Showing posts with label Mortal Heart. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Mortal Heart. Show all posts

Tuesday, September 23, 2014

Top Ten Tuesday: top books on my Fall TBR list

Top Ten Tuesday is a weekly feature hosted by The Broke and the Bookish. Every week they post a new topic that the participants come up with a top ten list for.



This week's topic is about the top ten books on our Fall to-be-read lists

Honestly? I don't really make lists like that, I just pick up something I've got on my shelf/kindle when I feel like it (review books are obviously different). However, all the ARCs I've currently got on my Kindle are Winter releases, so there's that. So the ten following books are ones I already own and really hope to get to this Fall. They're listed in no particular order.



Between the Spark and the Burn, by April Genevieve Tucholke
I really enjoyed the first book! I'll have to do a partial re-read and get to the second. I hope it continues the gothic mood :)

Angelfall, by Susan Ee
It's been on my shelf for close to a year and it's supposed to be fantastic.

Game, by Barry Lyga
I loved I Hunt Killers, and now that I've finally got Game, I want to read it soon. Also, the first one creeped me out so it's perfect for Fall. That season always makes me feel like reading moody, dark books.



Mortal Heart, by Robin LaFevers
I've got a shiny ARC of this one and look forward to reading it in a month or so :) I'm very curious about Annith's story! She's been a quite shadowy figure so far and she really surprised me at the end of the second book.

Hood, by Stephen R. Lawhead
I'd never heard of this book before last Spring, but then kept coming across it in the summer as an influence on books by author's I've read. So when I saw it at the second hand bookstore, I knew it was waiting for me. I've always been fascinated with Robin Hood, and I think this one's themed perfectly for the Fall season :)

Sabriel, by Garth Nix
I've been looking at this series for at least 10 years, I kid you not. I've owned a huge 1000+ pages omnibus edition for three years. So I'll be damned if I don't finally read at least the first book this Fall!



The Girl of Fire and Thorns, by Rae Carson
I've been hearing so much about this series and the cover and name make me think of Fall, so I hope I'll get to it!

The Lovely and the Lost, by Page Morgan
Another sequel I've been itching to read! Gargoyles. Paris. History. Yes, please!

Up From the Grave, by Jeaniene Frost
I'm so sad that this is the last Cat & Bones novel! But I need to read at least one vampire novel this Fall, and this series has never disappointed me.

The last pick: recommend me something dark and creepy! If it has faeries in it, cool. If not, that's also okay. But it has to be moody and horror-ish. Surprise me :)


Have you read or are you planning to read any of the books on my list? Does the season influence your taste in books? I noticed that I feel like reading a lot of high fantasy or creepy stuff this Fall. I could also have put Poison Study by Maria V. Snyder or Fire by Kristin Cashore on this list, they're both on my shelf. What about you?

Saturday, September 13, 2014

Stacking the Shelves: Lovely, dark, and signed dancers under the bell jar

Stacking the Shelves is a weekly meme hosted by Tynga's Reviews to showcase all the books we got in the past week. Those can be bought, won, gifted, for review, borrowed, print or ebooks... no matter, just share what you got :)


This is my first StS post since the end of January, so obviously I bought A LOT of books during that time. Listing them up here would be tedious for all of us, so I'm only showing you a small selection. I'm also planning on writing mini-reviews or a quick spotlight on some of the books I've read during my time away from blogging. So today I'm showing you...


The Classics
 The Bell Jar, by Sylvia Plath
Les Fleurs du Mal, by Charles Baudelaire
Richard II, by William Shakespeare
The Tempest, by William Shakespeare
Arcadia, by Tom Stoppard


I picked up the Shakespeares and Arcadia from used books stores in New Orleans and San Francisco. I'm especially happy that I found Arcadia - my only copy was in my Norton Anthology of Literature, which weighs a ton and makes for a bothersome re-read. It's my favorite play (yes, I like it more than Shakespeare) and it's not that easy to get a hold of, unless you want to pay upwards of 40 bucks for a whole collection of Stoppard's plays.
I've also wanted to read Les Fleurs du Mal for a very long time, but I'm always a bit wary of translations, especially when it comes to poetry. This edition has the French original and the English translation side by side, which is awesome because I know French, but not well enough to read Baudelaire without a crutch. I bought this edition and The Bell Jar at City Lights Bookstore in San Francisco (they have a whole room just for poetry!) which was a special thing for me to do. I've wanted to go there ever since I first heard about it in class when we discussed the Beat poets. It's a wonderful place, and it made me wish I'd grown up in that city. Or maybe I'm just a bit morose because I finished The Bell Jar a few hours ago and it really left an impression on me. I wish I had already read when I was 18 or 19.


The Long-Awaited
 The Lovely and the Lost, by Page Morgan
Dancers at the End of Time, by Michael Morcock

Technically, only The Lovely and the Lost was long-awaited. I was writing my thesis when it came out so the release kind of went past me. I really loved The Beautiful and the Cursed though, so I hope I can read it soon.
I read a lot about Moorcock while I was writing my thesis (about Steampunk and it's 19th-century precursors) but I didn't feature any of his work in my thesis, so I was really happy to find this one at a bookstore in Amsterdam last Saturday! It contains three of his novels and it's all inspired by the fin-de-siècle and Wilde and the decadent movement ^^


The ARCs
Mortal Heart, by Robin LaFevers

I got both of these at ALA in Vegas and you can imagine my amount of inner (okay, and some outer) squeeee :D I've already read Darkest Part of the Forest and loved it! It's also signed ^^

I also got two ARCs from Edelweiss:

The Fall, by Bethany Griffin
The Cemetery Boys, by Heather Brewer

I've featured The Fall as this week's WoW post, and I'm very excited to finally have the opportunity to read something by Heather Brewer! This one is a standalone, so it's perfect. She also has two series, but somehow the number of books always daunted me a bit.


The Graphic Novels
The Good Neighbors series, by Holly Black
Coffin Hill: Forest of the Night, by Caitlin Kitteredge

The picture only shows book 2 and 3 of the Good Neighbors, but I have them all, and they're all signed :D I got them at Book of Wonders in New York. They had so many signed books! And that was before I actually met Holly Black, and I already thought things couldn't get better.
Coffin Hill was a spontaneous purchase at a comic store in the Castro district in San Francisco. I've heard about Kitteredge's other books, and the artwork looked cool. Also, I wanted something to remember the store by. As for the Extraordinary Gentlemen, I've wanted to read that one for a long time, so I had to have it.


The Signed
The Book of Life, by Deborah Harkness
Game, by Barry Lyga
The Shadow Society, by Marie Rutkoski

At this point, I need to thank Kelly from Effortlessly Reading again! She gifted me Game and The Shadow Society. Gifted! Signed books! Just like that o.O I was flabbergasted. And very, very happy! I'll tell you all about my Amsterdam trip to Deborah Harkness tomorrow, so I didn't take a picture of her signature, but here are the others:

The "Disturb the Universe" note makes me happy, because it's an important part of the book and also one of my favorite sections from my favorite poem ^^


Alright, that's it! Any comments on my haul? Does anyone even bother to read my accounts of how I got into possession of the books? Anyhow, I'm curious to see your own new shelf-pretties, so link me up :)