Author: Haze

Top Ten Tuesday | Books on My Fall 2024 TBR

Posted September 23, 2024 by Haze in Top Ten Tuesday, Weekly Book Memes / 44 Comments

Welcome to Top Ten Tuesday, a weekly bookish meme hosted by Jana @ That Artsy Reader Girl that features a different bookish topic every week.

Today’s topic is Books on My Fall 2024 To-Read List

Some of these books have been on my list since the beginning of the year. Heck, some of them have been on my list since last year… and way before. It distresses me that I haven’t read them, the older ones in particular. I’m going to really try to get them done this fall!

Top Ten Books on My Fall 2024 TBR

  1. The Glass Chateau by Stephen P. Kiernan – This is the one I most want to prioritize. I’ve had it on my TBR the moment it was announced, before it was even published, and I was so excited when it was released. I love the author and I have no doubt I’ll love this book, but I just haven’t gotten around to it for some reason.
  2. The Storm We Made by Vanessa Chan – Malaysian author, Malaysian setting, Malaysian reader (me!). I must read it!
  3. Everyone In My Family Has Killed Someone by Benjamin Stevenson – I have been wanting to read this for a while now. You know it caught my attention with a title like that.
  4. Dungeon Crawler Carl by Matt Dinniman – Everyone keeps recommending this as one of the best series you can listen to on audiobook, but I’m hesitating because I listened to a sample and I’m not sure I like the narration, so I’m waffling between getting it on print vs. audiobook. So many people can’t be wrong about the audio, right? But what if they are?!
  5. Never Whistle At Night by various authors – This is relatively new to my TBR but I really want to read it because I wanted to read more diverse books this year, and I love folklore and not whistling at night is also a superstition in my own culture.
  6. The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks by Rebecca Skloot – A much older book that I’ve been wanting to read for a long time. Part of why I also signed up for a nonfiction reading challenge this year.
  7. Between Us by Mhairi McFarlane – I love the author’s works, but I don’t consider them light-hearted romance because they often have heavier themes and not so traditional HEAs, so I do need to be in a certain mindset to read them.
  8. The Keeper of Hidden Books by Madeline Martin – Another author I love, but much, much heavier stories. I read two of them very close to each other earlier this year, and I needed a break before I jump back into another one.
  9. The Wishing Game by Meg Shaffer – I don’t even remember how I heard about this book but I was so excited about it, and it’s also a bookish book!
  10. The Library at Mount Char by Scott Hawkins – Another bookish book I’ve been wanting to read. The things people say about it make me very curious!

Have you read any of these books? What did you think of them? Would you read any of these books?

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Sunday Post | Four Eyes

Posted September 21, 2024 by Haze in Sunday Post, Weekly Book Memes / 24 Comments

Welcome to the Sunday Post, a weekly meme hosted by Kimberly @ Caffeinated Reviewer to share weekly news and updates on what we’ve been up to on our blog, with our books, and book-related happenings. 

I Got Glasses

I got my first prescription glasses last week! I’m so happy and I’ve been wearing them almost non-stop to the point where my husband is scolding me for wearing them while lounging in bed because he doesn’t want me to break them.

To be clear, these aren’t my first glasses, only my first prescription glasses. I had “vanity glasses” as a child because I wanted to look smart and studious and my dream job was to be a librarian. Yes, I wore glasses I didn’t need out of vanity, and I’m only telling y’all here because I feel like if anyone would get me, it’s other bookworms. 😂 Also, I get that the whole librarian wearing glasses thing might be a little stereotypical but I was 10 and I loved reading! 🤷‍♀️

It’s also nice to be able to see things a little more clearly now!

I also ran 5k three times last week! Woot, progress! Well, sort of. I ran almost every day when it was 3k, and now that it’s 5k, I’m only running three times a week because it exhausts me and I need more recovery time, so there’s a give and take. I’m still slow, but at least I’m running slow a little further!

I’m looking forward to eventually running a marathon, like maybe after 10 more years of training! 🏃‍♀️‍➡️

All the happy things:

  1. I love my new glasses!
  2. Really proud about my progress with running even though there’s definitely some growing pains!
  3. My Hobonichi Cousin 2025 arrived! I know it’s still a few months to 2025, but I like knowing it’s there ready for me and I also have some things already scheduled for 2025 that I can now fill in.
  4. We had more soup! Spicy Sichuan soup this time!
  5. I crocheted a bag out of scrap yarn and it’s ugly as heck but I love it! (I haven’t woven in the ends yet.)
  6. The cooler weather means I can crochet more now! It’s no fun crocheting in the heat with all that yarn on my lap, but it’s so cozy when it’s cooler.

