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Noll's 2018 Reads


Nollaig

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2015 Reading Log

2016 Reading Log

2017 Reading Log
 
***
 
Green is read
Yellow is in progress
Grey is upcoming soon
Red is abandoned
 
***
 
Rating System (from Goodreads)
 
1/5 -  Didn't like it
2/5 -  It was okay
3/5 - Liked it
4/5 - Loved it
5/5 - It was amazing
 

***

January

 

1. The Road To Civil War - Various 3/5

2.  Let The Dead Speak - Jane Casey 3/5

3. The Tin Man - Sarah Winman 3/5

4. Fellowship of the Ring - J. R. R. Tolkein 3/5

5. Dead Souls - Angela Marsons 4/5

6. Turtles All The Way Down - John Green 3/5

7. The Good People - Hannah Kent 4/5

8. The Nest - Kenneth Oppel 4/5

9. The Chalk Man - C. J. Tudor 4/5

 

February

 

10. Friend Request - Laura Marshall 2/5

11. The Hate U Give - Angie Thomas 5/5

12. A Horse Walks Into A Bar - David Grossman 1/5

13. The Bone Collector - Jeffery Deaver 3/5

14. The Visitors - Catherine Burns 3/5

 

March

 

15. The Woman in the Window - A. J. Finn 4/5

16. Blood Lines - Angela Marsons 3/5

17. Annihilation - Jeff VanderMeer 4/5 (reread)

No One Gets Out Alive - Adam Nevill

 

April

 

18. The Good Samaritan - John Marrs 4/5

19. Thirteen - Steve Cavanagh 3/5

20. The Seven Deaths of Evelyn Hardcastle - Stuart Turton 3/5

21. The Folcroft Ghosts - Darcy Coates 2/5

22. The Liar's Girl - Catherine Ryan Howard 4/5

23. His Bloody Project - Graeme McRae Burnet 3/5

 

May - July

 

24. The Hunger - Alma Katsu 3/5

25. The Bear and the Nightingale - Katherine Arden 4/5

26. Broken Bones - Angela Marsons 3/5

27. Wolverine Hunting Season - 3/5

28. One Click - Andrea Mara 3/5

29. With Our Blessing - Jo Spain 4/5

30. Beneath The Surface - Jo Spain 2/5

31. Sleeping Beauties - Jo Spain 3/5

32. The Bedlam Stacks - Natasha Pulley 5/5

33. The Cabin at the End of the World - Paul Tremblay 2/5

34. Scythe - Neal Shusterman 4/5

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Video Games 2018

 

1. Ys - The Oath in Felghana 4/5

2. Person 4 Golden 4/5

3. Bloodborne

4. Final Fantasy 3 (SNES)

 

 

Want to play:

OxenFree

Crash Bandicoot (remastered)

I Am Setsuna

Final Fantasy XV

Until Dawn

 

 

 

 

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First review of the year. I'm probably going to do relatively short reviews this year, to make them less daunting to keep up with.

 

The Tin Man - Sarah Winman 3/5

 

I liked this book - more than expected once I got to Michael's section - and while I feel the raw ideas and characters were there, I also felt that I couldn't get at them through the layers of whimsical, fractured prose that seemed more intent on conveying a style than a story. Beautiful writing, it just didn't convey the story very well. It was like looking through a dirty window, trying to get at the full effect but being unable to. It was also too short to adequately tell the story, though I don't think I could have read much more of it in its current style. I'd love to have known more about Dora, Annie, Ellis's childhood, Mabel, Chris's life etc. They're wonderful characters. Also, perhaps due to my own inattention, I was a bit confused for the first while about when people left and came back and left again, but I don't think the time hopping, divided by character, was the best. I might like it more with a second read, which I probably will grant it now that I know how to set my expectations, but I think I would always want more from this book.

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Also, (copied from What's Up In January):

 

I've started making progress on my one real new year's resolution (is it a resolution if it's not difficult?) which I only realised earlier this week I wanted to do. Based off the extremely popular bullet journals around, my underwhelming experiences with various mindfulness and gratitude journal apps, and my knowledge that gratitude is the one area of mindfulness where I still really fall down, I have invented - the gratitude visual/bullet/sketchnotes journal! Yeah, it's a blend. So basically I'm going to fill a double spread once a week, one page will be a gratitude prompt (one of the best ones I've collected so far is 'where did you rest your head last night?' which got me thinking about warmth, comfort, security, having a partner, having a spare room when one of us is snoring or sick, having a roof over my head, having the money and job security to pay for it, and thinking about the homeless). The other page will be a sketchnotes/visual journal of a few things that week which I am grateful for. So I'll doodle and use doodles to represent these things alongside short descriptions (the 'bullet' element), and thus also work on my drawing skills.

