Book List For My Bestie

Preface

One time my best friend moved two states away and one time we went too long without talking. And then, one day we talked on the phone for two hours and then she said, "So, do you have any book recommendations."

And I gave her like three and then got kind of quiet and she was like, "I should go."

"No," I replied firmly, "I'm sorry I got quiet. I started a Word document of my recommendations for you and opened up Goodreads so I can remember what I read and you asked for book recommendations so you're in this conversation now you can't leave."

"Of course you did."

And if I spent an hour on a book list and I believe that sharing is caring, I should also share it with you. This is definitely a bestie-to-bestie list of books, not a "I am an expert on any of these topics" books, and I would LOVE to add books to these topic lists.

Bestie’s Book List

Feminist Books

·        How to Be a Woman, Caitlin Moran – funny “modern feminism” (listen to on audible because it’s amazing)

·        all about love: new visions, bell hooks – serious “feminist theory” but really delightful and feels like going to therapy

·        The Color Purple, Alice Walker – fiction, but really good and kinda queer

Anti-Racist? Books (aka books about black people that I think has helped me come to terms with some systemic issues in society)

·        Americanah, Chimimanda Ngozi Adichie – kind of a modern Jane Austen – comments on society, love story, funny, but really long and sometimes drags….

·        The UndergroundRailroad, Colson Whitehead – I looked at it like “ugh I know about the underground railroad” and then realized I’d never (at least since elementary school) read a book about the underground railroad. And it blew. My. Mind.

·        I’m Judging You: The Do-Better Manual, Luvvie Ajayi – full disclosure: I’m only like ¼ of the way through this book but I would say it’s kind of a mix of How to Be a Woman & like….more of a magazine/blogger feel? Definitely more about how to be better to women/people including black women which Caitlin Moran might not have included (I literally don’t remember, so probably not).

Romance-y Books

·        My Lady Jane, Cynthia Hand – kind of like The Princess Bride, funny, adventure, SO GOOD

·        A Court of Thorns and Roses, Sarah J. Maas – the first one is not great. And it starts really slowly. But then you realize it’s Beauty and the Beast and then it gets really really amazing like at the end and the second one is so good I read it three times

·        Matched – it’s not good. But it also is? YA Dystopian

·        Heartless, Marissa Meyer – Cinder author, I can’t believe you haven’t read it.

·        Caraval, Stephanie Garber – fantasy, I liked it. Kind of like Night Circus, but I liked it better.

·        I’ll Give You the Sun, Jandy Nelson – it’s beautiful and I love it. 

Do you love these books too? TELL ME

Do you disagree? TELL ME

Do you want to add on to my list? TELL ME
The only thing I love more than telling you about the books I love is finding more books to love. 

Fairest (4) Marissa Meyer

This is the fourth published book in the Lunar Chronicles series. The Lunar Chronicles is a delightful Sci Fi/Fantasy series taking beloved fairy tale characters and making them more badass. Cinder, the first book, is Cinderella-esque (ball and all!) but Cinder is a cyborg. I can't explain this series without making it sound ridiculous but I swear everyone I've talked into reading it has loved it. It's for the Once Upon a Time crowd more than the Game of Thrones crowd, it's lighter than Hunger Games and definitely leans on the prince/princess love stories. 

Fairest is the prequel to the existing series, where we see the origin story of the series' spooky villain Queen Levana. Winter, the fourth book in the actual series was supposed to be published in January, and instead we got Fairest. The book that nobody wanted. It's like the forth book of Game of Thrones* when we have to constantly listen to Cercei, and I almost quit the series. And I love this series. It's my new Harry Potter. Well, no, it isn't. But I need something to look forward to in my life, and Winds of Winter isn't going to be published ever.** 

Except it isn't actually. It's so dark and creepy and I couldn't put it down and begged my friend to read it so I could talk to her because I needed to talk about it with somebody. I think I gained a lot of respect for Marissa Meyer. I was worried she was more of a Stephanie Meyer and would name characters Renessme or some crap, but no! She can write a villain's story and you can understand her, and empathize with her, and still think she's scary and awful and hope Cinder and the rest of the original characters can defeat her. But maybe not too mercilessly because now you can see how damaged she is.  

