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Happy 2018!!

This is the first post of the year and is about…. drum roll, please…. books! This was supposed to be up in 2017, but I was in need of a little break after all the festivities and I got ill. It’s not the best way to start a brand new year and I’m still not feeling 100% however, I’m good enough to have my energy back to blog again. At first, I thought this post was going to be pointless since all the books I read in December had posts dedicated to them. So I was just going to repeat myself until I went to my Goodreads page and saw all the bookish news (and books) that I was collecting over the month. I’ll be keeping the 2018 releases that I found for another post because I want to search for more and prepare a decent list.

So now is time to do a quick run through all the books I read in December. I decided to do a Christmas readathon to make the countdown even more special. It’s an experience I want to repeat next year although I’m not going to pick this many books again. Beginning with the non-Christmassy books I read Carmilla by J. Sheridan Le Fanu, We Were Liar by E. Lockhart (I loved it!), The List by Johanna Bolouri (my all time favourite!), They Do It with Mirrors by Agatha Christie (still hate it) and Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them by J. K. Rowling (second movie please come quick). The remain books are set on or near Christmas and they are Silent Night by Mary Higgins Clark, Almost Midnight: Two Short Stories by Rainbow Rowell (Kindred Spirits was my favourite story and I’m not even a Star Wars fanatic), Dash and Lily Book of Dares by David Levithan & Rachel Cohn (you can read my review here), Winter Town by Stephen Emond (the art work was amazing and I could iditenfy myself with one of the main characters for the first time ever), and finally but no means least Winter Wonderland by Belinda Jones (a true winter trip to Canada that I’m hoping to do one day).

I can pass this wrap-up without talking about the book title reveal for Christine Richi’s book aka polandbananasBOOKS on Youtube: Again, But Better (as in do it again, but better). I’m so excited to know more, see the cover and get my hands on it. Also because Christmas came early, Veronica Roth revealed the new cover and title for the sequel of Carve the Mark and it is The Fates Divide. With a title like this, I’m really worried about Akos & Cyra, but we all have to wait until April to find out (or getting an ARC of it). I only have one problem with the gorgeous cover… the font doesn’t match the first book! Although is the same as the brand new paperback edition released on the 26th with the extra epilogue from the Divergent series, which I’m not sure if I want to buy or not. I already own both stories.

As if this wasn’t good news enough Kerri Maniscalco just released the title for the third book of the Stalking Jack the Ripper series and is Escaping from Houdini. But she didn’t stop there, turns out the series will be getting a fourth book. I still have to read the first one that is in my top books to read in 2018, which gives me enough time to catch up in the series before the released of the last one.

This next book, I just casually caught my eye in the bookstore because the Portuguese cover is so beautiful and, as strange as it seems, it’s print horizontally. I even had to open the book to make sure it was just the cover that was out of order. As the lucky girl I am, obviously, this book as to be the second in a series, I’m talking about Down London Road by Samantha Young. I haven’t found anywhere someone saying that you can read the second one without the first, so I’m assuming that if I ever want to get to it I need to pick up On Dublin Street first – curiously the Portuguese edition is also print in landscape. Can’t say I hate the idea of having out of ordinary books.

On Dublin Street

Down London Road

I also did a little booktubers Christmas haul binge-watching and I came across to Ariel Bisset haul. Lately, I’ve been watching her more because she’s a loaf of fresh air. She focuses on other genres besides YA like Memoires, non-fiction, essays, and even if that isn’t my cup of tea, between all that I can still find a couple of books that catch my eye. One of them was Sweet Bean Paste by Durian Sukegawa. By just one word and I was sold, Dorayaki. I grew up watching Doraemon and it was/is one of my favourite anime of all time. If you ever watched it you know that Doraemon was crazy for some dorayaki. In Portugal, at some point, we had something similar to it but instead of a bean paste in the middle was chocolate. It was the closest I’ve got to something similar to a dorayaki and that’s good for me.

Back to the book, the second thing that got me excited was the cover. It has pink blossom cherry trees and one of my life wished is to visit Japan while the cherry trees are blossoming. Since I saw in an anime I can only imagine how beautiful must be to have a picknick under a tree while the wind knot down little pink petals. It should be an amazingly beautiful scene. So I want to read this book and since it takes place in Japan it should be a great travel on its own.

With all this illness I haven’t had the mood to read so every book that I left unfinished from the readathon and prior to that I still haven’t got to. Contrary to my hopes, back on Christmas Eve, I did not finish A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens. For a classic is actually a quick read – says the one person that is still halfway. Welcome to Rosie Hopkins’ Sweet Shop of Dreams by Jenny Colgan is also halfway read and at this point is reaching a critical level. The more time I spend away from it the less I seem to remember and get excited about.

Back in November, I started 1984 by George Orwell knowing I was never going to finish it before 2018. I’m only 30 pages in so is almost as if I haven’t started it yet. And it was around that time that I got Library of Souls, the last book on Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children series by Ransom Riggs. If I recall correctly MPHFPC was my first book of 2017 and I read it in January. So if I finish the third one in this month I’ve completed the series within a year (I’m aware that it’s still one book left – Tales of the Peculiares – but it’s a companion so I’m not counting it). I’m still trying to find the energy to pick up any of these books before jumping in another brand new book. We’ll see how January goes.