#i think it's funny giving a character a vampire aesthetic but giving them sun/fire themed magic/powers

[bordonfreeman]

Finally made an updated/official reference for my owl house oc for Art Fight! [Linked in my pinned post]

I've been meaning to do this for a while but never got around to it

[deadparrish]

BOOKS READ IN 2017

total count: 78

goodreads: punknicole

i’m going to give a rating and a brief review of each book— just a sentence or two, depending on how much i remember about the book. this is mostly for fun, but I hope someone gets some use out of this! happy new year and happy reading! and, of course, possible spoilers ahead. 

I’ll Give You the Sun by Jandy Nelson: 5/5. Everyone and their mother has read this, so I’ll keep it short and sweet. I really enjoyed this book because I found it difficult to support just one specific character— everyone had flaws and they were all multi-dimensional. I appreciated the fact that each part of the story eventually matched up with the others. 

Everything, Everything by Nicola Yoon: 4/5. This was a cute book. I didn’t have too many strong feelings about it when I first read it, but it was enjoyable in a passing way. I thought the diversity was really wonderful but it was a bit overhyped.

The Dream Thieves by Maggie Stiefvater: 5/5. I was rereading this and I loved it even more than the first time I read it. I feel like if you follow me you’ve probably read this, since this is a mostly trc blog, so I won’t go too deep into this. It’s wonderful. 

The Color Purple by Alice Walker: 5/5. I loved this a lot!!!! I think that the style it was written in is really interesting and the fact that it’s about a black lesbian is wonderful. It’s also a classic so I’d say that this should be on everyone’s reading list!!

The Foxhole Court by Nora Sakavik: 4/5. I never got as into these as everyone else seemed to. It was good and I read it really quickly, but it isn’t something I’d want to read again? I only read it because it had lgbt+ representation and honestly I think that’s all it has going for it. 

The Raven King by Nora Sakavik: 4/5. Again, I read this really quickly. I can’t really remember what happens. I think this is the book that triggered me a bit— there was some pretty awful sexual assault. 

The King’s Men by Nora Sakavik: 4/5. I remember being really disappointed in the ending, but I’m not sure why. I think I expected something a little more dramatic. Again, I read the whole trilogy over the span of two days, so it all kind of blended together. I’d suggest reading these so you can understand what all the tumblr posts are about, but they aren't my favorite. 

The Elements of Style by William Strunk JR. and E. B. White: 4/5. Ah, the first book that I finished that was for school! This was basically a mini textbook, and I found it really informative if a bit dry at times. I’d recommend reading it if English is something that you’re passionate about.

Another Day by David Levithan: 2/5. This was awful. I had high hopes for it, because I really liked Every Day, but this just gives you insight into how awful the main character is. It’s completely unnecessary, and I wish I hadn’t read it. 

The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald: 5/5. I LOVED THIS!!! I read it for school and I absolutely fell in love. It’s extremely heavy handed on symbolism, but the language is so beautiful. I have a twitter thread about how I think that Nick is in love with Gatsby here. 

We Are the Ants by Shaun David Hutchinson: 5/5. I really liked this too, and I recently gave this to my mom and grandma to read and they loved it too!! I think that the storyline was really interesting and it dealt with some really existential issues about life, which I always really enjoy. 

You Know Me Well by David Levithan and Nina LaCour: 5/5. This was really cute!! I remember really enjoying the wlw representation in this, because most lgbt books focus on white guys, so this was refreshing. 

Flowers for Algernon by Daniel Keyes: 5/5. I bawled my eyes out reading this. I can’t even explain it but it is... so fucking good. 

The Old Man and the Sea by Ernest Hemingway: 2/5. Ugh. I didn’t even finish this. I know it’s a classic, but I just really couldn’t get into it. I might try again in a few years but it just didn’t work for me. 

Deathless by Catherynne M. Valente: 5/5. I tried to find this books in stores for at least a year before I finally took the leap and ordered it online. I love it so much— it’s one of the first books on my reread list. The language is really beautiful and I love the aesthetic, but it is a bit dark.

