May Wrap Up | 2021

hey guys it's sam and this is my may wrap up so as you all know i'm still struggling my way through reading slump but i did read four books this month and i dnf'd one so the first book that i read this month was hang the moon by alexandria bellaflore this is the second book in a companion series but you don't have to have read the first book to read this annie is the best friend of one of the characters from the first book and brendan is that same character's brother brendan runs a very popular dating app and he is the romantic of the story he really believes in love and loves everything about love and like finding your person all this annie is really over it um very exhausted with dating and with people not investing the same amount that she does and brendan as a kid had a crush on annie annie is like a few years older like brendan's the younger brother and so when annie comes to the city to visit darcy who's the character from the first book brendan ends up taking her kind of around the city and trying to get her to like believe in love again and everything kind of goes from there i really liked this this series in general i really enjoy i really resonated with annie's just like general exhaustion with dating she's not like oh the super cynic or anything like some characters are in romance books but she's just like man i'm really over it and i really liked that brendan is the character in this like straight dynamic who is like the romantic and believes in love and all this so i just really like their dynamic and everything about them felt very like natural and organic as far as them developing feelings for one another and i just found them really cute so i gave this one 4 out of 5 stars i also do have a review for that one so i'll link that on the screen the next book i finished was shadows of self at brandon sanderson this is my bibliothecary book pick so every month my bibliothecary supporters get to vote in a poll for a book that i'll read we also do video topics that i'll do we have a discord chat we have lots of stuff over the bibliothecary so i'll link down the screen if you're interested in being part of my content in that way this is the second book in the second mistborn series so this takes place hundreds if not a thousand years after the events of the first series and i can't go into much of it because this is obviously the second book but this is more like a fantasy western our main character wax waxilia misses full name is a like lawman out in the uh sort of like wild west area but then he has to come back into the town he's also a noble so he gets pulled into all of the workings of the city again and all the stuff that's going on there are trigger warnings in this series just in general for like some body horror type stuff nothing too bad but it's there i do have a review for this one too so i'll link that on the screen what i really like about the second book is that it's tying more into the events of the first series which i really enjoy because again what i really like about this world building is that one you already have this really cool magic system throughout both series but then also in this series you have all the characters from the first series almost being like legend and myth and part of like religion and stuff which is just like a fun element and there's a lot of stuff that's now tying back to the first series within this book so i really enjoy that as a big fan of the first series and also this book just had some more substance to it than the first one the first one was kind of like a fun little romp not really sure where it was going this one is definitely building much more on like a story and themes and things so i end up enjoying this one more also the twist at the end the ending for brandon sanderson books are always generally really good like he does really good with sticking the landings so the end of this was just like wow so really bumped it up for me and i gave this one four out of five stars as well i then ended up dnfing malice by john gwynne this is the first book in a grim dark adult fantasy series this follows like possibly five or six povs in this fantasy world there is there's so much that this is part of the reason i dnf'd it it's incredibly um info dumpy in the world building it was very hard for me to follow a lot of what was going on and i didn't even get far enough in even though i got like 200 pages in to really know what's going on but generally speaking there's like a bunch of different kings who are ruled by sort of like one king and there's all these mythological things popping back up because there's potentially going to be a war between two prominent gods and all this like magic is happening uh but again i didn't get really like far enough in um to really know all the world building stuff so the robotic stuff is like cool there's just like a lot of it there's a lot of characters almost all the main pov characters are men and there is one girl character not even like a grown woman in this first book at least but i felt like her pov was mostly just to build up the pov of her brother who's like one of the main povs and i just found it really hard to be jumping between povs which i usually don't struggle with that much uh because i couldn't really distinguish like that much difference between a lot of the different characters and there were a couple of similar plot lines in a few of the povs that were just based around like bullies um which i'm just like wow this is all i don't like bully plot lines in general and having multiple happening was not super fun and lastly one of the prominent characters which is very common in fantasy stories is this like younger teenage boy who's obviously going to be like sort of like a chosen one a big part of the story but right now he's kind of a whiny brat uh and it's he's also part of like the bully plotline so it was just a lot of things that were lining up that i wasn't super enjoying and right now i've been in a slump so it was really hard to try to push myself through this i tried to find the audiobook but i didn't really like the narrator there either i didn't think that was going to keep me very engaged so i'm putting this down not completely getting rid of it though because i feel like i could revisit it it seems like we talked about this on the discord um about because this was a group book that we were trying to read together and this book and series does seem to be very polarizing like some people really love it some people like give up on it it seems like if you push through it it is better i don't know but it's sad because it's a book in a series i've been meaning to read for so long and i really thought i was gonna love it and for me to be stumbling this much through it when like i'm a pretty experienced fantasy reader like even world building info dumping doesn't tend to bother me that much the fact that it bothered me and this like is saying something uh so yeah nothing was really keeping me super engaged about this none of the characters were like ones that could really push me through i felt so we'll see if i revisit this in the future but a dnf for now i would love to know if you've read this book or attempted to read this book what your experience was