I read and review stuff.

Books are my happy place and this is where I talk about them. Reviews/rants/recommendations.

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Evighetsbarnen

Date I started reading this book: April 17 2016 Date I finished reading this book: April 20 2016 So, having previously read and massively enjoyed Beate Grimsrud's book "En dåre fri", I think I had way too high expectations on this book. I have a hard time relating to and reading books that are too quirky. This book wasn't even quirky; it was straight up weird and odd. And that threw me off. On the plus side, this book takes place in my favorite neighborhood of Stockholm so a massive applause for that! Other than that I felt like the characters were really difficult to relate to and I got no grip of them whatsoever (that could be because they were all middle-aged characters though and I'm in my mid-twenties!), their struggles were very different from my own and the characters were all very childish and hard to like. Although I do know that's literally the point of this book, it threw me off a bit nevertheless. So for me this was a let down. And an unexpected one as well. I don't hate this book and if you're into quirky, rather slow and psychological descriptions of the lives of people, then by all means read it! It just wasn't for me I guess.

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Paper Tows

Date I started reading this book: April 9 2016 Date I finished reading this book: April 17 2016 My biggest pet peeve with John Green is that his books are all basically variation of the same book. Nerdy, not-very-popular guy that hella resembles John Green himself falls for a popular, pretty manic pixie dream girl and said girl is always quirky or does something stupid. Guy is always supposed to be very relatable and nice but always just comes across as tedious, patronizing (especially toward women) and a bit of a douchebro. The only characters in this book I liked were Ben and Radar, and Radar especially. I think the reason why I have troubles liking John Green's books is that they're simply not very believable. I mean really, finding someone who had ran away using *those* clues??? And how her parents were portrayed honestly didn't paint them out to be bad people. And especially Q's fight with Ben because Ben would rather spend time with and talk about a girl he liked?? If anything, Q came across as self-centered and childish. And honestly I don't get what's so great about Margo, either. She also seemed selfish in a way. I mean sometimes it's nice to read books where the main characters are portrayed as assholes but I doubt John Green had intended for these two to be seen as anything but perfect, cute teenagers. I also didn't get their romance at all, but I rarely do in YA books so there's nothing odd about that. And I didn't find the ~mystery~ interesting at all. I just read this book because I wanted to have read it I suppose. This is hands down the worst review I have ever written - and that is saying something! - but I couldn't even muster the energy to write this review properly because this book was so uninspiring. I honestly have a hard time explaining why I disliked this but I think it's definitely more to do with the fact that there's not much I like about John Green's books in general. He sometimes comes across as middle-age dude trying to sound funny and young!! Which he completely fails at. The only thing stopping me from giving this book a one-star rating is the fact that I enjoyed the road-trip scene.

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The Porcupine of Truth

Date I started reading this book: April 3 2016 Date I finished reading this book: April 9 2016 This book follows Carson and his friend Aisha, on an epic road trip quest to find his grandfather from Billings, Montana, to Wyoming, Utah, Nevada and California. The premise didn't sound that promising, having already read enough roap trip YA novels to last me a lifetime. And while this didn't stand out in any way, I soldiered through the first third and started to enjoy it more as things picked up. From when they got to San Francisco and onwards, I started to really enjoy it. This book quickly went from "oh well, another lighthearted YA novel" to being really profound and dealing with *a certain topic* that I'd only ever seen dealt with in one YA book ever before. These characters were deeply flawed and, like Turk put it, had "enough abandonment issues to sink the Titanic" and that's what I think made this novel so interesting in the end. I really liked these characters; even Carson - bless his heart - he was written really beautifully as a clueless straight boy but I could really sympathize with him at the same time. 

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Snapshots of a Girl

Date I started reading this book: April 9 2016 Date I finished reading this book: April 9 2016 I found this book at the library and since I never read graphic novels I figured I should give this a shot because the premise sounded lovely. However, this didn't do anything for me at all. I didn't hate it but I didn't really get it either. It really wasn't what I had expected; I'd expected it to explore gender, sexuality and race in basically any other way than the way it did (if you can say this book explored any of those things....because I don't think it did). And just to add insult to injury, I really didn't like how this book was drawn. So yeah, this wasn't for me.