The Books

Books I read last week:

  1. Goddess of the Hunt by Tessa Dare – Book 1 of the Wanton Dairymaid Trilogy. I love Tessa Dare but I felt like this one had a little more cheese than her other books I loved. Still fun and enjoyable, and I needed light-hearted books.
  2. Surrender of A Siren by Tessa Dare – Book 2 of the Wanton Dairymaid Trilogy. Also kinda cheesy, but sometimes you need a little cheese.
  3. One Dark Window by Rachel Gillig – It was very much a disappointment. The writing was quite messy and unclear. The characters were unlikeable and inconsistent and I couldn’t understand their motivations. The magical concept was interesting though, and I’m still very intrigued by the plot, but the good isn’t good enough to outweigh the flaws, and it was a struggle to get through it. I only did because it was a buddy read.
  4. Cujo by Stephen King – This is a reread but it’s been so long since I first read it that it might as well be a new read. As always, Stephen King is the King of Storytelling. There’s so much more to Cujo than just a scary, rabid dog story, and it’s such an incredibly look into the thoughts and behaviors of flawed human beings.

Book(s) I’m reading:

  1. Perfume by Patrick Süskind – It’s my irl bookclub’s BOTM for September and the meeting is this weekend. I’m about 30% in and it’s just so beautifully written. It’s a reread for me but it’s been a long while.
  2. I Fell In Love With Hope by Lancali – Just started and already I’m scared. It sounds like a sad and heavy read, and I’ve been warned to keep a lot of tissues on hand for the inevitable tears.

Last Week on The Blog

This Week

Feeling a little burnt out with reading so many sad and heavy books over the last month and we haven’t even gotten to October spooky season yet. I’m going to try to get some more light-hearted reads in between the heavy stuff.

How was your week? I hope you had a great week last week, and I hope you have a great one again this week!

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Book Review | Cujo by Stephen King

Posted September 21, 2024 by Haze in Book Reviews / 0 Comments

Cujo by Stephen King

Set in the fictional town of Castle Rock, Maine

The #1 national bestseller for Stephen King’s rabid fans, Cujo “hits the jugular” (The New York Times) with the story of a friendly Saint Bernard that is bitten by a sick bat. Get ready to meet the most hideous menace ever to savage the flesh and devour the mind.

Outside a peaceful town in central Maine, a monster is waiting. Cujo is a two-hundred-pound Saint Bernard, the best friend Brett Camber has ever had. One day, Cujo chases a rabbit into a cave inhabited by sick bats and emerges as something new altogether.

Meanwhile, Vic and Donna Trenton, and their young son Tad, move to Maine. They are seeking peace and quiet, but life in this small town is not what it seems. As Tad tries to fend off the terror that comes to him at night from his bedroom closet, and as Vic and Donna face their own nightmare of a marriage on the rocks, there is no way they can know that a monster, infinitely sinister, waits in the daylight.

What happens to Cujo, how he becomes a horrifying vortex inescapably drawing in all the people around him, makes for one of the most heart-stopping novels Stephen King has ever written. “A genuine page-turner that grabs you and holds you and won’t let go” (Chattanooga Times), Cujo will forever change how you view man’s best friend.

For the Reading Challenge(s):
2024 Audiobook Challenge

The Reason

I guess I’m making my way through Stephen King’s catalog faster than usual now that there are buddy reads happening. I love Stephen King and I would read him anyway, but it’s so much more fun when you can discuss the books with other Stephen King fans.

The Quotes

“It would perhaps not be amiss to point out that he had always tried to be a good dog. He had tried to do all the things his MAN and his WOMAN, and most of all his BOY, had asked or expected of him. He would have died for them, if that had been required. He had never wanted to kill anybody. He had been struck by something, possibly destiny, or fate, or only a degenerative nerve disease called rabies. Free will was not a factor.”

“When there was nothing left but survival, when you were right down to the strings and nap and ticking of yourself, you survived or you died and that seemed perfectly all right.”

“The two of them had discovered it was all right to open the closets…as long as you didn’t poke too far back in them. Because things might still be lurking there, ready to bite.”