Where the Red Fern Grows by Wilson Rawls: 5/5. A book straight out of my childhood! I love it just as much as I did when I was a kid, and I cried even more than I did the last time I read it, which had to have been at least ten years ago. It’s timeless and beautiful and I think it’s a must-read!

Milk and Honey by Rupi Kaur: 4/5. Honestly, I think this book is a bit overhyped. I enjoyed some of the poems but it didn’t leave a huge lasting impact. 

Beauty Queens by Libba Bray: 3/5. This was a really fast read for me, and I sort of liked it? It was lighthearted and kind of funny and had incredible representation, but it wasn’t a favorite for me. 

The Importance of Being Earnest by Oscar Wilde: 4/5. I love Oscar Wilde, so I’m a bit biased, but I thought this was enjoyable. It was clever and passingly funny, but I think it would be better to see it performed live. 

The Kite Runner by Khaled Hosseini: 5/5. This was my second time reading this, and I loved it even more than I did the first time I read it. I read this for school the first time and I’d definitely recommend that everyone read it at least once! It’s an incredible story and it really touches your heart.

The Black Swan by Mercedes Lackey: 4/5. I consider this a guilty pleasure book but I’m not exactly sure why. I read it when I was really young, which might be part of the reason why, since it has some really mature themes, but it’s a good read. 

The May Queen Murders by Sarah Jude: 2/5. I remember seeing a lot of posts on here about this book, so I was disappointed when it ended up being really boring. I just didn’t like it, and I wouldn’t recommend it. 

The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck: 4/5. I read this for school, and I’ll probably never pick it up again. I didn’t hate it, but it definitely wasn’t a favorite. I would recommend it, though, just because it’s a classic and it’s something that you Have To Read at least once. 

Tell Me Again How a Crush Should Feel by Sara Farizan: 4/5. This was another book that I had really high expectations for because I saw a lot of hype for it on tumblr. I did like it, but it wasn’t life changing like I expected it to be. 

The Uncensored Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde: 5/5. This is probably my favorite book of all time. I can’t say enough good things about it, so just read it. 

The Bluest Eye by Toni Morrison: 5/5. This was incredible! It really makes you think about American standards of beauty and how that affects your day-to-day life. 

The House on Mango Street by Sandra Cisneros: 4/5. I’ll be honest, I feel like I missed a huge part of this book because I read it really quickly, but I still liked it. 

1984 by George Orwell: 5/5. Everyone needs to read this, especially in our current political climate. There are quite a few parallels between what happens in the novel an what’s happening today, and it’s really helpful when it comes to trying to understand what people on the news are talking about when they say we’re “living in 1984.”

This is Where it Ends by Marieke Nijkamp: 4/5. I remember being a little disappointed in this, but I still really liked it! I think I cried but I’m not super sure? I guess it didn’t leave as lasting of an impact as I thought it did, but I remember liking it as I read it. 

Vampirates: Tide of Terror by Justin Somper: 4/5. This is definitely a guilty pleasure book and I’m not ashamed to admit it. My cousin recommended them to me at least ten years ago and every so often I get into a phase where I want to reread them. The title is pretty self-explanatory— vampire pirates. 

The Book Thief by Markus Zusak: 5/5. One of my favorite reads of the year! The narrative style is really interesting and it’s really beautifully written. I absolutely recommend it!!

The Strange Case Of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde by Robert Louis Stevenson: 2/5. Ugh. Again, I couldn’t even finish this, and I’m not sure why. It just seemed so boring! I’ll try to reread it at some point but definitely not any time soon. 

The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath: 5/5. I really enjoyed this!! It also got me into the good graces of my english teacher this year (she saw me carrying it around school and talked to me about it) so I’d recommend it!

Animal Farm by George Orwell: 5/5. I first read this in middle school and really liked it, so I figured I’d reread it and see if it held up, and it did. It’s another classic that I think should be on everyone’s read list!

The Mysterious Benedict Society and the Prisoner’s Dilemma by Trenton Lee Stewart: 5/5. These are really fun books that I’d recommend you read if you have a free afternoon! They’re clever, engaging, and easy to read. 

