Nollaig

That's awesome news Frankie, congrats! Living by myself is my long-term goal too, if I can ever afford it, so I understand the excitement and joy Good luck with the date too, will be looking forward to hearing all about it

I genuinely don't know where I found it! You definitely said something to me about it, but it might only have been 'enjoy!' I didn't know there was a movie, I will definitely check that out!!

Ooooh happy birthday Laura! Hope it was awesome. Love the kitty pics Uprooted is a great book, I read it a few months back and thoroughly enjoyed it. I agree with Claire, it's a gorgeous cover.

Finished Read Between The Lines by Jo Knowles. Mehhhh. S'alright. Started reading Normal by Graeme Cameron. Not very far in, but it's a little shocking so far!

Very grey and overcast here, pretty cool, no humidity really which is wonderful.

Lonely Postman sounds like an amazing read! Dying to know the twist. Definitely going on the wishlist!

Yup, it was probably one of us. I think all of us (except maybe Karsa, not sure?) had a couple of issues with it, but overall really enjoyed it. I haven't been reading much the last few days, I've had other things going on. Need to make sure I don't let my mojo get away!

Sherlock is one of my all time favourite shows. I like Midsomer Murders - my mum loves it (and Lewis, and all similar shows), so I wind up seeing them sometimes when I'm at home. The theme music to MM is superb. So eerie Fringe is a show I started recently rewatching - I had loved the first season a few years ago but I'm not enjoying it as much now.

I haven't heard of any of these books or authors, but I'm intrigued now by everyone mentioning A Little Life, so I might look into that.

No worries Kylie! Frankie I suspect it was you I got the recommendation from... I think, anyway. Bobbly -

A month-long group read (maybe with a choice of two or three books?) would be a great idea I think, because that way it's not narrowed down to one weekend, and it's an alternative for people who can't take part in the read-a-thon.

Finished The Long Way To A Small Angry Planet by Becky Chambers - the pacing and lack of overall plot structure grated a bit, but otherwise a superb read. Started Read Between The Lines by Jo Knowles today.

I was on my mobile (going for a nap hehe) by the time I saw your reply on Twitter and I find the Twitter app on my phone fiddly for replying so I favourited But yes, completely agree. I think I know one or two people who might say its Emmas fault, or rather they would go down the 'asking for it' route, without saying it's actually her fault, but fortunately most people I know wouldn't. I can't imagine any mothers like that, either, dear god Emma's mother was awful. The father wasn't great, but I think he just couldn't cope as opposed to caring about reputation and stuff. Conor and Bryan were such sweeties. R.e. Alive, I never would have guessed.

Right, still got three more reviews to write, but I've added four (a couple of fairly short, quickly-written ones) up above.