“A woman doesn’t necessarily mind being looked at. It’s being mentally undressed that makes you nervous.”

The Narrator(s)

Lorna Raver. It was a good listening experience. Lorna Raver did some pretty decent voices and the sound engineering was good too.

My Thoughts

This is a reread and it’s funny because most of what I remembered most about the story was the scary dog, of course, but rereading it now I see that it’s so much more than that.

We get a lot of background story with the characters – there are several notable characters – and we start to care about them very much. They are all flawed in some way; we find out about their marital problems, career problems, car problems, kids problems, life-in-general problems. Even their (very young) kids have problems!

The characters here are so multi-faceted and humanly flawed, and it’s interesting to see how their individual thoughts and behaviors created a butterfly effect that led them down this road to Cujo. It’s an intense read, and so heartwrenching.

I’m also paying more attention now to the crossovers between his books and that enhances the reading experience even more. It’s been a while since I read The Dead Zone, but I remember Frank Dodd and I like how his story was incorporated here. I also just read You Like It Darker earlier this year, and I like that one of the characters here continues his story there in Rattlesnakes.

Also, poor Cujo. He’s the monster portrayed in this book, but he’s not the real monster if you really think about it. This is just an incredible book, so well-written, and I think it’s up there as one of my favorite King books (but there are so many of them!).

My Rating

⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐/5 stars.

Have you read this book? Would you read this book? Did you like the book or do you think you would like it?

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Top Ten Tuesday | Redeemed Characters

Posted September 16, 2024 by Haze in Top Ten Tuesday, Weekly Book Memes / 20 Comments

Welcome to Top Ten Tuesday, a weekly bookish meme hosted by Jana @ That Artsy Reader Girl that features a different bookish topic every week.

Today’s topic is Ten Characters Authors Surprisingly Redeemed (which characters did you not like at first, but grew to love by the end of the book?) 

Topics like this one are difficult because while I’ve definitely got a whole bunch of characters I didn’t like that I ended up liking, I can never think of them when I need them! But I did some digging and went through my books read and managed to come up with ten, whew!

Top Ten Redeemed Characters

  1. Glokta from The Blade Itself (and the whole The First Law Trilogy) – He’s a royally sanctioned torturer and inquisitor and does a lot of bad things. But he’s also a very interesting character and may be my favorite character in the series.
  2. Mary from The Secret Garden – She starts out really spoiled and contrary, which to be fair, isn’t really her fault, but becomes such a lovely person in the end.
  3. Colin from The Secret Garden – Another spoiled and annoying child who becomes a much nicer person.
  4. Ebenezer Scrooge from A Christmas Carol – He starts out so horrible and stingy that his name has become synonymous with stinginess.
  5. Jaime Lannister from A Game of Thrones (A Song of Ice and Fire series) – There are several other characters who have redemption stories in this series, but I think Jaime’s arc is one of my favorites.
  6. Naomi from You Deserve Each Other – Naomi and Nicholas, listed below, are the MCs of this book and they are both insufferable at the beginning of the book to the point that you don’t know how you could enjoy the story at all. I was happily surprised to be wrong.
  7. Nicholas from You Deserve Each Other – See above.
  8. Linus from The House in the Cerulean Sea – Linus wasn’t evil or anything, just naive and maybe too much of a rule-follower, but sometimes the people who are “just doing their jobs” can cause a lot of harm. Glad to see things change.
  9. Cardan from The Cruel Prince (The Folk of the Air series) – He was such an insufferable bully. I hated him. Then I loved him.
  10. Boromir from The Lord of the Rings – Maybe one of the most well-known examples of redeemed characters? Or maybe it’s just because LOTR is one of the most well-known books! Either way.

Have you read any of these books? Did you like any of these characters? Who are your favorite redeemed characters?

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Sunday Post | Sweater Weather

Posted September 14, 2024 by Haze in Sunday Post, Weekly Book Memes / 14 Comments

Welcome to the Sunday Post, a weekly meme hosted by Kimberly @ Caffeinated Reviewer to share weekly news and updates on what we’ve been up to on our blog, with our books, and book-related happenings. 

It’s Cool, That’s What I Tell ‘Em

Last week was cooler and we’ve started getting out the sweaters! This week is going to be more of the same. I’m really looking forward to autumn!

