Wishlist Wednesday (1)

Originally created by Pen To Paper

Wishlist Wednesday is a book blog hop where we will post about one book per week that has been on our wishlist for some time, or just added (it’s entirely up to you), that we can’t wait to get off the wishlist and onto our wonderful shelves.

Lena Duchannes is unlike anyone the small Southern town of Gatlin has ever seen, and she's struggling to conceal her power and a curse that has haunted her family for generations. But even within the overgrown gardens, murky swamps and crumbling graveyards of the forgotten South, a secret cannot stay hidden forever.

Ethan Wate, who has been counting the months until he can escape from Gatlin, is haunted by dreams of a beautiful girl he has never met. When Lena moves into the town's oldest and most infamous plantation, Ethan is inexplicably drawn to her and determined to uncover the connection between them.

In a town with no surprises, one secret could change everything.

I really don't like seeing films before I've read the book it's based upon, I find that if I do that I imagine the characters in the book as the actors that play them - this also happens when I see trailers before or half way through books, it ruins the whole experience of reading a book for me. 

However much I want to read this book before the film comes out, I doubt that it's actually going to happen because I'm currently on a book buying ban which I plan to stick to until I've read at least twenty books that are currently on my shelves.

But I digress, I'm really eager to read this book as it sounds wonderful and I've heard so many good things about it, it just sounds really interesting. The cover, I admit, was the thing that drew me to the book originally; it's absolutely beautiful and I love any cover with gorgeous typography. Ergh, so lovely, and the contrast between the purple and the black - it reminds me of the gone series by Michael Grant cover wise and that series was one of my favourite cover sets. 

New Years Resolutions 2013

So, it's a new year, and with new years comes the new years resolutions. The dreaded new years resolutions which are made every year with the sole intention of keeping them throughout the entirety of the year until the end of the first week of January - well that's how it happens every year in my life. 

This year, however, I want to make a positive change with my life and start doing things that I enjoy and want to do. I'm fed up of procrastinating and not doing anything productive 90% of the time, I want to actually do something with my life and say to myself at the end of the year, 'I've achieved something' or 'I've kept to something'. That in itself would make my year, period.

So here we have it. Below I've listed my new years resolutions and I will look back at this at the end of the year and see how it's come along or not as it may be. 

1. Read 100 books. On Goodreads I have challenged myself to read 100 books. Now, I'm not sure if this is me being a little bit too ambitious but I'm going to try my hardest to complete this by the end of the year and if I don't make it, fair enough but I'm not going to decrease the number to compensate for what I haven't done.
2. Read a variety of genres. I am participating in the 2013 Genre Variety Reading Challenge on A Daydreamer's Thoughts blog. I have a tendency to read YA all of the time and I've decided that it's time to broaden my horizons and read a lot more genres as I might be pleasantly surprised with what I find. I plan to read 24 different genres.
3. Finish book series. Any series of books that I have started in the past I plan to finish. I always read book 1, not want to read the second one straight away, read something else and then forget that I'm meant to read the other books in the series. A few examples of this are The Mortal Instruments, The Infernal Devices, His Dark Materials, Percy Jackson and the Olympians. 
4. Blog every day. I need to write something every day on this blog and keep to it for once. If I'm away for a week I will create posts that will be posted on the particular days that I am not around.  I'm going to be creating a sort of schedule in a little while as well.
5. Draw every day. I love art and design and I want to get back into drawing and sketching for fun, so I want to draw something, anything at least once a day - these will be posted on my tumblr if anyone's interested as well.
6. Read books I have. I have a load of books on my bookshelves at home that I have had since I was little but I haven't read, alongside a load of books that I've read but really want to reread as I haven't completed the series and have forgotten everything about them and where I left off. I need to stop buying as many books and just read what I have for a little bit. I'm not setting myself a goal of how many books off my shelf I want to be read but I want to read quite a few is all I will say. Funnily enough I've got about £40 worth of book vouchers to spend this year from christmas presents I received - whoops.

Do you have any new years resolutions? 

Book Haul | Christmas 2012

"Pretties" by Scott Westerfeld (Spoilers)

Pretties is the sequel to the amazing book Uglies by Scott Westerfeld and I wasn't too sure if I wanted to read this book or not but I decided to give it a go anyways because if you're going to start a series, you may as well carry on from where you left off - doomed words that will haunt me, I fear.

*This will have spoilers from Uglies and Pretties in it so stop here if you haven't read the first book*

Tally has now given herself up and has officially had the operation to make herself a 'Pretty' a perfect specimen of a human being - she is good looking, popular and is having the time of her life in this high-tech drunken world that she has been thrust into. The only thing tugging at the back of her mind is the real reason she came to New Pretty Town in the first place - to test the cure, and now she is in a struggle to release the grips of this pretty world from herself and to find out the horrible truths about everything around her.

In New Pretty Town they had a language or a slang that they used amongst each other that wasn't used in the first book at all, words like 'dizzy-making', 'bubbly' and 'bogus' were used constantly throughout this book without a proper introduction into the lingo. I felt as though I was thrown into the deep end of this book with this and was just expected to know exactly what everything was and what everything meant which I most certainly did not. Due to this, I found myself not really understanding half of what was going on until I'd read about three quarters of the book and that was when things started to get a little bit more interesting.