Peter Pan by J. M. Barrie: 3/5. I didn’t like this and I can’t remember exactly why. I think that it was a bit dry for my liking, although it might have just been because I didn’t like all the talk about mothers. Either way, I wouldn’t recommend it.

Brain on Fire: My Month of Madness by Susannah Calahan: 5/5. This was really interesting! I don’t usually read memoirs, but my mom gave this to me to read and I actually really liked it.

The Scorch Trials by James Dashner: 4/5. I’ve tried to get into the Maze Runner series a few times, but it never quite manages to get me interested enough. I liked this well enough but it didn’t leave me invested enough to go out and buy the next book in the series, so it’ll probably be another year (at least) before I revisit this series. Oh well. 

The Phantom of the Opera by Gaston Leroux: 4/5. The movie with Gerald Butler is yet another guilty pleasure of mine, so I really wanted to like this, but it kind of fell short. It was decent, but it took me a while to read, which always means that I’m not loving it. 

The Holy Bible: 1611 Edition, King James Version by Hendrickson Bibles (compiler): I can’t write a real review for this because I only read certain parts of it for school, but I counted it on my goodreads because I wanted it to count towards my 2017 reading challenge. It was interesting, I guess? 

The Secret Garden by Frances Hodgson Burnett: 4/5. I didn’t expect to like this as much as I did! The characters were really sweet and I enjoyed their growth, and the plot was interesting. 

Howl and Other Poems by Allen Ginsberg: 4/5. I picked this up because I had just watched Kill Your Darlings and I wasn't as impressed as I wanted to be. There were some good poems but nothing that stuck with me.

The Bad Beginning by Lemony Snicket: 5/5. The beginning of my series of unfortunate events reread! I love these books a lot and they were a huge part of my childhood. Everyone should read these books! I don’t have much to say about each individual book but I’ll try to make a comment or two on each one. 

The Reptile Room by Lemony Snicket: 5/5. I love snakes so this is one of my favorites out of the series! 

The Wide Window by Lemony Snicket: 5/5. This book helped create my tentative fear of heights. I always remember being horrified of the image of Aunt Josephines house. 

The Miserable Mill by Lemony Snicket: 5/5. Nothing about this one really ever stood out to me besides my own outrage at child labor. 

The Austere Academy by Lemony Snicket: 5/5. This is my favorite of all the books!! I think it’s because I’ve always been obsessed with the idea of boarding school. 

The Ersatz Elevator by Lemony Snicket: 5/5. Climbing an elevator shaft would suck. 

The Vile Village by Lemony Snicket: 5/5. I would love to live in a village filled with crows. 

Mythology by Edith Hamilton: 5/5. I read this for school and it was really fascinating! I already knew a bit about Greek and Roman mythology (mostly because of Percy Jackson) but it was cool to learn more about it and Norse mythology. 

A Clash of Kings by George R. R. Martin: 5/5. All I have to say is that A Song of Ice and Fire is so much better than Game of Thrones. 

Witch & Wizard by James Patterson and Gabrielle Charbonnet:  3/5. I had found this in a box and wanted to reread it, and it wasn’t as good as I remember it being. It was a really fast read and fairly interesting, though, simply because of the magic. 

The Hostile Hospital by Lemony Snicket: 5/5. I feel like this is when the books really take a dark turn, which makes them really interesting to read. 

Blockade Billy by Stephen King: 5/5. I listen to this in the car with my dad whenever we take a long trip, and I always really enjoy it. There’s nothing super special about it, and I’ve never been super interested in books about sports, but this story is cool because it’s also about murder. 

The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood: 5/5. This is amazing! It’s another book that’s been in the news a lot due to the Trump presidency, so I’d say give it a read simply because of that, but it’s incredible and should be read in its own right. A total cliffhanger ending. 

Witch & Wizard: The Gift by James Patterson and Ned Rust: 3/5. Honestly, I can’t remember what this was about. 

The Carnivorous Carnival by Lemony Snicket: 5/5. Those lions deserved better. 

Holes by Louis Sachar: 4/5. This is one of those books that you’re supposed to read as a kid that I never got around to. I did like it, but I think I would have liked it a lot better if I had read it ten years ago. 