because that might sway me a little bit in either direction then i read people we meet on vacation by emily henry this is an adult stand-alone contemporary romance as far as the main characters of poppy and alex well we don't get alex's perspective but we do get poppies and they have been best friends since college they are polar opposites she is like a spontaneous traveling girl works for like a magazine about travel like all this stuff he's more of your like rigid stable like smart guy a little bit nerdy but they've been best friends for years and every year they take a summer trip but two years ago there was something that happened during their summer trip that sort of pushed them apart and they have not spoken since but poppy deeply misses him and she feels like her life is just like very stagnant and so she reaches out and is like let's take one more trip kind of trying to salvage the friendship and everything goes from there this is obviously a friends to lovers romance there's a trigger warning in here for a death of a mother that is in the past off page not like graphically described but is a big part of alex's life but this was very enjoyable i didn't love this as much as beach read which was emily henry's previous um book that i feel like everyone loved on booktube for the most part this was our household book club pick for this month so i will link that on the screen because that goes over all of our thoughts this was not perfect for a lot of us but was very enjoyable so i generally enjoy there's these like flashback scenes like previous trips they've taken and it kind of shows the development of their relationship and it does walk a fine line and it stays on like the good side of the line where these are two people who obviously have had feelings for each other for a while but during the last 10 years they have had other relationships and things and sometimes with books that have that feature there is this element of like emotional or physical cheating and we don't have that in here which is nice because that commonly will pop up in books with these kinds of themes and i did just find the progression of their relationship like very believable but there were points where especially towards the end when we're starting to get towards them getting like more together that i felt like we're like overly cheesy like 0 to 60 with the like changes in their relationship but i still really enjoyed it when i was reading it it was still really fun emily henry's books are like very addictive and i will be continuing to read all of her adult contemporary romance that she comes out with because it's good and i like it wasn't as good as beach reed which is like peak for me but very very good four out of five stars and the last book i read this month was night's shadow by sebastian de castel is the second book in the great coat series which is an adult fantasy series that is essentially like three musketeers feeling we have three characters well we have one main character that we're following like his actual perspective but we have three characters that are great coats who were the former kings uh magisters but feel very like three musketeers that are sort of traveling around the country because they are now in like ruin because the king has been killed they were perceived to have betrayed him and are seen as like cowards and traitors and falcio who's our main character is like the first cantor of the great coats who is like one of the people sort of in charge and they are getting pulled back into the machinations of this grim i would say kind of world um that is now being run by the dukes and just all these like bad people so since this is the second book i can't go much into it but i listen to these books on audio even though i do this physical copy but listen to my audio because i really like the narrator and i enjoy these but there's also like a lot of elements kind of going on here there is some like low magic stuff so this is not like a high fantasy is more of a low fantasy there is some like low magic type like elk me a little bit of other things but nothing super fantastical and is much more about like the political machinations and like fight scenes and things like that this also has like a fun kind of sense of humor and stuff with some of the banter and things but there are trigger warnings in both books in the series so far for rape and rape of men and rape in various different ways and like it's just used as a plot device a lot uh there's actually a pretty graphic scene in here which just felt like a lot and it's just one of those things that i'm like why do we have to have rape as like a main plot device for so many fantasy books so that's a thing that i don't tend to love also that this book fleshes out more of this like dynamic between falcio and this woman that's supposed to be like his i guess true love sort of but in the first book i'm laughing it's not funny and the first book there was a magical rape kind of with her but now they're uh they're meant to be together it's very weird in a lot of ways um but there are a lot of plot points end up happening um a lot of like this is a very like action driven pretty fast paced story a lot of different like twists and turns that you don't really see coming but the thing that kind of gets me too along with those other things i mentioned that makes it so it's not as enjoyable as it could be for me is the villains in here are incredibly like two-dimensional all of the villains thus far and antagonists thus far in the story are so very flat and just like we're bad for the sake of being bad and you're just kind of like or like just they're just power hungry but like that's it like that's the one note that they all have and they do really really horrible things and you're just kind of like why though so it's just kind of like gratuitous uh violence and torture porn for the sake of that uh which i don't love so i wish that that would get fixed a bit i'm gonna continue to read this series because it's very easy to read on audio and what i've been doing is listening to this mostly while i'm playing stardew valley and it's like my background noise and i love it for that so i think this series would make a pretty decent like tv show because of the you know action bits and i think a tv show would like flesh out some of the like character motivations and things um but overall this isn't like my favorite series but it's still like kind of fun while also having its issues boiling down to i gave this three out of five stars so that is it for my may wrap up comment down below let me know the books that you read in may what you're enjoying you'll also notice that i did a tbr for a readathon this month and did i read any of those books no i think i think night shadow might have been on the list but otherwise i did not because reading is not i hope i get out of this soon i don't like it here mom come pick me up so thank you all for watching and i'll see all of you guys soon [Music] bye you

Channel: Thoughts on Tomes

Views: 6,289

Rating: 4.9615383 out of 5

Keywords: booktube, book, review, goodreads, book haul, thoughts on tomes, thoughtsontomes, may wrap up, 2021

Id: z1n5Ou112YQ

Length: 12min 45sec (765 seconds)

Published: Thu Jun 03 2021