Five Years of Favorites: This and That

[Music] hi everyone kate here for the next in my five years of favorites series and this one is kind of the outliers there's a little bit of everything in this i have one two three four six seven eight ten in this category and the first is coming home by rosamund pilcher so the timing of this is very fun i put that on my favorites i think five years ago and i'm reading it again i have not picked it up yet but i will be picking it up soon and i can't wait to get back to this it is just full of delightful delightful characters who um you want to spend a lot of time with and seeing them go through different trials in their life and uh take comfort in warm domestic things is just so endearing to me and i'm very much looking forward to uh picking this book up again and the next is a suitable boy uh by vikram seth and here i have it right here a suitable boy this chunker um i have a really fond memory of the summer that i read this in particular i read it with hillary from your robot friend she's not on um she's not actively making booktube videos anymore and i hope she does again at some point it was such a lovely experience we took three months to read this and so we were not usually in sync as we were reading it but we would leave you know boxer messages occasionally and at the end of that time we made indian food and we did a uh you know a video chat together this was before zoom um and had a delightful time just discussing this amazing book it is on such a huge huge scale where you're following a lot of different characters lada is the main character and it is kind of her mother's journey to find her a suitable boy um there's a lot of moving parts to this and i just found it so compelling there are some scenes uh that are more dealing with the politics of the day i did have to kind of force myself to get through but overall it is living in my memory as just an amazing reading experience and then right underneath that is the rose garden by susannah kearsley this was started at the beginning of a new chapter in my adult reading life and that is that as a kid i read a lot of um contemporary books books you know written within written very recently and then as a young adult and an adult i just mainly was reading classics and i loved doing that but then you start to kind of um not run out of classics but you just sort of kind of lose momentum with that and susanna cursely is one of the first modern authors that i read that i really really enjoyed and i am forever grateful to bree from falling for romance for telling me about susannah kirsley this is my first time slip book and a time slip is different than time travel someone is not setting out to travel in time they have no control over it and it is only when they are in certain places and the book is this character specifically eva um it's on the cornish coast like a lot of susanna kearsley's or no no only some of hers um and she is traveling back in time and the romantic interest in this does it say his name oh it doesn't but i just one of the best of all time uh and i just found myself so compelled to keep reading and i have read a lot of susanna curiously since then so i would like to do a video ranking her different books i think that would be fun um then i have i'm gonna grab my copy of that uprooted by naomi novik this was a fun experience because i tried it at one point and dnf'd it and i know a lot of people um really love the uk cover of this but i really love this because it's made to look like a newspaper cover i think that's fun i think the colors are beautiful uh but olive at a book olive kept talking about this book and i could not get out of my head and so i finally said you know what i need to try this book again and i'm really glad that i did i loved the darker atmosphere to it and it was very much um it has a slower pace to it and i really like that about it and it takes inspiration from a lot of eastern european folklore it's a little bit like beauty and the beast um and uh you know onyshka loves her valley home in a quiet village but the corrupted wood stands on the border full of malevolent power her people rely on the cold driven wizard known only as the dragon to keep the woods dark faces dark forces at bay but he demands a terrible price for his assistance every 10 years one young woman must be handed over to serve him without question i found it gripping and i loved it uh then the firebird by susannah hearsley this one is my favorite susanna cure sleep but it has to be preceded by the winter sea then the shadowy horses and then the firebird because it takes the plotline of the past from the winter sea and you find out more about what happened to those characters and it takes the modern day characters from the shadowy horses and has them grown up a couple decades later and um just i loved it traveled to russia and to italy and she just has such a way of writing that makes you incredibly invested in these characters and wanting to know what is going to happen next to them so i definitely recommend suzanna kirsley then before midnight by cameron dokey and this charged me so much because it is just a really solid bread and butter cinderella retelling it has some magical elements in there it is short and sweet it is just over 200 pages but camera dokie shows such skill in writing a really lovely version of cinderella in such a short span of time so i love that it's a quick read but no less delightful because of that and the next book is cinders the untold story of cinderella by finley aaron this is another great cinderella retelling in my cinderella chronicles project you know i have found a few favorites and this is one of them and i love that it has the trope of a girl dressing as a boy and that is uh the kind of mode that they get to know the handsome hero in and so they have this great friendship first uh before they fall in love and there is jousting which is fun because i don't read a lot of books that have jousting um and yes this cinderella character is just so um strong and uh tenacious and she's a very admirable heroine and then hannah coulter by wendell berry a really quiet gentle thoughtful beautiful read wendell berry writes kind of rural kentucky and hannah coulter is these little snippets from hannah's life seeing um some uh kind of highlights a highlights reel of her life but it's written in such a thoughtful way you feel like you're kind of sipping iced tea and sitting out on a porch on a summer evening hearing her tell you all about her life and it's beautiful the next one is sorcery of thorns by margaret rodgerson this could not be more different from hannah coulter this is a why a fantasy and in this the element that hooked me that made me pick it up is that the books are sentient and um our main character is framed for stealing one of these sentient books that has been kept up in a uh a library this book was not supposed to leave this library it has lots of powerful magic in it that should not be put into the hands of just anyone so this story is her trying to prove herself and figure out who it is that did take her book and the last one is christy by katherine marshall i have really been wanting to revisit this story this book is inspired by the stories that the author catherine marshall heard from her mother of her time going to teach in a rural school um and the uh the lessons that she learned while she was there she was very very young and impressionable and she also ends up meeting the love of her life and it's just a really um really compelling book just hearing about people's real struggles that they have and a lot of the children that attend the school can't even afford shoes um so let alone you know any materials and it's just very compelling and i loved the balance that it had between um the stories that you're hearing from the people in the community but also christy's own kind of inner dialogue and i found it so moving and that is all the books in the kind of random favorites category i hope that you enjoyed this and i will be back for my last five years of favorites video which is going to be um middle grade and non-fiction so i hope you are having a great day and i'll be back with another video soon bye

Channel: Kate Howe

Views: 901

Rating: 5 out of 5

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Id: l-WvkMUEEoQ

Length: 9min 18sec (558 seconds)

Published: Wed Jul 28 2021