“Mad Ship” by Robin Hobb

It takes a while for me to wade through Robin Hobb’s books, especially the Liveship Traders trilogy. I started Mad Ship, the second in the trilogy, at the end of February and completed it in early May.

The book is long, at about 850 pages, but my reading was slow because the story is emotionally heavy and emotionally charged scenes are dragged out. It makes me take frequent breaks from the story and thus a longer time to read it. Still, the world and characters Hobb has created are so interesting that I can’t break for long. I keep returning to the story, helped along by my buddy read with Emily at Embuhlee liest.

Goodreads summary:

The Vestritt family’s liveship, Vivacia, has been taken by Kennit, an ambitious pirate. Captain Haven is a prisoner; his son Wintrow, who bears the Vestritt blood, finds himself competing with Kennit for Vivacia’s love as she becomes a pirate ship.

Althea Vestritt, in training to become Vivacia’s captain, arrives home to discover her beloved ship lost. Brashen Trell, her old friend and shipmate, proposes that they sail to Vivacia’s rescue in the liveship Paragon, who has lost two previous crews and is believed mad.

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Judging A Book By Its Cover: Frankenstein

Once again, I’ve teamed up with Millie at Milliebot Reads to do a guest post in her weekly meme, Judging a Book by Its Cover, where she shows her appreciation for beautifully designed book covers.

This time, I contributed by showing the covers and illustrations in my copy of Gris Grimley’s Frankenstein. Hop on over to Millie’s blog to check it out! 😀

Milliebot Reads

This is my weekly post where I highlight and appreciate cover designs and the general physical appearance of books. We all judge book covers to some extent. I can’t say that I’ve ever decided against a book with terrible cover art if I liked the sound of the plot, but I do purchase special editions of books and multiple editions of books based on their cover art. If book covers didn’t matter, publishers wouldn’t put out so many beautiful editions!

This week I’m happy to feature another guest contribution from Zezee! You may recall a while back she sent me pictures of her copy of Lord of the Flies. Now I have the pictures she took of her utterly fabulous and grim edition of Frankenstein! All I’ve done is crop the images.

This is Gris Grimley’s Frankenstein or The Modern Prometheus – Assembled From the Original Text by…

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Tough Travels #2: Assassins

Tough Travels is a monthly meme that recommends fantasy books based on tropes, themes, and clichés cited in Diana Wynne Jones’s The Tough Guide to Fantasyland. The meme was created by Nathan at Fantasy Review Barn and is now hosted by Fantasy Faction.

Since I haven’t read many fantasy books, I instead create my list at the end of the month, after reading everyone else’s, and include recommendations from them that are interesting to me.

This month’s theme:

Assassins

Assassins are ubiquitous throughout fantasyland. Sharp-eyed readers (or even dull-eyed ones) will notice that their hooded forms often adorn book covers, and that they frequently appear – rather improbably – not to mind being the sole focus of our attention. Whether they’re spotlight hogs or camera-shy and brooding, most assassins will have trained for years and are very, VERY good at their job (i.e. killing people for money).

“The Strain” by Guillermo del Toro and Chuck Hogan

The Strain, the first book in its trilogy, is so many things. It’s a story about revenge, loss, the strive to survive, chaos and the destruction of society, fighting against evil. It’s a story about individuals driven by greed, anger, love. It’s a science fiction novel, both a novel steeped in science and fairytale. It’s dystopian. It’s a nightmare.

Quick summary:

On September 24, 2010, a flight from Berlin lands at New York’s JFK Airport, but no one disembarks and the pilots do not contact the control tower. It’s as if the plane is dead. When personnel from the CDC rapid-response team, doctors Ephraim “Eph” Goodweather and Nora Martinez, enter the plane, they find everyone dead, but no sign of how they died. However, there is a sinister feeling in the air, a tingle of fear, and as they unload the plane, they find a huge, ornately carved coffin in the cargo hold. This occurs at the cusp of a total solar eclipse with the city on edge waiting for something to happen.

Only one man in New York City truly knows what is about to happen because he has experienced it before — Holocaust survivor Abraham Setrakian. He tries to warn Eph and Nora, but no one believes him until it’s too late, until the eclipse starts and the bodies from the plane start to disappear and there are increasing reports of people attacking each other.