On the running front; I only went a couple of times this past week, but in my defense, it was mostly because husband and I went on a hike on Sunday and my muscles were sore for a couple of days! I made up for it by doing extra yoga exercises later in the week though! We’re planning to hike again this weekend if we can.

Other than that, I’ve been mostly just moaning and groaning about my sore muscles while totally exploiting them as the reason I can’t do anything except sit around and read my books! Bonus: school has officially started so I have more time to laze about in secret while husband is at work. 😂

All the happy things:

  1. Now that the weather is cooler, we’ve been enjoying more delicious soups! I made hot and sour soup on Monday, and the husband made bak kut teh on Thursday.
  2. I love my husband very much, but I also really enjoy having the house all to myself more often now while he’s at work!
  3. I’m really happy about that hike, even with the sore muscles. I want to do more!
  4. The book community with all the buddy reads is making me really happy. I’ve been there for about a month now and getting to know the people there better. It’s been really fun and welcoming, and I’m also having such wonderful discussions about the books we read.

The Books

Books I read last week:

  1. The Girl from Rawblood by Catriona Ward – I love the vibes, but I hated the audiobook production! I’ve heard a lot about this author and wanted to try her books, but I think next time I’ll stick to a print copy.
  2. I Who Have Never Known Men by Jacqueline Harpman – This was an unexpected favorite. It’s very speculative and I both love and hate the uncertainty. I feel it’s a great philosophical exploration though and it’s really giving me lots to think about.
  3. The Girl from the Other Side Volume 8 by Nagabe – Continuing with the series. I think this is one of my favorite volumes out of the ones I’ve read so far!
  4. Born A Crime by Trevor Noah – This was so good! I love Trevor Noah and now I think I love him more. I love the way he tells his stories; they are so eloquent, funny, and emotional all at once!

Book(s) I’m reading:

  1. Goddess of the Hunt by Tessa Dare – I needed something light and romantic for a palate cleanser. I feel like I’ve been reading a lot of heavy books recently. And now that it’s close to Halloween season, there are darker books to come!
  2. One Dark Window by Rachel Gillig – Apparently this book has been talked about a lot in social media spaces, but I haven’t heard of it before. I signed up for the buddy read blind and I’ve only just started reading.

Last Week on The Blog

This Week

I’m almost finished with Goddess of the Hunt, and then I’ll be able to focus on One Dark Window. I’ve got a lot of darker reads in the queue but I might end up reading a few romances in between just to lighten the mood.

How was your week? I hope you had a great week last week, and I hope you have a great one again this week!

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Book Review | Born A Crime by Trevor Noah

Posted September 13, 2024 by Haze in Book Reviews / 6 Comments

Born A Crime by Trevor Noah

The memoir of one man’s coming-of-age, set during the twilight of apartheid and the tumultuous days of freedom that followed.

Trevor Noah’s unlikely path from apartheid South Africa to the desk of The Daily Show began with a criminal act: his birth. Trevor was born to a white Swiss father and a black Xhosa mother at a time when such a union was punishable by five years in prison. Living proof of his parents’ indiscretion, Trevor was kept mostly indoors for the earliest years of his life, bound by the extreme and often absurd measures his mother took to hide him from a government that could, at any moment, steal him away. Finally liberated by the end of South Africa’s tyrannical white rule, Trevor and his mother set forth on a grand adventure, living openly and freely and embracing the opportunities won by a centuries-long struggle.

Born a Crime is the story of a mischievous young boy who grows into a restless young man as he struggles to find himself in a world where he was never supposed to exist. It is also the story of that young man’s relationship with his fearless, rebellious, and fervently religious mother—his teammate, a woman determined to save her son from the cycle of poverty, violence, and abuse that would ultimately threaten her own life.

For the Reading Challenge(s):
2024 Nonfiction Reader Challenge
2024 Diversity Reading Challenge
2024 Audiobook Challenge

The Reason

I really like Trevor Noah and I’ve heard such great things about this book, especially the audiobook as narrated by him!

The Quotes

“The first thing I learned about having money was that it gives you choices. People don’t want to be rich. They want to be able to choose. The richer you are, the more choices you have. That is the freedom of money.”

“Language, even more than color, defines who you are to people.”

“Being chosen is the greatest gift you can give to another human being.”

“You want to live in a world where someone is good or bad. Where you either hate them or love them. But that’s not how people are.”

The Narrator(s)

Trevor Noah, the author himself. I love listening to him, I wish there was more!