Asking For It - Louise O'Neill Synopsis: It's the beginning of the summer in a small town in Ireland. Emma O'Donovan is eighteen years old, beautiful, happy, confident. One night, there's a party. Everyone is there. All eyes are on Emma. The next morning, she wakes on the front porch of her house. She can't remember what happened, she doesn't know how she got there. She doesn't know why she's in pain. But everyone else does. Photographs taken at the party show, in explicit detail, what happened to Emma that night. But sometimes people don't want to believe what is right in front of them, especially when the truth concerns the town's heroes... *** Review: After the phenomenal success of her debut novel, Only Ever Yours, expectations (including my own) were high for this second novel dealing with extremely controversial subject matter. I will admit I was a bit unsure for the first half of the novel. The main character, Emma, is an exceptionally superficial, bitchy, unlikeable human being. So are most of her friends. I'm so grateful to never have had 'friends' like them when I was myself a teenager. It didn't help inspire empathy, I suppose, that I am not the kind of person who has ever gotten so wasted at a party that advantage could be taken of me (without a fight, anyway) - I believe people should demonstrate more responsibility for own safety than that. However, failing to do so does not put them at fault if someone else assaults them, and that is the point here. It took me until the title event to realise the genius of making Emma so unlikeable - there is absolutely no room for excuses in this novel. She is not a nice girl and the book does everything in its power to present a situation where your most judgmental, prejudiced instincts will be evoked against her - it does its damndest to elicit any hint of your own unwitting participation in the exact culture that the entire novel is about. I will admit, it really did make me take a hard look at how I view cases like this in particular. As with her previous novel, Louise tackles this difficult topic unrelentingly and with more unbiased brutality than I've seen in some adult novels. This is classed as a YA novel, but make no mistake, it is not for younger readers. That said, it should be mandatory reading for everyone of appropriate age because, particularly from the second half onwards, it does an absolutely incredible job of illustrating the problematic, multi-faceted reality of victim blaming in rape culture. It does so from the perspective of the victim, the victim's family, the rapists and Emma's friends, and the small town community, as well as on the national stage. Not only do we see vicious social media attacks on Emma from people who believe she is at fault, we also see her elevation to an objectified state of unwanted martyrdom by people who believe she must become a symbol, an abstract concept to represent a fight against rape culture. On both sides of this, the suffering of the individual is utterly overlooked until it is lost. Thus, with the most exceptional stream-of-consciousness style of writing, we witness the irrevocable fallout of Emma's traumatic experience and the destructive reality of victim-blaming. I believed, after reading Only Ever Yours, that this topic could be placed in no better hands than Louise O'Neill's and I was right. Rating: 4.5/5

Alive - Scott Sigler Synopsis: A young woman awakes trapped in an enclosed space. She has no idea who she is or how she got there. With only her instincts to guide her, she escapes her own confinement—and finds she’s not alone. She frees the others in the room and leads them into a corridor filled with the remains of a war long past. The farther these survivors travel, the worse are the horrors they confront. And as they slowly come to understand what this prison is, they realize that the worst and strangest possibilities they could have imagined don’t even come close to the truth. *** Review: This was a surprisingly refreshing read. Being described as similar to the Maze Runner, in addition to the fact that the synopsis is going to make anyone with a vague knowledge of YA Dystopia think of Maze Runner, I will admit that I didn't have high hopes for this novel. At best, I thought it might be an interesting once off read that would give me the dystopia fix I was looking for, but which I'd probably forget again fairly quickly. I was wrong. That doesn't mean this is the most amazing piece of fiction I've read read, but it was extremely refreshing and unusual. I loved the setup, I loved the main character, Em, (or M. Savage) from the outset - an angry, scary, changeable narrator - and I absolutely loved the pacing. I actually think the pacing may be one of the best things about this novel - there is a point where a significant chunk of the prose is just the characters making their way along an endlessly long empty corridor - and, having amply worn my patience as thin as the characters, it pulled in a new direction *just* at the right time. Similarly well-timed changes in pace occured throughout the novel, each one usually leading into a totally different, and often very original, plot point. I loved the pigs. I just want to say, I thought the whole pig thing was great. A lot of the characters were pretty cool, and nobody could accuse this book of not featuring ethnic diversity. Even better, characters are divided up by a marking system that is never actually explained - a feature that reminds me more of the sci-fi that this novel at its heart really is, rather than dystopia. I loved the setting for the novel, and the little twist the baffling location introduced, along with yet more sci-fi elements to explain it. I did feel the rushed explanation towards the end (featuring a horrendously cringe-worthy line) was a little much, and it was a pretty sharp curve from dystopia to all-out sci-fi, but that's probably my only real complaint. All in all, a very fresh sci-fi twist on what has become the standard for YA dystopia. It's the first in, I believe, a proposed trilogy, and while it could easily have ended perfectly where it did, I'm curious enough to pick up the second book when it comes out. Rating: 4/5

