What books will you choose?
Welcome, welcome, welcome!
It’s that time again—Spring, if you can believe it.
Time to open up the windows, air out the house, turn on some jams, and clean house.
And since our house is right in the middle of Spring cleaning, I’ll be keeping it short and sweet today with this great book tag I stumbled over @ Mybookworld24.
The questions here are interesting so you end up sharing books that are also pretty interesting in response.
These are mine.
Enjoy!
(Disclaimer: This post contains affiliate links. Any purchases made through my links may earn me a small commission at no additional cost to you.)
The struggle of getting started: a book/book series that you have struggled to begin because of its size?
The Diviners by Libba Bray
The Passage by Justin Cronin
Fairy Tale by Stephen King
These are the kind of books you take time off for, snuggle into a pile of pillows with, and don’t come up for air until it’s done.
None of which I have the time for at the moment.. but soon.
Cleaning out the closet: a book and/or book series you want to unhaul?
Survive the Night by Riley Sager
It’s November 1991. Nirvana’s in the tape deck, George H. W. Bush is in the White House, and movie-obsessed college student Charlie Jordan is in a car with a man who might be a serial killer.
Josh Baxter, the man behind the wheel, is a virtual stranger to Charlie. They met at the campus ride board, each looking to share the long drive home to Ohio. Both have good reasons for wanting to get away. For Charlie, it’s guilt and grief over the shocking murder of her best friend, who became the third victim of the man known as the Campus Killer. For Josh, it’s to help care for his sick father—or so he says.
The longer she sits in the passenger seat, the more Charlie notices there’s something suspicious about Josh, from the holes in his story about his father to how he doesn’t want her to see inside the trunk. As they travel an empty, twisty highway in the dead of night, an increasingly anxious Charlie begins to think she’s sharing a car with the Campus Killer. Is Josh truly dangerous? Or is Charlie’s jittery mistrust merely a figment of her movie-fueled imagination?
One thing is certain—Charlie has nowhere to run and no way to call for help. Trapped in a terrifying game of cat and mouse played out on pitch-black roads and in neon-lit parking lots, Charlie knows the only way to win is to survive the night.
Opening windows and letting fresh air in: a book that was refreshing?
The Twisted Ones by T. Kingfisher
A horror story that will have you giggling, snorting, and laughing out loud like a lunatic.
What could be more refreshing than that?
When Mouse’s dad asks her to clean out her dead grandmother’s house, she says yes. After all, how bad could it be?
Answer: pretty bad. Grandma was a hoarder, and her house is stuffed with useless rubbish. That would be horrific enough, but there’s more—Mouse stumbles across her step-grandfather’s journal, which at first seems to be filled with nonsensical rants…until Mouse encounters some of the terrifying things he described for herself.
Alone in the woods with her dog, Mouse finds herself face to face with a series of impossible terrors—because sometimes the things that go bump in the night are real, and they’re looking for you. And if she doesn’t face them head on, she might not survive to tell the tale.
Washing out sheet stains: a book you wish you could rewrite a certain scene in?
Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows by J. K. Rowling
Dobby’s death.
‘Give me Harry Potter,’ said Voldemort’s voice, ‘and none shall be harmed. Give me Harry Potter, and I shall leave the school untouched. Give me Harry Potter, and you will be rewarded.’
As he climbs into the sidecar of Hagrid’s motorbike and takes to the skies, leaving Privet Drive for the last time, Harry Potter knows that Lord Voldemort and the Death Eaters are not far behind. The protective charm that has kept Harry safe until now is broken, but he cannot keep hiding. The Dark Lord is breathing fear into everything Harry loves and to stop him Harry will have to find and destroy the remaining Horcruxes. The final battle must begin – Harry must stand and face his enemy…
Throwing out unnecessary knick-knacks: a book in a series that you didn’t feel was necessary:
Catching Fire by Suzanne Collins.
First: I’m not a huge fan of this series in the first place, not since the movies.
Second: Catching Fire is actually my favorite book in the series.
Three: Despite the fact that Katniss gains a shit-ton of sympathy and support from the people in this book.. it still feels completely unnecessary to the story as a whole.
Against all odds, Katniss Everdeen has won the annual Hunger Games with fellow district tribute Peeta Mellark. But it was a victory won by defiance of the Capitol and their harsh rules.
Katniss and Peeta should be happy. After all, they have just won for themselves and their families a life of safety and plenty. But there are rumors of rebellion among the subjects, and Katniss and Peeta, to their horror, are the faces of that rebellion. The Capitol is angry. The Capitol wants revenge.
Polishing the doorknobs: a book that had a clean finish?
The Necromancer’s Daughter by D. Wallace Peach
A healer and dabbler in the dark arts of life and death, Barus is as gnarled as an ancient tree. Forgotten in the chaos of the dying queen’s chamber, he spirits away her stillborn infant and in a hovel at the meadow’s edge, breathes life into the wisp of a child. He names her Aster for the lea’s white flowers. Raised as his daughter, she, too, learns to heal death.
Denied a living heir, the widowed king spies from a distance. But he heeds the claims of the fiery Vicar of the Red Order—in the eyes of the Blessed One, Aster is an abomination, and to embrace the evil of resurrection will doom his rule.
As the king’s life nears its end, he defies the vicar’s warning and summons the necromancer’s daughter. For his boldness, he falls to an assassin’s blade. Armed with righteousness and iron-clad conviction, the Order’s brothers ride into the leas to cleanse the land of evil.
To save her father’s life, Aster leads them beyond Verdane’s wall into the Forest of Silvern Cats, a wilderness of dragons and barbarian tribes. Unprepared for a world rife with danger and unchecked power, a world divided by those who practice magic and those who hunt them, she must choose whether to trust the one man offering her aid, the one man most likely to betray her—her enemy’s son.
Reaching to dust the fan: a book that tried too hard to relay a certain message:
The Midnight Library by Matt Haig
This is a fantastic book about the choices we make—and the consequences of those choices. How changing one thing, one action or event, can change everything. I don’t mind books that attempt to teach us valuable lessons, I’ve even been known to enjoy them, but can we not make it so mind-numbingly repetitive?
Somewhere out beyond the edge of the universe there is a library that contains an infinite number of books, each one the story of another reality. One tells the story of your life as it is, along with another book for the other life you could have lived if you had made a different choice at any point in your life. While we all wonder how our lives might have been, what if you had the chance to go to the library and see for yourself? Would any of these other lives truly be better?
In The Midnight Library, Matt Haig’s enchanting blockbuster novel, Nora Seed finds herself faced with this decision. Faced with the possibility of changing her life for a new one, following a different career, undoing old breakups, realizing her dreams of becoming a glaciologist; she must search within herself as she travels through the Midnight Library to decide what is truly fulfilling in life, and what makes it worth living in the first place.
The tiring yet satisfying finish of spring cleaning: a book series that was tiring yet satisfying to get through?
House of Night by P.C. Cast & Kristin Cast
A Discovery of Witches by Deborah Harkness
The Mists of Avalon by Marion Zimmer Bradley
I actually really enjoyed all three of these series but they were, for their own reasons, tiring.
Thanks so much for stopping by,
I hope you found a book or two that caught your eye!
Spring cleaning: What do you do with your books?
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This is a fun tag, Sheri. I love your answers.
Thanks. 😊
I really enjoy how creative you can get with tags.