 

I'll be posting pages of it here most likely :)

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On 1/1/2018 at 12:39 PM, Nollaig said:

Crash Bandicoot (remastered)

My kids used to love this!  :D

 

I'm rubbish at games - if I try one of my son's car games I always end up going the wrong way! :blush:

 

I'm so glad to read you're in such a good place (physically and metaphorically!) - and yes, it's loving to have a spare room for snoring purposes! :giggle2:

 

Happy reading in 2017.  :)  Edit - or even 2018!  :doh:

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On 1/11/2018 at 2:27 PM, Nollaig said:

I'll be posting pages of it here most likely :)

 

Please do :).

 

On 1/11/2018 at 4:59 PM, Janet said:

Happy reading in 2017.  :)  Edit - or even 2018!  :doh:

 

I still make that mistake too on occasion :doh:.

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Hope you have a great reading year Noll :) 

 

Your journal sounds like a great idea, looking forward to seeing it!

 

I was watching a video of one of the Ys games yesterday but I'm not sure which it was now. I know there's quite a few, have you played any others? It's good to know there's a decent story!

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Ys: Oath In Felghana

 

The graphics are a little hard on the eyes at first as they're quite pixellated, and the boss battles take a bit of getting used to due to the hack-n-slash battle system which has you

mashing buttons. I realised early on that as it's a port of an older game onto the PS Vita, that I needed to remap the buttons a little to make them more convenient, and that made a huge differece to gameplay. I played it on easy (one of 5 difficulty modes), as I always do, and I flew through it pretty easily - I only really struggled with finding out the patterns of a couple of bosses, as like Zelda and similar classic games, this one's bosses do have specific patterns they follow while healthy, then change when at half-health etc.

 

The characters were likeable, but not really developed. This is a pretty common thing with classic jrpgs, and given that the game is only about 15 hours long, it's not that surprising. All the same, while it was underdeveloped, there was a good core at the core of the game. 

 

All in all, it was a fun game, easy to get through, enjoyable gameplay, a solid enough story for a short game, and quite characteristically Ys.

 

Rating: 4/5

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On 1/11/2018 at 3:59 PM, Janet said:

My kids used to love this!  :D

 

I'm rubbish at games - if I try one of my son's car games I always end up going the wrong way! :blush:

 

I'm so glad to read you're in such a good place (physically and metaphorically!) - and yes, it's loving to have a spare room for snoring purposes! :giggle2:

 

Happy reading in 2017.  :)  Edit - or even 2018!  :doh:

 

Thanks Janet! I think games are something you either grow up with, or don't. I don't really know anyone who's gotten into it if they didn't grow up with it.

 

On 1/12/2018 at 11:23 AM, chesilbeach said:

Your journal sounds lovely Noll, and I like the idea that you've amalgamated different ideas to suit your own style.  Look forward to seeing some pages. :) 

 

Thanks Claire! I'm still practising with it... not sure I like the colour in it, so we'll see! I got watercolour pencils to try those and they just soak through the pages too easily so I think it will be either black and white, or simple pencil colouring!

 

On 1/13/2018 at 9:00 PM, Hayley said:

Hope you have a great reading year Noll :) 

 

Your journal sounds like a great idea, looking forward to seeing it!

 

I was watching a video of one of the Ys games yesterday but I'm not sure which it was now. I know there's quite a few, have you played any others? It's good to know there's a decent story!

 

Thanks Hayley!

 

I've played 2 - Ark of Napishtim, which I played years ago on PS2 I think, and loved it - because it was short, easy, and a typical hack-and-slash jrpg. Oath In Felghana (review above) proved to be more of the same, so I'm definitely going to play more, as there are several that have been ported (or entirely redone) for the PS Vita :)

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5 hours ago, Nollaig said:

I think games are something you either grow up with, or don't. I don't really know anyone who's gotten into it if they didn't grow up with it.

I was *ACE* at golf on the Sega Megadrive ("absolutely marvellous putt...") and before that, at The Hobbit on the Commodore 64!  :D  :giggle2:

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On 1/16/2018 at 6:11 PM, Janet said:

I was *ACE* at golf on the Sega Megadrive ("absolutely marvellous putt...") and before that, at The Hobbit on the Commodore 64!  :D  :giggle2:

 

Hehe! That reminds me of one time my family played a golf game, not sure what console, but we were all terrible at it. We were all like 10-15 over par all the time, and towards the end when I'd hit the ball back and forth past the hole several times and was right on the edge, the commentator said, 'perhaps this shot will end the misery'. :rolol:

 

In other news...

 

Back to work today after a week off. The week off was nice enough, although a few nights poor sleep meant a couple of days were effectively wasted on catching up with sleep. It's never long enough though, had trouble sleeping last night knowing I was facing back into work, and have been awake since 5am so my mood is particularly low this morning.