Beyond The Great Indoors - Ingvar Ambjornsen Synopsis: Elling has a wildly overactive imagination and has been molly-coddled by his mother all his life, so when she dies he is left completely incapable of taking care of himself. After a stint in the very helpful Broynes Rehabilitation Centre, Elling returns to Oslo with his room-mate Kjell Bjarne in tow. Together the odd couple embark on a free-spirited new life.On a quest to live like normal average people, Elling and Kjell's friendship grows - kittens, girlfriends and terrorist poetry enter the equation - even fame beckons. But there are fears to conquer before that, answering the telephone for one, leaving the house for another and the journey outdoors is by no means an easy one. A touching and hiliarious comedy of anxiety. *** Review: This is a book I had been dying to read for ages, and which I couldn't find in bookshops, nor online in hardcopy for (what I consider) a reasonable price. The Kindle version cost closer to what I would expect to pay for a hardcopy, so I had put off getting it, but eventually I relented and bought the Kindle version. I'm pretty happy that I did, because it turned out to be a very funny and occasionally slightly surreal read. I did feel at times that it didn't really seem to be going anywhere, but overall by the end I found I had become quite attached to the characters and wanted them to end up happy. This book has a lot of heart, portraying its two eccentric leads as kooky but loveable people with severe quirks that make integration into the real world very difficult. In their discovery of their new life living together in Oslo, we are introduced to a small but interesting cast of characters (including a pair of kittens, who we didn't get to see enough of) and across a series of unlikely events we're shown how everybody is actually a little bit weird. Very very funny at times, and painfully relatable at others (I found myself relating massively to the mindsets induced by anxiety in this novel) this is a novel that is as honest as it is strange. Highly recommended for anyone who has ever suffered from anxiety, or even just felt a little bit strange. Rating: 4/5

The Phantom Tollbooth - Norton Juster Synopsis: Milo mopes in black ink sketches, until he assembles a tollbooth and drives through. He jumps to the island of Conclusions. But brothers King Azaz of Dictionopolis and the Mathemagician of Digitopolis war over words and numbers. Joined by ticking watchdog Tock and adult-size Humbug, Milo rescues the Princesses of Rhyme and Reason, and learns to enjoy life. *** Review: I picked this one up despite not being sure it would be the kind of thing I'd like, because it was a group read on this forum, and some of the concepts sounded really clever and I liked the idea behind it. Unfortunately I have to admit that's about all I can say for it. It did make for an interesting read, and many of the puns were fiendishly clever, which I enjoyed because I can be quite pedantic and fussy about accurate grammar. All of the locations and characters in the story pertaining to puns were fun and occasionally even made me laugh out loud. As an overall story, however, I just felt none of the individual components gelled to make anything coherent. It's a fantasy story, so naturally it's going to be full of random imaginings that need have absolutely no basis in reality, but the whole thing felt, to me, like an excuse to make a bunch of puns, and unfortunately, no matter how good those puns are, that's not enough to make me like a book. That said, I am glad I read it, because it was an entertaining experience, but it's not one I would read again or heartily recommend to anyone else, I'm afraid. Rating: 3/5

I approve!

Vance Joy - Riptide

I'm happy to suggest some titles! None of these need be picked as one goal read, but I'll leave them here for people. I might take it as an opportunity to reread something, like Salem's Lot, Through A Glass Darkly or Penpal (which I only read this year but LOVED). I might also try another book by Kathe Koja, whose The Cipher I read and loved earlier this year (but it was extremely adult, dark and weird). Birdbox by Josh Malerman was a fun read, weak ending but the rest of the story was awesome. Sleepless by Lou Morgon is a kids/YA read which I found surprisingly dark and extremely enjoyable. The Monstrumologist is a YA read, Victorian-set, dense-prose (for YA) read which I loved earlier this year. Even though I didn't finish it, Long Lankin was really great too, I just wasn't in the right mood at the time. The Silence by Tim Lebbon is one a few of us read recently, mixed reviews but I think we all agreed it was by and large very enjoyable and worth reading.

Ohh snap!

We call them courgettes! Much nicer name than zucchini... makes me think of bikinis and mankinis. And nobody wants to think about mankinis

Yeah same, I'm gonna be doing Halloween stuff on the actual weekend, but I can try get some reading in on the Sunday maybe.

Wheeee I'm so glad you had fun spending your voucher!