Now I want to go back and re-read the series, but I can't quite bring myself to since I still need to finish The Bone Clocks (Day 77 and counting...). BUT GUESS WHAT?! As of this post, I have caught up! With this post. Which is adorable to look at. Oh, precious, you're 13 books behind? That's cute. Since I posted that I read 20 more books. TWENTY. And that's not even counting the daily doses of children's picture books I read. So what will I finish first? 20 blog posts or The Bone Clocks? Stay tuned...

PS Winter will be out in November and Facebook is already showing me adds for it. Facebook knows me too well. 

*Yes, it's called A Song of Ice and Fire but everyone knows it as Game of Thrones and I try not to sound as pretentious as I actually am. 
** Maybe 2017? GRRM stopped writing the show so he could work on it but I don't trust him. 

This is the creepiest cover ever...

This is seriously the creepiest f-ing cover in the world. I promise there is not some terrifying monster under there...oh wait that's probably exactly what it is.

I'm just writing to warn you that the 3.5th book in The Lunar Chronicles is coming out January 27th, so you should get started reading and catch up. Book one is Cinder and it's about Cinderella in the year 3000 or something and she's a cyborg. This is usually the point where people look at me like I'm a crazy YA fantasy reader who has no idea what a good book is. And there is absolutely zero way I can convince you otherwise and still talk about these books, because they are absolutely YA fantasy but they are also absolutely amazing and I'm more obsessed than I should be.

I keep telling myself that they aren't that great. I tried to not be excited about this book, in fact I was quite angry when I found out that instead of Winter (Book 4) we were getting Levana's origin story (Book 3.5??), but I'm a sucker for this series and I'm excited and I'm going to assume that we need this story to properly enjoy Winter when it comes out...supposedly November 24, 2015 which is in over a year. 

UGHHHHHHH. 

Cress (5)

I'm so sorry. I talked and talked about how excited I was about this book, and then I never mentioned that I actually read it. I did. Within three days of it coming out.

This is the third book in The Lunar Chronicles series.

In true Jana fashion, I really don't know what I like so much about these books.

Ok, that's not true...I love YA love stories. Because they have that lovely Disney quality to them, where at the end they get together and everything is all happily ever after.

Grown-up novels always talk about that messy part where you like each other, you finally get together, and then after awhile your fantasy-boy starts to become a real person and you have to deal with each other. And then people break up and hurt each other and yell a lot. I'd rather they try to kill each other with their magic powers OBVIOUSLY.

Also, I am obsessed with Cinderella. I've done the play 3 times now. I've read every book that so much as mentions it might be about Cinderella. It's my thing. If it's yours too, read these books. If you liked Once Upon A Time, read these books. If you like Merlin, probably definitely read these books.

I don't LOVE this show, BUT I like it more than I should.

Also, UPDATE on my whole blogging situation. NO WONDER there was a month long hiatus. I wrote about 4 books per blog post for the last 3 posts!! What was I thinking?

I know what I was thinking. I was thinking I AM THE BOOK MASTER. I READ ALL THE BOOKS. Which is true (I mean, sort of) but here's how I read them: 4 at a time. 1 audiobook in car or while running, 1 on kindle at bedtime, & 1 physical book for when I'm not trying to sleep or at work, & then a play or nonfiction or whatever. (or all of the above) SO I don't finish anything for 3-4 weeks, and then I finished 3-5 books in one week. And then I hammer out a bunch of reviews and set them to go up one week apart. 

ALSO since I still haven't read Henry IV, I don't want to read plays and I need to because I desperately need some new monologues. I have read 14 books this year and there have only been 12 weeks of the year. I shouldn't have run out but I got cocky. 

Let this be a lesson: When feeling like a failure, look not on what you have NOT accomplished, look instead upon what you HAVE accomplished. - Every Successful Person Ever 

You welcome, world. All 25 of you that read my blog.

OMG IT'S LIKE I HAVE A CLASSROOM ALREADY. 

Miss. Peregine review (3.5) & Cress is coming!