 

I'm grateful for my job, it's a good job, I just hate having to work.

 

I also have to get my next lot of meds sorted this month for my anxiety/depression. I've been on one dose for a year now, and gradually my mood is declining again. Not sure do I need a higher dose or what. Maybe I should start going to counselling but that's a 200 euro commitment a month, it's just so much money.

 

It's funny, all those years ago when I was unemployed for 2.5 years, I produced tons of art and was really creative. Now that I've been in employment for 2.5 years, I don't want to draw, I'm struggling to keep up my cross-stitch, I just read, watch tv or play video games. My creativity is pretty much dead. You'd think financial security would make me happy, but I think all is does is relieve one aspect of anxiety/depression, which is immediately replaced by the depressing tedium of spending most of my life doing a job simply to pay bills.

 

I'm even starting to feel unenthused about my masters, which starts in the next two weeks.

 

 

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Thanks ladies.

 

Helplines wouldn't be very effective for me Madeleine I don't think, even a counsellor would have a hard time dragging things out of me.

 

Regardless, I'm feeling a good bit better now. Still not 100% but am back to looking forward to my masters and not feeling too crappy about being at work!

 

This has probably been helped by the fact that my partner has agreed to go to London to meet my best friend and her partner - I only met her partner at Christmas, but he's lovely. I really want the four of us to spend time together as my bestie is so important to me, and so it's important to both her and me that she meets my partner, as well as us hoping our partners get along (they both like video games and comics, so that's a good start!)

 

 

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Happy Reading in 2018, Noll. :D

 

Hope you feel more positive soon. Do you think the Winter bleahs could be adding to things ? A friend was telling me about a friend of her`s, who`s a GP, and has one of those SAD lights and swears it really helps her. Of course, that`s not free or cheap. :(

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22 hours ago, Nollaig said:

Regardless, I'm feeling a good bit better now. Still not 100% but am back to looking forward to my masters and not feeling too crappy about being at work!

 

This has probably been helped by the fact that my partner has agreed to go to London to meet my best friend and her partner - I only met her partner at Christmas, but he's lovely. I really want the four of us to spend time together as my bestie is so important to me, and so it's important to both her and me that she meets my partner, as well as us hoping our partners get along (they both like video games and comics, so that's a good start!)

 

I'm glad you're feeling a bit better :).

 

I hope you have fun in London with your best friend and her partner and with your partner. I hope they will all get along :).

 

15 hours ago, Little Pixie said:

Hope you feel more positive soon. Do you think the Winter bleahs could be adding to things ? A friend was telling me about a friend of her`s, who`s a GP, and has one of those SAD lights and swears it really helps her. Of course, that`s not free or cheap. :(

 

My sister has one of those, she says it really helps her :). It's true that they are not cheap, but she's had hers for many years now and as far as I know it still works and she still uses it (I think! I'll have to ask her about it some time).

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On 1/24/2018 at 5:36 PM, Little Pixie said:

Happy Reading in 2018, Noll. :D

 

Hope you feel more positive soon. Do you think the Winter bleahs could be adding to things ? A friend was telling me about a friend of her`s, who`s a GP, and has one of those SAD lights and swears it really helps her. Of course, that`s not free or cheap. :(

 

9 hours ago, Athena said:

 

I'm glad you're feeling a bit better :).

 

I hope you have fun in London with your best friend and her partner and with your partner. I hope they will all get along :).

 

 

My sister has one of those, she says it really helps her :). It's true that they are not cheap, but she's had hers for many years now and as far as I know it still works and she still uses it (I think! I'll have to ask her about it some time).

 

It's actually not caused by Winter Bleahs at all - I adore winter, dark evenings, cold weather, I can't get enough of it and am sad it hasn't been colder this year! I get very moody in summer as I can't take the heat, volume of people, or endless daylight. My mood picks up from September onwards and lasts til about March or April hehe!

 

4 hours ago, poppyshake said:

Happy New Year Noll and Happy Reading in 2018! Hope you feel much better soon :hug: 

 

Thank you x

 

I'm trying to get out of my detective crime thriller reading rut. They're easy books for me to read, but I'm sure I'm missing out on tons of great stuff. So I'm starting with The Good People by Hannah Kent, and need to scour this forum and Goodreads for other ideas!

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3 hours ago, Nollaig said:

It's actually not caused by Winter Bleahs at all - I adore winter, dark evenings, cold weather, I can't get enough of it and am sad it hasn't been colder this year! I get very moody in summer as I can't take the heat, volume of people, or endless daylight. My mood picks up from September onwards and lasts til about March or April hehe!

 

 

:lol: I prescribe more lurking in darkened rooms and cocoa. ;)

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