My Thoughts

I watched some of Trevor Noah’s clips on the Daily Show and his comedy shows and I really enjoy them! He comes across as really self-aware and a great person overall, but I don’t know very much about him. There’ve been so much praise about this book, and I’ve been so curious about him and the book, but I held off reading for a while because I wanted to listen to him narrate it on audiobook, and it was so worth the wait.

I love the way he tells his stories, the different languages that he incorporates into the story, his expressive style, his amazing sense of humor, and the way he handles sensitive topics. He talks about difficult things; his own life growing up poor, in an apartheid regime, with an abusive stepfather, but he still manages to retain his humor and gratitude. I love the way he adores his mother, and the way he appreciates his relationship with his biological father. It’s such a privilege getting this glimpse into his life.

I was already a fan, but I think I’m a bigger fan now after reading his book!

My Rating

⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐/5 stars.

Have you read this book? Would you read this book? Did you like the book or do you think you would like it?

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Book Review | I Who Have Never Known Men by Jacqueline Harpman

Posted September 13, 2024 by Haze in Book Reviews / 2 Comments

I Who Have Never Known Men by Jacqueline Harpman

“As far back as I can recall, I have been in the bunker.”

A young woman is kept in a cage underground with thirty-nine other females, guarded by armed men who never speak; her crimes unremembered… if indeed there were crimes.

The youngest of forty—a child with no name and no past—she survives for some purpose long forgotten in a world ravaged and wasted. In this reality where intimacy is forbidden—in the unrelenting sameness of the artificial days and nights—she knows nothing of books and time, of needs and feelings.

Then everything changes… and nothing changes.

A young woman who has never known men—a child who knows of no history before the bars and restraints—must now reinvent herself, piece by piece, in a place she has never been… and in the face of the most challenging and terrifying of unknowns: freedom.

The Reason

This was my online bookclub’s BOTM and one of the other bookclub members said it was really good so I got curious and excited!

The Quotes

“If you do something that is forbidden, it is the action that is the target. If you do something that isn’t forbidden, and they intervene, then it’s not the activity that’s attracting the attention, it is you yourself.”

“By remaining silent, they were creating a girl who didn’t know and who would regard them as the custodians of a treasure. Did they only keep me in ignorance so they could pretend they weren’t entirely powerless?”

“I understood that, alone and terrified, anger was my only weapon against the horror.”

“Sometimes, you can use what you know, but that’s not what counts most. I want to know everything there is to know. Not because it’s any use, but purely for the pleasure of knowing, and now I demand that you teach me everything you know, even if I’ll never be able to use it.”

My Thoughts

I loved this book! I’m not sure if I’ll be able to talk about what I loved most about it without giving away spoilers, but I’ll try.

This book is written without chapter breaks, and yet somehow it felt interesting enough that I kept reading, on print, without feeling bored or needed to take breaks. The lack of chapter breaks also corresponds to the story itself because the women’s imprisonment not being marked by any sort of time-keeping felt parallel to the story not being marked by chapters. There were also some other parallels to later parts of the story about not having markers. I loved that!

It’s a very thought-provoking read and I love that it had so much fodder for speculation and uncertainty. Definitely worth reading!

My Rating

⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐/5 stars.

Have you read this book? Would you read this book? Did you like the book or do you think you would like it?

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Book Review | The Girl From Rawblood by Catriona Ward

Posted September 13, 2024 by Haze in Book Reviews / 0 Comments

The Girl From Rawblood by Catriona Ward

In 1910, eleven year old Iris Villarca lives with her father at Rawblood, a lonely house on Dartmoor. Iris and her father are the last of their name. The Villarcas always die young, bloodily. Iris knows it’s because of a congenital disease which means she must be strictly isolated. Papa told her so. Forbidden to speak to other children or the servants, denied her one friend, Iris grows up in solitude. But she reads books. And one sunlit autumn day, beside her mother’s grave, she forces the truth from her father. The disease is biologically impossible. A lie, to cover a darker secret.

The Villarcas are haunted, through the generations, by her. She is white, skeletal, covered with scars. Her origins are a mystery but her purpose is clear. When a Villarca marries, when they love, when they have a child – she comes and death follows.

Iris makes her father a promise: to remain alone all her life. But when she’s fifteen, she breaks it. The consequences of her choice are immediate and horrific.