Tally was part of a clique who called themselves the Crims - this was made up of people who were trouble makers, or 'tricky', in their ugly life - they would go around trying to do the most rebellious things that were possible to do to impress one another and it seemed a little pathetic for my likings. It just seemed as though they were trying to fit in, and when it came to light about three quarters of the way in that the reason that they were set up in the first place was so they could escape and find a cure came as a big surprise as it seemed totally out of character for them and was slightly random. It was as if Westerfeld thought things were getting a little too boring so added something to liven it up a little, but it didn't really have the intended effect in my eyes, it just made me think it wasn't really thought out and if this was made clear near the beginning, everything would have made a whole lot more sense than it did.

The characters were bland as well - each individual person seemed to blend into another one and other than Tally, Zane, Shay and Peris (who barely made it into the book) I couldn't really name anyone else. There was no real development, and if there was it was only to make them more pathetic and boring. I didn't like Tally and Zane's relationship one bit, there was no growth, no emotion, no realistic qualities, it was as if two actors were set to act a romance scene in a play but didn't connect and have chemistry at all - it just read like a bad screen play. One minute they're silent, the next they're in love with eachother, it just doesn't make any sense.

There was something about this book that I just didn't like but for once I just can't put my finger on it, it definitely wasn't as good as the first book and now I'm not even sure I will read the third instalment. I was thoroughly disappointed with this book.

★★

"The Boy Who Sneaks In My Bedroom Window" by Kirsty Moseley

Amber Walker and her older brother, Jake, have an abusive father. One night her brother's best friend, Liam, sees her crying and climbs through her bedroom window to comfort her. That one action sparks a love/hate relationship that spans over the next eight years.

Liam is now a confident, flirty player who has never had a girlfriend before. Amber is still emotionally scarred from the abuse she suffered at the hands of her father. Together they make an unlikely pair.

Their relationship has always been a rocky one, but what happens when Amber starts to view her brother's best friend a little differently? And how will her brother, who has always been a little overprotective, react when he finds out that the pair are growing closer?

When I first read the synopsis, I thought this could be an interesting book - abused child, unlikely romance blooming - I was wrong. The abuse is just a sub sub sub plot to the 'romance' that happened towards the beginning of the book, in fact, the abuse only just manages to peak it's head through the shallow dating talk that takes up the majority of the book. This book had so much potential to be a gradual love but it just jumped in at the deep end and took one predictable turn after another to the extent that I already knew the ending of the book and what was going to happen.

This book didn't even have a storyline, I can't even describe what actually happened to be quite honest. It was just a mess of all the usual 'love' stereotypes. Nothing of real importance happened and when it did happen it was only minor to the everlasting love that was blossoming before our very eyes - cue the fingers down throat.

The characters were the most shallow I have ever read about - you can't make every single girl in the school ridiculously slutty just so the main character doesn't look that bad. All they kept doing was flirting with every single guy, talking about sex and even the guys were exactly the same, it was just one big sex orientated school with no life or personality. Everyone in this world seemed to be living in cloud cuckoo land with enough hypocrisy to share around as well - as well as being shallow they were also quite stupid characters and even the adults didn't have an ounce of sense in them between all of them, it was just a mass palaver of idiocy.

Dreadful is the only way I can describe the writing - if I ever read 'fine ass', 's/he purred' or 'flirty wink' again in my life I think I might rip my hair out. I don't even think Moseley has even heard of a thesaurus because if she had she probably could have come up with about a dozen other words to use in replacement for these, or maybe she should just write the book again because it was one of the worst books I have read all year and I have no idea how it got so many stars on goodreads - maybe all the hormonal teens were reading this one, and if they were this is the most horrible influence any young girl could read in their most vulnerable years when surrounded by sex in their everyday life. 

I can't even go on...

★

30 Day Book Challenge [4/30]

Day 4 - A book you lent out once, never got back and miss

I don't think I have ever lent out a book. A lot of my friends don't actually read and I don't think I've ever actually wanted them to borrow any of my books anyways - I'd be too afraid that they'd ruin them. I like my books to be perfect, not bent, not dog eared etc. and I don't believe that if I lent them out to a lot of my friends that they'd come back in the same condition I lent them out. 

I'm just a little bit too over protective over my books is all.

"Pandemonium" by Lauren Oliver

PANDEMONIUM 
Author: Lauren Oliver
Publisher: Hodder and Stoughton
Published: 2012

SYNOPSIS

Lena's been to the very edge. She's questioned love and the life-changing and agonising choices that come with it. She's made her decision. But can she survive the consequences?

REVIEW

I think this is the very first time that I've loved a second book more than the first one - it was absolutely stunning and the development was amazing. In the first book you were just getting to know Lena and she was growing but in Pandemonium you felt as though she'd got a lot stronger than she was and she became the kick-ass character that she was always bound to be. In fact all of the characters were amazing I thought and they all had a lot of depth to them as they weren't all obviously stereotypical people who you could guess what they would be like.

The plot was rather predictable at times, but this is one of those times where predictability is a good thing. Although you knew what was going to happen to a certain extent it was still quite shocking to read and kept the tension up all the way through the book. In Delirium I found Oliver's writing to be too descriptive and I felt as though if she'd toned down the wordiness of the novel it would have been better - this was the main thing I noticed that had changed in Pandemonium; it got to the point without being too vague, it got enough description but not the ridiculous amount like in the first book.

As stated before, the twists were quite predictable but the end, oh my goodness, the end. I was not expecting what I was reading for the first time throughout the book and when it was getting to the climax of the book I can honestly say that I was shocked at what happened. I was so excited reading this book, that for the first time I wanted to read the third one straight away - but to my dismay I have to wait until March 2013 which well and truly is awful.

Lauren Oliver, you are evil and yet amazingly talented to leave me hanging like that!

★★★★★