Final Thoughts on the Women’s Prize Squad Longlist (Book Blogger Edition)

Hello readers!

In April, the lovely, brilliant bloggers Callum, Emily, Hannah, Marija, Rachel, Sarah, Steph and I came up with the Women’s Prize for Fiction SQUAD Longlist as an alternative to the original Women’s Prize longlist, which has left us underwhelmed. It was a very spontaneous decision as we discussed all the books we wished had made it, and it was fun to come up with books we would’ve chosen instead. To no one’s surprise, a longlist we chose ourselves was far more enjoyable to read. Obviously we are biased because of our somewhat similar tastes, so of course this is not a serious list and neither did we put a whole lot of effort into it. If we decide to do this again next year, we’ll make sure it’s far more diverse!

Here were our choices:

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I have now finished reading all of them, and have some thoughts. First of all, this was an exciting list, and thank you to everyone for making me read some of my favorite books this year. I was looking forward to reading the entire list and this is the main difference to me between this one and the one from the original Prize this year: it was actually exciting.

Women in Translation Wrap Up

Hello readers!

Women in Translation month is sadly over! I may be biased (I’m totally biased) but this is my favorite readathon of the year. I loved picking up new-to-me books and discovering new favorites, from creepy reads to magical family sagas. My original TBR had a few books more, but it was quite unrealistic to read them all anyway and I am glad for what I read in the end! I also ended up picking up a few I hadn’t planned on at all. There was not a SINGLE flop, they were all brilliant reads!

It Would be Night in Caracas by Karina Sainz Borgo / Review

As I said a few times, this was probably the most important book I’ve read this month – it shines a light on the situation in Venezuela through the story of Adelaida, a woman who’s dealing with grief over her mother’s death, leaving her all alone in a violent country where she isn’t safe and must make a difficult choice to save herself.

Women in Translation: My Tentative August TBR

Hello readers!

I am late to the party but I’ve decided to join the Women in Translation month challenge! As there is no minimum amount of books to read, it’s a very low-effort challenge to join, thankfully, as I have many other books I want to read this month still – namely a thousand ARCs I’m getting quite late to get to. The odds that I’ll actually read all the books in this post are pretty slim, but writing a post always encourages me to actually read the books, so this is me putting peer pressure on myself.

I decided against writing a recommendations post (for now) because I’ve seen a lot of the stuff I’d recommend be listed already, and I do already talk about translated fiction quite often in my blog, if you want to check out: The Translated Literature Book Tag, Reading Latinx Books Project with @cbookrambling, What I Read for @AsianReadathon. Maybe next year I will write recommendations (or, if I cave in, sometime during this month).

Michelle helped me with a few recommendations – if you don’t know, she has a TBR Recommendation service and I think it’s such a fun thing to get recommendations according to your personal reading tastes, it’s the highlight of my day when I get her email. I highly recommend it, especially if you struggle to find books for challenges or personal goals (like I do). The books she recommended to me are Like Water for Chocolate, Girls of Riyadh and Empress, all of which sound really great.

Here are some books I’d like to read for WIT:

Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead by Olga Tokarczuk

This sounds like a weird read and I own this for half a year already, so it’s high time I pick it up! The author is from Poland.

What I Read for @AsianReadathon

Hello readers!

May is over, and with it, so is the Asian Readathon, sadly. I am happy to have participated and picked up a bunch of amazing books by Asian authors and seen what everyone has been reading! I talked about my TBR for this readathon at the beginning of the month, and here is how it actually went down:

I started with A Madness of Sunshine by Nalini Singh, which was a bit of a wildcard in the mix, because I am not really into romantic suspense and I wasn’t sure what to expect. In the end I could not finish reading this because it was really not my kind of book – the characters were not much more than stereotypes, the plot was super predictable and the writing was a stilted, too descriptive and slow. It’s possible that after a while the book becomes very twisty and romantic and interesting, but I could not wait to see and honestly, I don’t think it will. I DNF-ed it at 22%. So I needed a book to substitute this one!

What I Read During My Staycation

Hello readers!

I ended up reading 6 (or rather, a bit over 5) out of the 7 books I set out initially to read on my post TBR for my Honeymoon-Turned-Staycation-Because-Oh-Well, which is pretty good! And in addition I read a few more books. Basically my staycation turned into a 2-week readathon! Not too bad 🙂

My TBR for the @AsianReadathon + Recommendations by Genre #representasian

Hello readers!