Iris’s story is interwoven with the past, the voices of the dead – Villarcas, taken by her. Iris’s grandmother sets sail from Dover to Italy with a hired companion, to spend her final years in the sun before consumption takes her. Instead she meets betrayal, and a fate worse than death. Iris’s father, his medical career in ruins, conducts unconscionable experiments, to discover how she travels in the Villarca blood. Iris’s mother, pregnant, walks the halls of Rawblood whispering to her, coaxing her to come. As the narratives converge, Iris seeks her out in a confrontation which shatters her past and her reality, revealing the chasm in Iris’s own, fractured identity. Who is she? What does she desire? The answer is more terrible and stranger than Iris could have imagined.

For the Reading Challenge(s):
2024 Audiobook Challenge

The Reason

I’ve heard good things about Catriona Ward but have never read her books. This was a buddy read so I thought it might be a good opportunity to try one.

The Narrator(s)

Liz Pearce, Steven Crossley, John Keating, Elizabeth Sastre, Jenny Sterlin. This was painful to listen to on audio. The narrators were fine, but the sound engineering was so bad and it really detracted from my listening experience. The volumes between chapters were inconsistent, and there was one chapter where the volume varied so much I had to keep turning it higher and lower as I was listening to it! The soft parts were so difficult to hear and the loud parts were sudden and hurt my ears. I didn’t enjoy listening to this on audiobook at all!

My Thoughts

I feel like I missed a lot of details and the nuances of the story because of the audiobook production, and it made me doubt my listening comprehension of the book. This book is told in multiple POVs, across multiple timelines, and it jumps about a bit. There were many times when the story jumps to something that wasn’t mentioned in previous chapters and I had to wonder if I missed something or if it was a stylistic choice. I enjoy time jumps and missing pieces of the puzzle as stylistic choices, but I couldn’t be sure that was what was happening here while listening to it. I had to repeat entire chapters of the book because I was so confused.

Having said that, I love the vibes of the book and the writing style. It feels very gothic and is reminiscent of Frankenstein, which is one of my favorite books. The vibes and writing style is enough to make me want more, but I think next time I’ll try a print version of Catriona Ward’s books.

My Rating

⭐⭐⭐/5 stars.

Have you read this book? Would you read this book? Did you like the book or do you think you would like it?

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Book Review | Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoevsky

Posted September 13, 2024 by Haze in Book Reviews / 2 Comments

Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoevsky

Raskolnikov, a destitute and desperate former student, wanders through the slums of St Petersburg and commits a random murder without remorse or regret. He imagines himself to be a great man, a Napoleon: acting for a higher purpose beyond conventional moral law. But as he embarks on a dangerous game of cat and mouse with a suspicious police investigator, Raskolnikov is pursued by the growing voice of his conscience and finds the noose of his own guilt tightening around his neck. Only Sonya, a downtrodden sex worker, can offer the chance of redemption.

For the Reading Challenge(s):
2024 Audiobook Challenge
The Classics Club

The Reason

I’d been wanting to read more classics, hence the reason I joined The Classics Club, and I’d been wanting to read Dostoevsky, and this happened to be one of the buddy reads in my online bookclub, so it all worked out and made me read a book I would’ve otherwise kept putting off.

The Quotes

“To go wrong in one’s own way is better than to go right in someone else’s.”

“Existence alone had never been enough for him; he had always wanted more. Perhaps it was only from the force of his desires that he had regarded himself as a man to whom more was permitted than to others.”

“The man who has a conscience suffers whilst acknowledging his sin. That is his punishment.”

“What do you think, would not one tiny crime be wiped out by thousands of good deeds?”

The Narrator(s)

Will Poulter. I was very pleasantly surprised by his narration. I loved that his narration was so clear and easily understandable, and I was surprised with his voices for the characters. It was really easy to listen to because of his narration. And I say this after sampling a couple of other narrators for this book.

My Thoughts

I had been intimidated by this book for ages and thought it would be difficult to get through, but it’s surprisingly easy – maybe because I listened on audiobook with Will Poulter narrating, but whatever helps is good, right? I did get confused with the names and nicknames, as is normal for Russian literature and fantasy novels with made-up names and places, but I was mostly able to follow along with the story and characters. I did have to refer occasionally to the physical book to clear some of the confusion though.

As for the story itself, I have to say that I don’t really connect to the characters and their motivations. A lot of it didn’t make sense to me; why they do the things they did, why they talked so much and did so little, a lot of things happened in their head and in conversations. There were a lot of thinking, and wondering, and existential crises.