How to Read Literature Like a Professor by Thomas Foster: 5/5. Another really awesome pseudo-textbook! It really teaches you a lot about certain aspects of literature that you’ve probably never thought about before, and it’ll really change the way you read! 

Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass by Lewis Carroll: 3/5. This was really boring for me to read and I’m not sure why. I think I just expected it to be something else, and I didn't really like it. 

Medea by Euripides, translated by Rex Warner: 4/5. My World Mythology class read this out-loud and it was really entertaining. It’s not a necessary read but it’s kind of fun. 

The Rime of the Ancient Mariner by Samuel Taylor Coleridge: 5/5. This is super hard to read so I’d definitely recommend paraphrasing it as you go, but it’s a classic, so you definitely need to read it at least once. 

The Turn of the Screw by Henry James: 3/5. Again, this was a book that I really wanted to like, but just couldn’t force myself to. I think I ended up skim-reading at least three-fourths of it. 

The Notebook by Nicholas Sparks: 4/5. I think this is probably the first straight up romance novel that I’ve ever read, and I actually kind of liked it. It wasn’t my favorite, but it was cute and I cried a little bit at the end. 

The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time by Mark Haddon: 5/5. This was excellent! I’d never read anything like this before, and the format was super unique as well, and it was all around a good read. It was also really sad and made me really uncomfortable at times, which I think speaks to how well it’s written. 

Frankenstein by Mary Shelley: 5/5. Super good. I read this for class and I’m really thankful for that, since I think there’s a lot of deeper meaning to the book that I was able to examine thanks to class discussions. 

All the Crooked Saints by Maggie Stiefvater: 4/5. I liked this okay, but it’s definitely not on the same level as The Raven Cycle. I really enjoyed the characters in this— they were all extremely different from one another, and that was refreshing. 

The Girl on the Train by Paula Hawkins: 5/5. This started a minor obsession with murder/thriller novels!!! It was extremely well written and had me guessing until the end (I didn’t see the final twist coming!) I actually leant this to my mom and she also loved it! 

The Fellowship of the Ring by J. R. R. Tolkien: 4/5. I was desperate to like this more than I actually did. There were parts of it that I really liked, and parts of it that had me literally falling asleep. 

Bridget Jones’s Diary by Helen Fielding: 3/5. Ugh. I didn’t like this at all. It’s only redeeming factor was that it’s a really fast read. 

The Secret Life of Walter Mitty by James Thurber: 3/5. Extremely underwhelming. 

The Things They Carried by Tim O'Brien: 5/5. I wasn’t super into this in the beginning, because I don’t like war books, but I had to read it for class and I ended up loving it by the end. There’s definitely some triggering content but the book mainly focuses on the idea of truth and storytelling, and it’s really fascinating! 

Speak by Laurie Halse Anderson: 4/5. This was okay. I found myself getting annoyed with how dramatic everything was, but it’s a story about overcoming odds and finding strength within yourself, which I know some people are into. 

The Catcher in the Rye by J. D. Salinger: 3/5. Yikes. The narrator is so fucking annoying in this that I couldn’t take it seriously. I know it’s a classic, but I really didn’t like it. 

The Giver by Lois Lowry: 4/5. This is another book that I wish I had read in a classroom setting when I was a little younger because I feel like I missed out on a lot of the deeper meaning because I sped through it in an hour or two. I did really enjoy it, though. 

The Martian by Andy Weir: 4/5. This is one of the rare instances where I prefer the movie to the book. I liked this book okay, but there were big lengthy descriptions of the “science” that I found really tedious. 

Gone Girl by Gillian Flynn: 5/5. I wish I had read this before I watched the movie, though I still really enjoyed it. It’s another book that leaves you guessing about what’s going to happen until the very end, and it leaves you feeling really unsettled. 

Misery by Stephen King: 5/5. This is my first Stephen King book that I actually read (aka didn’t listen to)! I’m glad I picked this as my first book of his to read, because it’s shorter than some of his other stuff without being boring. It’s more violent and gory than I usually go for, but I still really liked it! 

And that’s it! Happy new year, everyone!