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Djupa Ro

Date I started reading this book: April 2 2016 Date I finished reading this book: April 3 2016 In the small town of Ingelstad, it's always been them. The gang. David, Ludde, Paula, Tove and Jonathan. But then they graduate. Tove goes backpacking in Thailand; Paula moves to go to uni in Uppsala; David and Ludde go to Norway to find work. And Jonathan stays behind. Their lives are moving in different directions; that is, until Jonathan is found drowned by a tiny beach called Djupa Ro. I'm going to review this book with the intention of not spoiling it meaning I am going to be very vague. I figured out both plottwists rather early; one was very obvious but the other, main one wasn't. Anyways, this book deals mainly with loss, death, grief and survivor's guilt. I have lost people close to me and to me this book's description of the post-loss confusion that's the constant state of the weeks following someone you love's death is pretty spot on. I have dealt with the confusion and grief and have also seen just how differently people react to these things, which is shown by how the different characters behave when they've all returned home. I approve of the decision as to letting David be the main voice in this throughout the whole book; I think it wouldn't have been as good had they changed narrators in the middle of this or something. I love how loud and clear David's voice is throughout this. In this book you don't get to know the characters all that much, really. You meet them here and now but what they were before is unknown and that is also quite powerful, like their past doesn't matter and the only thing that does in what we have here and now. It was interesting seeing what happened when people that used to be close were thrown together like this; you can sense their past throughout it all but you don't know any of it, if that makes sense? I mean you figure out bits and pieces here and there but most is up to you to fill in using your imagination. It's also really interesting and heartbreaking how everyone realizes they didn't really know Jonathan at all in life and probably know him even less in death. As a reader that's rather interesting too; how the main character (because, let's be real in a way he is) remains a blank slate throughout the whole book. You don't really grasp much of his personality or anything and that makes me think that the other characters probably didn't, either.

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Rikitikitavi

Date I started reading this book: March 22 2016 Date I finished reading this book: March 28 2016 Rikard Wolff is a Swedish singer/actor and I decided I should read his autobiography since I found it at the library and I’ve always found him interesting. I’m not going to write a review of this book because as per usual I feel like I’m reviewing someone’s life when I review a biography and that just feels totally wrong. I have to say I really enjoyed this book though.

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Pink

Date I started reading this book: April 1 2016 Date I finished reading this book: April 2 2016 In this book we follow a teenage queer girl (is she gay? is she bi? WHO KNOWS. NOT HER ANYWAYS) called Ava who *gasps* likes girly stuff!! Like pink things and fashion and going shopping!!!! This proves not to go down well with her wannabe-goth, intellectual hipster of a girlfriend called Chloe. Ava changes schools to get away from Chloe so that she can ~be herself~ and starts hanging out with a gang that 1) really resembles the Plastics from Mean Girls 2) are just your stereotypical rude popular girls IDK nothing groundbreaking there. Ava auditions for the musical because that's what the cool girls do and due to her epic suckdom ends up in stage crew or "screws" as they call themselves, which basically is a band of random misfits mashed together in typical YA-book style. While I did like this book well enough there's nothing super memorable about it. It's a solid young adult book (and also written by an Australian author yay!!) but it's not something I believe I will remember in time because it didn't really make much of an impression on me. It was a quick and light read, something I needed after battling Six of Crows for ages, and at times hilarious too making me laugh out loud but it simply wasn't very memorable.I didn't really have that many problems with this book other than this story was way, way over the top and too dramatic and not really realistic. Because let's be real, the sort of drama taking up much of the plot in this book and the reactions of some characters is not how real life people would react. I don't think this book was intended to be realistic either, however; if it were I think I'd be rather disappointed in this book but since I don't perceive it that way I can laugh at it. I have a feeling it's supposed to be tongue-in-cheek and too over the top because it wants to be entertaining in the same way as your average teenage movie. In that it definitely succeeds to, I think. If you're looking for some light and rather funny reading that might not be too memorable but enjoyable nevertheless AND has female queer characters, I would definitely recommend 'Pink'. 