As many of you know, on May there are a bunch of readathons, and I don’t normally participate because I don’t normally own all the books needed to fulfill the prompts, so I just drool wistfully from afar. But this year, the rules for the Asian Readathon (created by Cindy) are so easy even I can participate! *crowd cheers*

In addition to the challenges below, I added a personal one: I could not buy new books to participate, so all the books listed are books I own! Which is great! My backlisted books are quite thankful.

CHALLENGES

1) Read any book by an Asian author.

This is a fantasy/sci-fi book that sounds lovely, by a Japanese author!

Women’s Prize for Fiction SQUAD Presents: Book Bloggers Take Over the 2020 Longlist

Hello readers!

As you might have seen already this week, Callum, Emily, Hannah, Marija, Rachel, Sarah, Steph and I got together after ranting more or less forever about the Women’s Prize for Fiction 2020 Longlist (underwhelming) and came up with a whole new list of what books we think would have made a far more exciting list!

Obviously this is based on our personal tastes, some books we’re really excited for and some we really loved and thought were truly powerful reads. We followed the same rules as the original prize, so that this list is quite comparable to what the WP could have been, if we’d been the judges (hint, hint). This is just for fun and was decided quite spontaneously, so obviously the list isn’t perfect and neither is this all very serious. We all love the Women’s Prize for Fiction and love finding new books every year with it!

The squad has some posts talking about our longlist:

Emily: 2020 Women’s Prize Take 2: Blogger Edition

Callum: What If? | Women’s Prize [Squad] Longlist

Sarah: The 2020 Women’s Prize Squad Longlist

They’re all fantastic and really, you should follow all of us and see what happens! Maybe we’ll have some flops, for sure we won’t love all of them, but AT LEAST there’s no Greek retelling this year and maybe only a limited amount of books about how motherhood sucks! Instead, we got murder, dark academia and even YA, which is really exciting for me.

If you wanna follow us on Twitter while we read and talk about the longlist, you can use #womensprizesquad.

• Bunny by Mona Awad / Goodreads
• The Body Lies by Jo Baker / Goodreads
• Ninth House by Leigh Bardugo / Goodreads

#FFFeb TBR and Recommendations

Hello readers!

Charlotte from Moonraker & Read Rainbows posted about the #FFFeb challenge and I decided to (attempt to) participate! To learn more about it, go check out her post 🙂 oh and don’t forget to follow her, she gives amazing recommendations and I love the aesthetic.

i got impatient and posted this two days early (oops) but. looking to sort your tbr for #FFFeb? i got you covered https://t.co/o9CWx48OLd

— charlotte 🐑 🐏 #FFFeb (📌) (@darashirazi) December 31, 2019

My TBR

Because I am also trying to keep up with the ARCs and backlist books I already own, I will try to adhere to those books for my TBR as much as possible. So I’ve divided my FFFeb TBR into priority 1 and 2, since I’m confident I can read prio 1 books (also I already own them) and then if the month goes really well reading-wise, I’ll pick up prio 2 books as well!

Click on the covers to go to their respective Goodreads pages. Priority 1 books:

 

What I read for #Tropeathon (Mini-Reviews)

Hello book lovers!

As you know, I participated on Tropeathon this week, hosted by Misty and Chelle! There are nine prompts, which I managed to cover with the three books below. So in the end I read exactly what I’d planned, plus finished an audiobook from last week. The Bride Test I got finished on day 2 of the readathon, so I felt pretty confident and considered adding another book to it, but then my life got crazy busy and I only got some time here and there to read – so I finished The Wicked King by Saturday night and devoured Binti on Sunday!

I started with The Bride Test, by Helen Hoang! I’ll be posting a full review of this, since it’s an eARC, but to sum up: this was a sweet, quick read and oh my gosh, completely adorable. ★★★★☆

I then picked up The Wicked King, by Holly Black for an exciting, fast-paced fantasy and boy, did it scratch that itch. This was twisty and dark and delicious to read. I can barely wait for book 3! ★★★★☆

Finally, on Sunday I picked up Binti, by Nnedi Okorafor and… did not like it so much. I loved the world, the concept of the book, the story… but not the writing. I could not connect to the character so well and found it a bit too dry and too fast paced. ★★★☆☆