Spring Break TBR

Now I know I said I wouldn't do TBRs anymore but now that I have a week off from school I have lots of time for reading. Here are the books I intend on reading. I might not get around to all of them but I will try.

This is another book I am reading for school though it sounds more interesting  than Staying Fat for Sarah Byrnes. Evolution, Me and Other Freaks of Nature is about Mena, a Christian girl who after speaking up for a bullied student is kicked out of her church and is shunned by her friends and family. It doesn't help that her brilliant biology teacher is teaching evolution to a class of devout Christians. This book sounds interesting to me based on the plot. It reminds me of Speak by Laurie Halse Anderson which I enjoyed. Overall, I have hopes for this novel.

The 5th Wave has been getting a lot of hype recently and based on the plot the hype is for a good reason. This novel presents us with the idea of a sudden alien apocalypse in present day. The aliens start controlling the Earth, shutting down electricity, causing huge earthquakes and even spreading the avian flu. We see through the eyes of several characters on a journey to survive when almost no else is left.

Maus by Art Spiegelman is a graphic novel telling the true story of the authors parents, who were Jews, living through the Holocaust. The Jews are portrayed as mice and the Nazis are portrayed as cats as you can see from the cover. This, along with its sequel which I will also read, sounds like a fascinating story of a survivor's tale especially after learning about World War II and the Holocaust in school.

Insurgent is an absolute must-read for me. It is the sequel to Divergent, a book I very much enjoyed. This series is very hyped up from almost everyone. If you are curious about the story I will leave my review of Divergent here. 

Forgive Me, Leonard Peacock by Matthew Quick, the author of The Silver Linings Playbook, sounds like another fascinating story about a man named Leonard Peacock who decides one day to shoot his best friend and then himself. I have never read a book from an almost antagonistic point of view so this one is something new. This novel lets you experience the mind of a mentally unwell person trying to find his meaning which I beieve is very important to read about.

I am reading The Mortal Instruments series (along with The Infernal Devices trilogy pictured below) by Cassandra Clare for the Clare-A-Thon, a reading marathon from April 16 to April 22. The goal is to read as many of these Cassandra Clare books as you can in this time span. This is all taking place to prepare for the release of the final book in The Mortal Insrtuments series, City of Heavenly Fire. In this marathon participants are eligible for prizes by completing challenges and sprints, the grand prize being a signed copy of City of Heavenly Fire. You can find more information at the event's Goodreads page here. 

Quarterly Update

Since the year is about a quarter of the way through I decided to give you guys an update on my reading challenges and goals. Also I decided I will not be posting TBRs anymore. Wrap-ups work well for giving short reviews to everything I read but TBRs make me feel repetitive and they are never realistic. Any way on with the update!

Pictured above is a compilation of the 20 books I have read so far this year. I have not completed any series yet but I most certainly have a few in mind I would love to finish. I haven't read any debut authors because obviously not many debut novels have been published and shipped to libraries but as the year goes on that will change. As for the Book Bingo Challenge you can see my homemade version of Reading in Winter's board below:

As you can see I have filled more than half of the board though the unchecked boxes have more than one book in their prerequisite. This challenge is going smoothly. I have filled one column and when I read a non-fiction book I will complete a column and row simultaneously.

That is all for my update! In a few months, around June or July, I will do another one of these for you guys to keep updated. For now see you later! 

March Wrap-Up

I have finally truly learned my lesson to not pile on too many books. I usually can only get four books read in one month not seven like I assigned myself. I have since then created a reading schedule to keep me on track throughout the month. This month I read six books though some were through my English class and some were very short. I will now give a brief synopsis of each book and give you my thoughts on each one.

Staying Fat for Sarah Byrnes by Chris Chrutcher was the first book I read this month. As I mentioned in my March TBR post I read this for school. My teacher recommended it to my class and I would get class credit for reading it so I gave it a shot. Unfortunately, it was a mediocre novel. Staying Fat for Sarah Byrnes tells the story of Eric Calhoune, a fat high schooler, who becomes best friends with Sarah Byrnes, a girl with terrible burn scars all over her face. The two get into all kinds of shenanigans like creating a newspaper that slanders kids in their school and becoming friends with a huge doofus who repeated the 8th grade many times. The problem with this book was the many, many, MANY subplots. Some were interesting like Eric's English teacher teaching a class where they discuss controversial topics such as abortion and religion or a barely mentioned plot point where Eric joins the swim team and fears he will become skinny so he stays fat for Sarah Byrnes. Yes, the name of the title is a dismissed plot point that is rarely mentioned. Instead they focus on...well focus isn't the right term for a novel with such a lack of focus. Seriously, there are subplots about Eric's friend's car which he painted with religious symbols, a jerk in the English class who bickers with Eric and even Eric's mom's boyfriend has his own subplot. This book could have been great if it had one plot and focused on a few interesting subplots, possibly the one they built up to in the title. Maybe if you love contemporary and the lives of really unrealistic teens interests you give this a read.  

Out of the Dust by Karen Hesse was a book I read with my English class. This book is about the Great Depression following the life of 13 year-old Billie Jo. She lives on a farm in the Panhandle of Oklahoma during the Dust Bowl as her family's crops suffer. This book is written in verse, short poems on every page. This was a boring, depressing book but it was inoffensive. I wouldn't recommend it but it was decent.

This was another assigned read. This is not the book that Anne Frank wrote but the play adaption written by Frances Goodrich and Albert Hackett. It wasn't very exciting but it was enjoyable to read in class with my peers, everyone reading a different part aloud. It is not something you would want to read for leisure but it was an enjoyable classroom activity

Peanut is a graphic novel written by Ayun Halliday and illustrated by Paul Hoppe. It follows the story of Sadie, the new girl in town who desperately wants to be popular at her new school so she pretends to have a deathly peanut allergy to get attention. Everyone falls for it and soon enough she makes a lot of friends and has to constantly be vigilant in order to keep her secret. This book was decent. It told a cute story with cute illustrations but at the same time the story was very predictable. The main character was bland and forgettable. All I remember about her was her pink shirt that she always wore to contrast with the black and white drawings. I even had to look up her name for this post. If you want a fast read or a cute contemporary pick this one up but it's nothing special. 

I, and probably most of the world, have hyped Divergent to the extreme so I won't go into detail. I even made a separate review of this book comparing it to the newly released movie where I explain my thoughts about this novel. In short, I loved it and I highly recommend it for fans of The Hunger Games.

Free Four is a short story (by short I mean a 10 page long ebook) taking a chapter of Divergent and putting it the other main character, Four's, point of view. I enjoyed it but I recommend it only if you are a huge Divergent fan you may enjoy it for a bit more information but there's not much to work off of for review.

The Impossible Knife of Memory on the other hand is a very special, important story. Hayley Kincain is a 17 year-old girl who is attending her senior year of high school in a new town, Sounds like your run-of-the-mill young adult contemporary novel until you thrown in one more element: her father is a war veteran suffering from Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. This leads to a whole slew of problems for Hayley to deal with including her father's drug addiction and alcoholism, debt, quick temper and depression. Along the way Hayley finds friends along the way including Gracie, a childhood friend suffering from her own set of problems and Finn, a cute boy Hayley begins to fall for as he falls for her. I  can't say I "loved" this book but I definitely have a deep appreciation for it. It is an important story that needs to be told. If you are interested in mental illness, PTSD, are suffering from those problems yourself or want to know about the life of a troubled teen I encourage you to pick this up.


That is the end of my March Wrap-Up. Stay tuned for my April TBR coming up soon!