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Six of Crows (Six of Crows #1)

Date I started reading this book: March 15 2016 Date I finished reading this book: March 31 2016

(I totally hurried to finish this book today just so that it would make my 'read in March' list, not even going to lie haha). 

So, this month hasn't been all that great for me, reading-wise. This book is quite thick and I for some reason decided to start reading this during the most busy time of my life which has resulted in me having time for 10-minute reading sessions here and there which probably has affected my overall opinion about this book. (Longest sentence ever I WIN!!!!!!!!!!!) First of all, I am not a fan of fantasy. I never gravitate toward it on my own accord and I pretty much only ever read it if I see everyone on Goodreads rave about such a book. Which definitely is the case with this book and also the reason why I ultimately decided to get it from the library. Tales of supernatural things and magical land never really interest me, period. This book was on the 'okay' side of too much and I actually cared about the actual story. It was believable enough as not to throw me off course completely (I'm still laughing at people with Swedish names running around speaking what to me sounds like Dutch though....) and I actually found myself caring for the characters and wanting to know what was going to happen, which isn't something that happens to me all that often when it comes to fantasy series. This book was exciting enough and the story wasn't overly complex which to me is a good thing since super complex fantasy stories usually throw me off course like no other. I felt like a part of my interest was lost towards the end of this book and my initial gut feeling was that this book is a solid 3.5 stars but then I gave this another think and I came to realize that this book is simply better than that. My current being super busy with uni and whatnot has affected the time and energy I've given this book. And I know for a fact that I would have loved this book way more, had I had the time to read this properly. Anyways I really did love the characters! Such a broken band of misfits if I've ever seen one. My favorite ones were probably Kaz and Inej!! My broken idiots <33333333 Mattias and Nina were actually super adorable! And Wylan and Jesper melted my heart T.T I hope they'll get their heads out of their asses and commit already in the next book. Speaking of the next book, I will definitely be picking that one up whenever it's been released.

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March reading recap

Happy April! No April fools jokes from me though because I absolutely loathe that. Anyways this month has mainly been me studying my ass off, so I haven’t had that much time to read I’m afraid. My ‘read pile’ turned out to be surprisingly big though! Number of books I read: 8 Number of pages I read: 1958 The best book I read: I’ll Give You The Sun The worst book I read: OMG Queer: Short stories by queer youth # of books from my to be read list: 1 # of books that were rereads: 0 Books by female authors: 6 Books by male authors: 3 Books in English: 6 Books in Swedish: 2 Goals for April: start. Reading. Books. You. Own. FFS woman!! Don’t go to the library. Just...don’t. I have four more books from the library that I need to read but other than that I’m fully planning on reading books I own!  

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This Book Is Gay

Date I started reading this book: March 15 2016 Date I finished reading this book: March 17 2016 I wish I could have found a book like this when I was 12 and crushing hardcore on a girl for the first time ever. I was so deep in denial, I'd pretty much dug a hole all the way to the center of the earth and it took me another 10 years before I could accept the fact that I like boys and girls, and that that is okay. The things mentioned in this book are stuff we never talked about at school or in sex ed or whatever. I think I was 14 when I realized girls could like girls too (this being after a year of me rattling off crush after crush on various girls, my music teacher included ¯\_(ツ)_/¯) and I think the coming 8 years of my life would have been easier, had I been given this book at 14. It truly is an amazing resource for LGBTQ+ youth!! Being 24 and way too old for this book, I still found it a great read even though I knew everything it said. It was very pedagogic and funny but a few things rubbed me the wrong way. You could tell this book was written by a white cis gay dude ("Women can be sexist towards men!!" "Let's all just talk at length about gay men and maaaaaaaaybe mention lesbians too!! And oh, don't forget to squeeze trans people in there too!" "Trans women are men that want to be women!!!"). Some of the things that irked me were how focused on (cis) gay men this book was while poopooing misogyny (dude, if you haven't noticed it, gay men ARE often more misogynistic than their straight counterparts....so maybe mention that too? And also while focusing on gay men you ARE being misogynistic). I'm cis so it's maybe not my place to speak about this but from what I've heard actual trans people say, this book is swimming in misconceptions about everything trans. Oh and don't forget, this book doesn't mention nonbinary trans folks AT ALL. Because they don't exist...clearly. Also I sort of remember this book saying it was going to be inclusive of asexuals? Well, it straight up isn't. It explicitly said "EVERYONE LIKES SEX!!!" dude, no. I wish the author would have focused on the asexual spectrum AND the split attraction model a bit too. For a white gay cis dude this author did a good job but you could sometimes literally feel that he was a white gay cis dude while reading this.