Top 5 Wednesday #18: Favorite Minor Characters

Top 5 Wednesday is a weekly meme created by GingerReadsLainey and now managed by Sam from Thoughts on Tomes. For more information on this meme, visit the Goodreads group.

This week’s topic:

Favorite minor characters

For this, I chose characters who don’t figure prominently in their respective stories. Meaning instead of side characters, such as Hermione and Ron, to use the example Sam listed, I instead focused on characters with minor roles, such as Seamus and Dean. So, speaking of Harry Potter, I’ll start with

Crookshanks

Top Ten Tuesday #25: Summer 2017 TBR

Top Ten Tuesday is a weekly meme hosted by The Broke and the Bookish. This week’s topic is a summer reads freebie, so I’ve decided to do my

Summer TBR!!

And since this was also the topic for last week’s Top 5 Wednesday, I’ve decided to list 15 instead of the usual 10 books (I’m just looking for a reason to list more stuff), though I hardly ever read what I place on my TBR, smh. Just once it would be nice to complete my TBR list.

Of the 10 books I listed for spring, I read five, one of which I’m currently reading. I guess I should count that as a success since reading 50% of my list is an improvement over the usual 0%. I still would like to read the other five books I didn’t get to so though I won’t list them all here, I’ll keep them in mind as I read through summer.

The plan for summer is to focus on reading my own damn books, so here’s what I plan to get stuck in:

Bout of Books 19 Wrap-Up

Well, my blogging has been off lately. Last week passed without me posting a thing because (1) I forgot to post this update and (2) I didn’t feel like blogging. I was hooked on the books I was reading, or speeding through them so I could return them to the library. I hate returning books unread.

Bout of Books is one of my favorite readathons and is usually the only one I participate in. For this one, I assigned myself four goals and 10 books, mostly comics, to accomplish in the week, May 8-14. But was I successful? We’ll see. Of my goals —

Read books checked out from the library, or at least start them.

Read comics.

Read everyday.

Read at home and before bed. No electronics.

— I did all except one — no electronics before bed. I think I did that for one night, but there were a couple events on Sims Freeplay that I didn’t want to pass up sooo I had to play before bed. However, I was surprised that I read at home and got started on my library books.

As for the 10 books I listed to read, I only read two. HOWEVER, I did read three other books that were not on my list (which proves that I should stop making TBR lists). Here are what I read and my ratings, starting with the two books from my list:

Spring Cleaning Book Tag

I’d really like to do some spring clean but, ugh! I can’t work up the energy. Instead, I’ll do the Spring Cleaning Book Tag, which I found on Dragons & Zombies. It was created by booktuber Jen @ Book Syrup.

The struggle of getting started: a book/book series that you have struggled to begin because of its size.

The Eye of the World by Robert Jordan

Well, this is more a struggle to continue rather than to begin. I started reading this high-fantasy series, which is composed of 13 thick books, back in 2013, but by the fifth book, I was too annoyed with Jordan’s writing to continue and took a break from it, which led to me giving up. Thanks to audio books, my interest in it has been renewed and now I look forward to continuing the series after refreshing my memory of those I’ve already read.

Weekend Reads #71: On Writing

Weekend Reads is a weekly post in which I discuss a variety of topics and mention the books I plan to read on the weekend.

Again, I hopped over to Sara Letourneau’s blog for inspiration because I couldn’t think of anything. In a recent Weekly Writer Wisdom post, she asked this question inspired by a William Gass quote (I focused on the questions rather than the quote in my response.):

How do you view the act of writing? If you could compare writing to other activities or process, what would you liken it to? Why? What other thoughts do you have when you read this quote?

Book Haul #34: A month has passed…

This will seem like a large book haul, but a month and few days has passed since I last posted one of these so let’s blame the abundance of books on the passing of time.

However, it’s been such a long time since I’ve bought these books, some of which I’ve read or mentioned in blog posts, that I feel as if I’ve already mentioned them in a haul post. So typing this feels like déjà vu.

Books I bought