However, there were discussions in the buddy read for this book that helped me understand some things better in regards to how the story relates to the beliefs and values of the time and place, and while I’m still not sure that I like the book, I can absolutely see why it’s considered a masterpiece. I also intend to reread this book again because I’m sure that I’ll get more out of it every time I read it, so maybe I’ll have more to say next time.

My Rating

⭐⭐⭐⭐/5 stars. 4 stars because I really enjoyed listening to the audiobook, participating in the discussions for the book, and because I think it’s really well-written despite my disconnect to the characters.

Have you read this book? Would you read this book? Did you like the book or do you think you would like it?

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Top Ten Tuesday | Books That Provide a Much-Needed Escape

Posted September 9, 2024 by Haze in Top Ten Tuesday, Weekly Book Memes / 20 Comments

Welcome to Top Ten Tuesday, a weekly bookish meme hosted by Jana @ That Artsy Reader Girl that features a different bookish topic every week.

Today’s topic is Books That Provide a Much-Needed Escape

I’ve chosen my favorite escapism books that I reread often; there are so many to choose from, of course, but I landed on these books because they also have themes of escape in the stories themselves; escape from imprisonment, from a life of servitude, from death, and so on.

Top Ten Books That Provide a Much-Needed Escape

  1. The Count of Monte Cristo by Alexandre Dumas – Every time I read this book, I am immersed in another world for hours and hours because it’s such a thick book and so intense for all of it. Sometimes I start the audiobook, thinking I can listen to it as background noise since I’ve read it so often before, but nope. Once I start it, I am in it, and nothing else exists. Bonus: The actual escape scene in this book is so thrilling!
  2. The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins – The whole trilogy is an escape for me. Despite the difficult themes, it’s a comfort read for me and going with Katniss on her journey makes me feel better about mine. There are plenty of escape scenes in the trilogy, and they’re all good.
  3. A Game of Thrones by George R.R. Martin – Again, it’s the whole series for me. I love some characters’ POVs more than others, but the whole story, the world, the political intrigue, the people, is all so engrossing. Too many escape scenes in the series to list, but also to be fair, many of them don’t escape.
  4. Red Rising by Pierce Brown – Another series that I love and get engrossed in. I just read the most recently released book this year, so I technically haven’t reread all the books, but it’s still such a great story to escape into. Some of the escape scenes in these books are so harrowing and incredibly satisfying!
  5. The Old Man and the Sea by Ernest Hemingway – Some people say this book is boring, but it’s one of the most thrilling books I’ve read because I used to go fishing and I loved the thrill of having a fish on a hook and not knowing if you’ll be able to land it. I don’t want to spoil the ending, so all I’ll say is that there is definitely escapism for the MC here.
  6. The Light Bearer by Donna Gillespie – This is one of my favorite childhood books, and I escape into it almost every other year or so. It’s set in the ancient Roman empire in the time of Nero and Domitian, and I love how smart it is. There are so many different kinds of escape in this book; escape from actual imprisonment, escape from wrongful prosecution, escape from tricky situations, biding-your-time escapes, lucky escapes, etc.
  7. The Ghost Bride by Yangsze Choo – I’ve talked about this book before as one that most closely reminds me of my own culture and family history. It’s funny that that would be an escape for me, but the way the story goes, it’s cathartic because the MC goes against her family’s wishes and makes her own way, ie. she escapes what her family plans for her. There are also fantasy and folklore elements which makes the story really wonderful for me.
  8. Life of Pi by Yann Martel – It’s a fantastical story, but I love it. I love how it’s written, I love the philosophical examinations, I love the parts that are calm as well as the parts that are exciting. There is escape from death here, and escape from the harsh elements of nature, but there is also metaphorical escape, I think, if you read deeper into it.
  9. The Neverending Story by Michael Ende – This story provides escape like no other. Bastian literally escapes from some bullies with the help of this book. That happens in the beginning so it’s not a spoiler, but there are certainly more escapes happening throughout the book! This is one of my favorite books as a child and it did so much for my imagination.
  10. The Princess Bride by William Goldman – I mean, who doesn’t love this book? And the movie? They are both so great for escapism. So funny, and heartwarming, and just so perfectly perfect in every way. Plenty of escapes to read about too!

Have you read any of these books? What did you think of them? Would you read any of these books?

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