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Wintergirls

Date I started reading this book: March 11 2016 Date I finished reading this book: March 16 2016 This is a solid three and a half stars. Like, the basic definition for that rating is this book. This book follows 18-year-old Lia, a girl dealing with an eating disorder and self harm whose best friend Cassie died. This book started off really brightly and I plowed through it like a steam train. And then my interest in it vanished slightly. First of all, I love Laurie Halse Anderson's books a lot. She's an amazing writer from what I recall of her other books that I've read. I think this book is also good but not as outstanding as her rest. Not having suffered from either of those things, the gut feel I get from this book is that it handled the topics of mental illness really well and I bet having a class of high school kids read this would be a good way of introducing that topic as something to discuss etc. For me, though, I feel like this isn't a very memorable book. It's not something I'm going to be mulling over for months afterwards. Having said that, I did enjoy this book nevertheless and it's a solid three and a half stars. ALSO! If you want to read a book where the main character doesn't have a sexual or romantic interest in anyone, go read this! This was such a refreshing read after having read one too many romances as of late.

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Lies We Tell Ourselves

Date I started reading this book: March 5 2016 Date I finished reading this book: March 11 2016 Before I start, I don't really know how to write about this book as it's about race and I'm a White person. I know I'm constantly speaking from a position of power so if you're PoC please let me know if I've overstepped the line! Sometimes I'm blinded by my own privilege. So, this book. This book handles a topic I'd never even heard of before - namely integration in American schools. During my 12+ years of school we never once talked about the American Civil Rights movement. Which is a shame and we should have. But that meant I didn't know anything about these things. As someone who isn't American and who was born in the 1990's, the events of this book were mind blowing. I had to remind myself that these things actually did happen because sometimes this book felt slightly unrealistic even though I knew this what was really happened in the 1950's!! It's just so bizarre how this could actually happen in real life!!! This book made me - a White person - deeply uncomfortable. I know us White people have a long way to go before we could be considered decent human beings but how White people behaved back then made me sick?? Just HOW could people actually think that Black people were dirty and unintelligent and unsuitable for White schools? Again, to me this notion that people really could be - and probably still are - thinking this is just so bizarre. Like some sick kind of joke. As for the characters in this book, Sarah Dunbar stood out to me the most. I can't deal with how incredibly brave students like her must have been, standing up to racist White people every day simply by existing. I really liked her character development throughout the book from the girl who first stepped foot inside that high school to one that realizes she's really so much better than her. I know Linda's character development should be applauded too but her character is basically the sole reason why I didn't give this book five stars. Again, something about her being so clueless just didn't ring true to me. I sort of have a hard time believing people were that stupid and clueless for real. Even though they probably were. I am obviously glad she changed her opinion but like I said, something about her character just didn't sit right for me. I feel like their queerness wasn't handled very much but I get why and also honestly, if you were to write a book about lesbians set in the 1950's I think you would have to deal with a lot more shame than could be fitted into this book so while I thought their sexuality would play a bigger role in this book, I'm okay with how this book handled that. In my opinion this was a very well written and sensitively handled topic about something that easily could have gone awry especially since the author is white (again I am White, and it's not really my place to be judging these things so let me know if you disagree!)

