-Today we are doing my, April, May?
My may wrap up.
We're going to talk about all the books that I finished
in the month of May.
It was a good variety.
Also before we get into what I did read
and how I rated it and all that jazz,
shout out to my currently reading an Interview with the Vampire,
which I have two copies of.
I'm only 40 pages in because I've been focusing
on wrapping up other books so that I can just fully focus
on this beauty.
I'm not very far yet, but I am loving what I'm currently reading.
Books that I finished, if you keep up with my reading vlogs,
I actually finished a couple of books in this last week of the month,
so there will be some surprises at the end.
Starting out with the Field's Gate, this is the first little novella
that I finished or a short story.
I don't actually know what it's classified as,
but it is 56 pages long and it was so good.
I'm not going to say much about it because it's so short,
and I don't want to say hardly anything.
It starts out following this girl who's been walking
for a really long time,
and she doesn't know why and she doesn't know
where she's going, she just knows that she needs
to keep going.
She arrives at a labyrinth and meets a leviathan,
and she knows that she has to go in, but she doesn't know who to trust.
She meets a lot of creatures and things along the way
that all try to convince her of who to trust,
and she has to decide what she's going to do.
This is 56 pages.
Again, it's very, very short.
Throughout my time reading it, I was thinking, "This is creepy,
this is odd.
I am entertained."
I was interested enough to keep going the whole way,
but it wasn't until the ending that I was like,
"Oh man, I loved that so much."
If you're in the mood for a short, creepy,
little story, highly recommend.
I really want to talk to people about this one.
It's self-pub.
Support self-published authors.
Next book I finished was The Life-Changing Magic
of Tidying Up, this is Marie Kondo's nonfiction.
I think she published this before she got her TV show
because she didn't talk about having kids
at all in this book, and that's something
that I would've really liked to have included.
I know she had kids during the show.
Anyway, nonfiction talking about how to keep your house tidy.
I really enjoyed listening to this audiobook
while I cleaned my house.
It was a good motivator.
I'm not going to implement everything she said.
I don't agree with all of her philosophy.
There were a lot of instances where she would say,
"Just throw it away if you're not sure about it,
you can buy another one later if you later decide
that you do need it."
That tip came up a lot throughout the book.
I'm definitely not in a position where I can just keep rebuying things
over and over again, and I think a lot of us are,
so there were certain things that it's like,
"Okay, I'm not going to implement that
because that wouldn't be helpful for my life,"
but that's okay. That's what a nonfiction is.
If I can just get little nuggets out of it that I can start implementing
in my daily life to make my life better,
then I've succeeded.
This book did that.
I enjoyed it.
I'm glad I read it.
I'll probably read it again.
I really like listening to it while cleaning.
I'll probably listen to it again sometime
when I need a motivation to clean my house.
It was a good time.
I recommend it. It was like four hours.
Then because I was enjoying my nonfiction self helps,
I went into another one.
This one was free for the Audible-- I don't know.
They feature free books every single month,
and this was one of them.
It was How to Build Meaningful Relationships
through Conversations.
This is a topic that I really love learning about,
and I've listened to or read several self-help books
on effective communication.
This one again is very short.
It was four or five hours long,
and I didn't feel like it said anything
that more popular books on effective communication
haven't already said.
That said, I still enjoyed listening to it
because I really like this topic
and it didn't do me any harm to get a nice refresher
on these things to be paying attention
to and implementing.
If this isn't a topic that you just love rehashing
over and over again, I would more recommend
The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People
or even more so How to Win Friends and Influence People
by Dale Carnegie.
That's my favorite communications, nonfiction, self-help
whatever it's called.
If you want a nice little condensed refresher,
sure, go for this one.
Next book I read this month was The Ballad of Songbirds
and Snakes.
I noticed I read a couple of chunkers this month,
so almost everything that I read ended up
being finished at the end of the month.
A couple of these you'll have heard about fairly recently
if you keep up with my channel.
The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes
is Suzanne Collins's most recent addition
to The Hunger Games.
We have the original trilogy and then we have this prequel
that follows President Snow, the bad guy.
It's supposed to be a villain origin story.
I went in nervous but hopeful and I didn't like it.
If you just want more of Pan Am and you want more world-building
and you want a look into what the games used
to look like back when they were brand new
and back when they weren't polished or very successful,
this book provides that.
In my opinion, it does not provide a compelling villain origin story.