“I used to dream about escaping my ordinary life, but my life was never ordinary. I had simply failed to notice how extraordinary it was.” - Miss. Peregine's Home for Peculiar Children, Ransom Riggs 

Jacob, 16, is a quiet loner who has one best friend, a misfit like himself, and is closest to his grandfather. As a child, his grandfather told him many stories about a magical house he lived in as a child during World War II, the kindly matron who protected them from the monsters, and the peculiar children he lived with. As Jacob grew older, he came to realize that the monsters were really the Nazis, and the pictures of magic merely illusions. But after he finds his grandfather half-dead in the woods, torn apart by an animal who he glimpses, Jacob begins to wonder if the stories were real after all. He ends up travelling with his father to the island his grandfather had spoken of, to find the house where it all began. 

This book started out really strong, but the more fantastic it got, the less connected to the characters I felt. I thought it was going to be a great, creepy, Halloween read but it turned into a less interesting X-Men meets Harry Potter and ended on such a blatant to be continued, I felt a little cheated. Maybe if I had known that it was the first book of a series, I would have accepted this more, but I thought it'd been out for awhile (only 2011) and was just a book all on it's own. 

Now, in the book's defense, I did read it immediately after finishing The Ocean at the End of the Lane, which became more beautiful as it got more fantastical, so it did have a lot to live up to. And the author's note that all the creepy pictures of fantastic children were actually real pictures he found in thrift shops was pretty cool. And the next book comes out January 14th, so you don't have long to wait if you want to know what happens. 

I, personally, am feeling a little overwhelmed by the authors/series I'm following, and If you're into YA, I am in love with the Cinder series, and the third book is coming out in exactly two months!! If you missed my earlier post about Cinder (which was really short), it's another one of those fairytales re-told, which I have a soft spot for. I am especially obsessed with retellings of Cinderella, so I probably like this series more then I should. I may have already read it twice this year. I tried really hard to say it was just ok, but it's the perfect fast read if you're into that prince falls in love with ordinary girl and you can see it all but she doesn't because she's just so ordinary except she really is special if only she could just see it. SPOILERS, sorry, but it's based off Cinderella, so you  have to see that part coming. Cinder's a cyborg, it's the year 3000-something, there are cyborgs.

Rehearsing has taken over my life

Acting is my addiction. That is my only excuse for not having updated in the past six weeks. Between filming a short film, rehearsing for Jesus Christ Superstar and getting ready for TPS auditions, I haven't sat down and thought through a blog post. I I also haven't had time to go to the library, and was trying not to go on too much of a book buying spree...so I steadily attempted to plod through "A Prayer for Owen Meany."

I don't know why I keep quitting that book. It's rich and compelling, while I'm reading it, but then after a few weeks I wander into the abyss of Facebook and can't force myself to pick it back up. Perhaps one day I can admit to myself that I love love stories, and Johnny's lack of a romantic interest makes me lose interest. Maybe it's because my brain is tired, and all I can handle is some good old junk food reading, the kind where you can sit on the couch and devour the book in one sitting instead of, you know, actually thinking.

Judas give us your info

These are the books that made the ADD cut:

Cinder: a scifi YA Cinderella novel set in the future. Cinderella's a cyborg, the prince likes her but politics and all that...definitely an entertaining, fast read but the plot is a bit obvious.
Scarlet: the sequel. Adds a little red riding hood and big bad wolf character. I found this plot less predictable, but I also felt that it was very much a second-book-in-the-series, where characters are added wit their own plot and histories are revealed, but the plot itself has merely inched along.
I read them both in the span of...four? Maybe five? days in the midst of tech for JCS. The next book doesn't come out until 2014, I think I'm going to jump off a bridge. Lol

Night Circus: awesome. Love it. Want to play Celia in the movie version desperately. I'm not joking, I seriously started reading up on moving to LA in time to get discovered. It had everything you need: romance, magic, threat of death hanging over your favorite characters' heads. The book's about a circus which is only open at night which becomes the arena for two young illusionists to compete.
That being said: if a character dies in a book I want to cry my eyes out. This book did not make me cry, but maybe I've just become heartless in my old age. You be the judge.

The Thirteenth Tale: at first I kind of hated the main character, Margaret Lea, because she was quiet and mousy and just sat around and read books, but I think you're supposed to. Margaret gets chosen by the reclusive, best selling author Vida Winters to pen the authors biography.
The real story is, of course, the biography, which at times becomes so fantastical you wonder if its fiction after all. What begins as a slow, quiet novel about a shy, quiet girl morphs into an enticing mystery.