the fame they could have had. The writing was fine and although it wasn't bad, for me it just seemed kind of okay. Some stories were interesting, some I didn't care much about. It was just a very meh read.
My Rating: ★★★★★
Full review here. This was a really fun read that also offered a lot of diversity. One of the better reads I had read this month and probably going to be one of my favorites for the whole year.
The Horse and His Boy (Chronicles of Narnia #3) by C.S Lewis
My Rating: ★★★
I'm reading the books in this series as they were chronologically published, and I have to say the first few books were fun, but I'm losing my interest. This was the third to last book and after already reading the first four I didn't want to leave the series unfinished so I'm pretty much just reading them so I can be done with the whole thing. This wasn't necessarily a bad read, it was just another 'meh' one for me.
City of Bones (Mortal Instruments #1) by Cassandra Clare
My Rating: ★★★★★
This was my second time reading this book and although I found a few things I didn't pick up on during my initial read, I still love this. I have a blog post discussing my thoughts on this after rereading it here.
Ready Player One by Ernest Cline
My Rating: ★★★★
This was so much fun. It could get a bit info-dumpy at times with all the information about different games and such, but overall the info was useful in helping the reader understand how these different aspects fit into the story. The romance in this book was a relatively minor part of the story but even so, it felt pretty cheesy, which is one of my pet peeves in YA.
My Rating: ★★★★★
This was my second time reading this book and although I found a few things I didn't pick up on during my initial read, I still love this. I have a blog post discussing my thoughts on this after rereading it here.
Romeo & Juliet by William Shakespeare
My Rating: ★★★★
I loved A Midsummer Night's Dream so much that I really wanted to read another Shakespeare play right away, so I did. I also participated in the Biannual Bibliothon this month and I used this for the challenge to read something that has been referenced elsewhere in media. It's a classic story that practically everyone is familiar with. I had read bits and pieces of it before in high school so I wasn't surprised by any of it. Overall, it was exactly what I expected it to be.
The Yellow Wallpaper by Charlotte Perkins Gilman
My Rating: ★★★★★
This one I read for the Bibliothon challenge of reading a book dealing with mental illness. This was a very short and easy read. It's about a woman who is confined to her bedroom with little to no activity due to what her husband calls her 'condition'. The protagonist had recently had a child, so the 'condition' sounds an awful lot like post-partum depression, which instead of acknowledging, her husband just tells her not to give into it and discourages talking about it. I thought this was very well written and fairly relevant to how some still perceive mental illnesses like post-partum today.
The Pearl by John Steinbeck
My Rating: ★★★
Another Bibliothon read, this one was for the under 200 pages challenge. I liked this better than Tortilla flat, but it was still a very meh read for me. There were only a few parts that I took an interest in, but the rest just droned on, which is saying something considering how short this is. I don't know if it's just that I'm not picking the right Steinbeck stories, or that Steinbeck's short stories aren't for me.
The Witches by Roald Dahl
My Rating: ★★★
This one I read for the Bibliothon challenges of reading a backlist title and of reading a book you've never heard of. Overall, this was a pretty fun and short read. I'm not a super huge fan of children's literature, but I've always wanted to try some of Dahl's works, so for the Bibliothon, I looked through his works that I wasn't already familiar with the story of and settled on this one. It was definitely unlike anything else I've read and it had a pretty cute ending.
Lady Midnight by Cassandra Clare
My Rating: ★★★★★
Another Clare reread. I bought Lord of Shadows a couple months ago and haven't had time to read it until now, so I wanted to reread Lady Midnight so the story was fresh in my mind for when I started its sequel. Not much to say about this one, I loved it just as much as when I first read it almost two years ago.
Lord of Shadows by Cassandra Clare
My Rating: ★★★★★
I finally got to read Lord of Shadows and it was even better than I thought it would be. There were so many minor side plots that I definitely wasn't expecting, but that made the book that much better. I had already been spoiled to something pretty significant that happens in the book (thanks internet for that one) so that was a bit disappointing, but even knowing what was coming, it still got me. The only thing that felt strange about this book was the ending. It doesn't have a transitory type of ending where things have calmed down after the climax, preparing you for the continuation. Instead, it ends abruptly in the middle of a very chaotic scene and I felt that the ending really could have used some kind of epilogue to wrap up the chaos. Also, I used this for the Bibliothon challenge of reading a sequel.
Crooked Kingdom by Leigh Bardugo
My Rating: ★★★★★
Words cannot describe how much I loved Crooked Kingdom. It's only the second book I've read by Leigh Bardugo but it's further solidified her as one of my favorite authors. There isn't much that can be said about this without spoiling Six of Crows, but I will say that with a world as richly built as Bardugo's created, I wish I had reread the first book before I started this one to have had that first part of the story fresh in my mind for its continuation.
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