I didn't really feel like Snow's story needed to be told.
It didn't feel like it added anything to the series.
I think that what this book did well could have been accomplished
in a novella.
I do expect to get an announcement for a sequel to this very soon,
and I probably won't read it, but I do think that some people
are going to like it.
There's a spoiler-free review over there if you want
more information about it.
I do think that people are going to like this,
but I also think that it's going to be a pretty divisive book
and a lot of people are going to feel the way I felt
in a lot of people are going to feel totally different,
and that's fine.
Next book I finished was Wheel of Time, book 14,
A Memory of Light.
I finished The Wheel of Time series.
That beautiful shelf right there that's dedicated to Lord of the Rings
and Wheel of Time.
These chunkers, I read them.
I have a spoiler-free review of the entire series.
Link it over there if you're interested.
I'm so glad that I saw this series through to the end.
It was an incredibly satisfying ending.
The character arcs are phenomenal.
Just watch the spoiler-free review.
I'm happy that I finished the series.
I think that this series has major pros, major cons.
I see why some people love it and some people hate it.
I have fallen into love it.
It's not my new favorite series of all time, but man,
am I glad that I read it.
Last book did lean really heavily
on one of my least favorite tropes ever,
and that did bump me out a little bit,
but other than that, very satisfying ending.
Also, I finished The Way of Kings, which now that I think about it,
actually I finished this before the last book,
The Wheel of Time, but it doesn't matter.
There's a whole review for this as well,
but it is spoiler-filled.
If you've read this, you want to see my spoiler-filled review link
over there.
Spoiler-free thoughts, oh my goodness,
this is a phenomenal book.
I already loved The Stormlight Archive,
but going back and rereading them,
now that I have a grand picture, seeing all the little things
that I missed the first time, that are foreshadowing,
that are building up to other things, it's been great.
It's been so good.
We're buddy reading the series over on my Patreon in preparation
for book four, which is being released
later this year.
It's hard because we're only doing a book every other month
because they're big.
It's hard for me not to dive straight into Words of Radiance.
This was just the best.
It was such a great experience to reread.
I did continue on with Fullmetal Alchemist.
Finally, I've been saying that I would do it for months
and I finally did.
I only read two volumes this month because I started it
in the end of the month.
I'm at a point in the series that I'm not liking as much,
which is why I put it down for such a long time.
This is a point in the series where the brothers
are not in the forefront
and it's expanding to building up other characters,
building up the world, building up the stakes.
I get how this will be payoff later, but at the moment,
I just want to follow the brothers.
I just want to be emotionally connected to them again,
and since they're getting so little page time,
I'm not feeling that.
Even though I really liked this series
and I find it easy to just fly through a volume,
I don't feel inclined to pick it up as much
at the point in this series that I'm at right now.
Did I say which volumes I picked up?
I read volumes 10 and 11.
They were great, but they're not what I want
from the series right now.
I am reading them because I know there will be payoff
for what they're building up now later.
I will continue reading them.
Then I also
read Avatar graphic novel, The Promise.
This takes place a year after the Avatar series
is finished and it was fantastic.
That's probably partially why I'm not into Fullmetal
as much as I could be, is because, oh my goodness, am I loving this?
There are some things that I feel felt a little bit off,
some character choices that I feel like they wouldn't have made
in the show and it didn't feel fully consistent,
but they were small things and it wasn't that big of a deal.
For the most part, I loved this.
I loved getting extra story.
I loved getting to see these characters
and what they do next.
It feels so good to have more content.
Avatar is my favorite show as of now, not as of now.
Avatar is my favorite show now.
I only recently just started watching it and I finished it
and it was incredible.
I love it so much and I want to have more Avatar content,
and I'm so glad I have it.
I'm currently rewatching the avatar series with Korey,
my husband,
and this time around, I'm going to be reading the comics
in between each season that I was supposed to have read
in between each season the first time and didn't know about.
I'm also working my way through graphic novels,
which are ridiculously expensive.
I'm probably going to be reading them on ebook
instead of buying the physical copies.
I will also be reading the Kyoshi novel
after I'm done with all this amazing content.
There's so much content, and I'm so excited about it.
I do want to know about what you guys want, my Avatar people,
what you guys want in regards to this stuff.
Do you want me to do a dedicated summary,
spoiler-free plus spoilers?
I'll do like half and half review for each graphic novel,
or do you want me to just read through all the graphic novels
and then do a compiled review of them?