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OMG Queer: Short Stories by Queer Youth

Date I started reading this book: February 24 2016 Date I finished reading this book: March 5 2016

On one hand: yay lesbians!!!!! On the other I felt like nearly all these stories were badly written, could have done with some serious editing and came across as bad fanfiction at times.

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I’ll Give You The Sun

Date I started reading this book: February 18 2016 Date I finished reading this book: March 1 2016 (to be honest my initial gut feeling was a 4.5 rating but I rated this up anyways because I've been very distracted and busy lately and haven't been able to fully concentrate on this book which leads me to believe I would definitely have given this a five star rating had I been able to concentrate on it!). Anyways, I'd seen the hype surrounding this book and had deliberately putting off reading this book because I feared it wouldn't live up to the hype and I really wanted it to, but it did! I loved this book. I initially thought this would be a rather cheesy "girl and boy fall for the same person" type of book but it wasn't. It definitely wasn't. This is a rather complex tale of how easy it is to mess up, and about loss. No one in this book is perfect, everyone could and probably should have done better most of the time. But that's what makes this book so real; the characters are like actual living people. And I love that. The way grief and guilt were handled in this book made me die an emotional death over and over. At the start of this book I never thought the story would be so complex and so sad. Everyone was grieving, and not just the most obvious things either. I thought it was very interesting to see how even the smallest thing done years ago sent ripples throughout time. I especially enjoyed seeing Jude and Noah's feelings towards each other and how their relationship developed through time. Also, Noah Sweetwine. I want to be your BFF.

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February reading recap

This has been a, in my opinion, bad reading month. I’ve been in the worst reading slump of all time and I’m surprised I ended up reading this many books! Number of books I read: 8 Number of pages I read: 1958 The best book I read: Sum: Tales from the Afterlives The worst book I read: No One Belongs Here More Than You  # of books from my to be read list: 0 # of books that were rereads: 0 Books by female authors: 4 Books by male authors: 4 Books in English: 6 Books in Swedish: 2 Goals for March: Read more. Read the books you’ve picked up from the library. Don’t get more books from the library. Read books off your freaking list!!   

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What She Left Behind

Date I started reading this book: February 16 2016 Date I finished reading this book: February 18 2016

I picked this up at the library because I liked the cover ^^, Anyways, as for the actual story I found it very interesting. This isn't a story I'd normally be drawn to but I found that I really enjoyed it. I mean it contains some very graphic descriptions of abuse so if you're triggered by that you probably shouldn't read this. Okay, you definitely shouldn't. This story had it all: it was impossible to put down, interesting, while it was a bit predictable it was unpredictable enough to present me some epic plottwists and it wasn't too over the top. It's ultimately a very tragic story and from my own personal experiences with the matter, portrays the struggle of hating someone you should hate but who you also sort of love really well. All in all, I finished it in two days and I'm glad I picked it up. Probably not the most memorable read ever but I really did enjoy it nevertheless. I wish we’d gotten to known Matt and Jay more -  I do get why we didn’t but it felt a bit random to just throw it out like that at the end. 

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More Happy Than Not

Date I started reading this book: February 10 2016 Date I finished reading this book: February 16 2016 I don’t know, a lot of other stuff was going on in my life as I read this hence why I couldn’t give it my full attention, probably. When I first started reading this it seemed very good but my interest in it dwindled pretty soon.  The idea is splendid: a gay narrator (I have seen countless of reviews calling Aaron bi but he’s not. He explicitly says so himself), mental illness, racism and a dash of science fiction thrown in. I really did Aaron as a character. Thomas was flawfree too, and I feel like Connor would have been awesome had his background been developed more because there was some serious tragedy in that background. For a YA story it was pretty good but at the same time I feel it only ever scratched the surface of the promise it had. The story in and of itself wasn’t bad but it did so little with what it had. I’m slightly disappointed because I feel like it could have been so much better than this.