YouTube has taken away their polls that I can put in the videos.
You can't vote on this anymore in my video.
When this video is live, I'll put a community tab up,
and I'll link that in the description so you can vote there
since you can't vote here anymore,
but this was such a great experience,
and I'm ready to be onto the next one.
I'm so excited.
Wizard of Earthsea.
This is a bind-up of I think the whole series.
I only read the first one, which was only 200 pages long.
It was really, really short.
This is an instance of "I get it".
I get why people like it, but not for me.
I really enjoyed this series for the writing style, primarily.
I loved her writing.
It was beautiful.
It was immersive.
It was atmospheric.
It was fantastic.
I also really liked this book for the magic system.
Oh my goodness. The magic was so cool.
It was very similar to The Name of the Wind
or maybe this one was actually published--
Yes, I think this was published before The Name of the Wind.
Name of the Wind is super similar to The Magic System in Earthsea.
It just didn't end up being the right fit for me.
For me, it read very similar.
It has a similar feel to how The Hobbit has
where it's very episodic and it's--
I don't want to say formulaic.
It's very fast, fast, slow, fast, fast, slow.
I don't like episodic, however you say that.
I don't like that storytelling, but I did really love seeing
how influential this book was and literature in general.
I really liked seeing some of the themes
that were totally unique at the time that she wrote this
that have now been so influential on fantasy.
I really enjoyed elements of this book, but overall,
it's just not really the type of story
that I tend to fall in love with.
I just fell in love with elements of it,
but I am really glad I read it.
I don't yet know if I'm going to continue on with the series
or if I'll be happy with having just read the first one.
I forgot.
There was one last book that I finished this month
that I don't actually know where it is right now.
Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell.
I read half of this last month, and then I finally finished it
at the end of this month.
The month was almost over and I was just like,
I got to see this book through, otherwise, I never will.
I powered through the ending of it and it was really satisfying
to finish.
This is, I guess, another one of those instances
where it's so fantastic and I get it,
but all of the elements didn't quite work for me.
This one worked for me more than Earthsea did.
Again, the writing in this is--
This is like my favorite kind of writing if we're going
to go more flowery.
It's a classical sort of writing, it's meant to seem classical,
and it's also intentionally nonsensical
and very, very clever and dry and witty.
I love this writing style.
It's also so atmospheric and it was easy for me
to just feel I was a part of it.
Again, I really enjoyed this magic system.
I feel like this is a soft magic system
really, really done right.
I loved that.
Also the characters in this story, oh my goodness.
I am attached to Norrell like no other character.
I love Norelle.
He's one of my favorite characters of all time.
I also love Strange, especially near the end.
Oh my goodness, what a phenomenal character.
I also loved their friendship and the many stages
their friendship had.
There's so much that I love about this book.
The one thing that made it difficult for me to finish,
and I really had to push myself to see it through,
is that it's really not a plot book.
I don't need a book to be plot-heavy, I just need some plot
to move it along consistently.
This book just didn't have that.
There is a plot to it, but it's not consistently there.
Really the focus of this book is in writing style environment
and characters.
I like all of these things, but I just need more plot
than this book provided.
However, the ending made it so worth it.
I loved the ending.
This is a book that I have mixed feelings about
because I did have to push myself to finish it.
Were it not a buddy read on my Patreon,
I probably wouldn't have seen it through,
but I'm so glad that I did because these are some
of my favorite characters ever.
This is one of my favorite writing styles ever,
and the ending made it so doggone worth it.
If you're a reader that loves characters,
environment, writing style, oh my goodness,
this is going to be the book of your dreams.
If you need more plot like me, it'll probably be a challenge,
but I fully think that it's worth it.
I'm also currently reading Jurassic World,
and I haven't decided yet if I'm going to push myself
to see it through or if I'm just going to bail
and focus on other things.
You'll see in the DNF video if it shows up there
or if it shows up in next month wrap up.
I'm not disliking it, I'm just not liking it enough
to really be excited about finishing it.
These are some of the books that I finished this month:
The Earthsea, I only read the first one,
which was like 200 pages and there were several eBooks
and audiobooks this month as well,
so this stack is very not accurate, but here it is.
I would love to continue chatting with you
about any of these books in the comments.
I post videos every Sunday, Tuesday, Thursday, and Saturday.
I'll see you guys again soon.
Bye.
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