Snowflakes and Spider Silk

Top Ten Tuesday is a meme hosted by  The Broke and the Bookish . This week's theme: Top ten X books I can't believe I haven't read yet   Since I mostly read science fiction and fantasy anyway, I'm going with those two genres.                     

I can't believe it's February already! Where did the first month of 2015 go? This is my first attempt at a monthly summary post, so please excuse the randomness and the rambling :) Book Haul I'm cheating a little bit and including a book I got at the end of December. I'm the type of person who buys books maybe three or four books a year, but thanks to lots of amazing friends giving my books for my birthday, I've accumulated quite a bit by the end of January! Here's my stack: The Complete Sherlock Holmes, Volume II - birthday present from a very good friend. I already have volume one, so now that I have all of the stories, I need to start reading these! This is What Happy Looks Like - Another birthday present. I almost never read contemporary novels, especially not rom-coms in book form. I was having a bad day, and my friend forced me to start reading The Statistical Probability of Love at First Sight out loud. What started out as a joke has...

The first month of my year-long bingo challenge is over! I feel like it flew by, but it turns out I read a couple of books that fit my card without even trying :D If you want to join in the Bingo challenge at any time, you can find the original card and instructions here . You can fill out one line to make a bingo, or try and fill out the whole card. This is mainly geared towards Science fiction and Fantasy, but you can use whatever genre you want! Here's my progress so far: 1. 2nd book in a series: Crown of Midnight by Sarah J Maas *****  I'm glad I stuck with this series because I LOVED THIS BOOK. Full review here ! 2. POC main character: The Many Lives of Ruby Iyer by Laxmi Hariharan *** The author of this book requested that I review it, and it sounded really cool: a pseudo-dystopian society based on the city of Bombay. The main character, Ruby, and in fact all of the characters are Indian or of mixed origin. Look out for my full review of this...

Title:  The Mime Order Author:  Samantha Shannon Genre: Science fiction, fantasy, dystopian, adult fiction My rating: 3.5 of 5 stars Goodreads Summary: Paige Mahoney has escaped the brutal prison camp of Sheol I, but her problems have only just begun: many of the survivors are missing and she is the most wanted person in London... As Scion turns its all-seeing eye on the dreamwalker, the mime-lords and mime-queens of the city's gangs are invited to a rare meeting of the Unnatural Assembly. Jaxon Hall and his Seven Seals prepare to take centre stage, but there are bitter fault lines running through the clairvoyant community and dark secrets around every corner. Then the Rephaim begin crawling out from the shadows. But where is Warden? Paige must keep moving, from Seven Dials to Grub Street to the secret catacombs of Camden, until the fate of the underworld can be decided. When I picked up this series, I was really curious and excited about a world that was full of c...

Title:  Blue Lily, Lily Blue Author:  Maggie Stiefvater Genre: Young adult, fantasy, magical realism My rating: 4 of 5 stars Goodreads Summary : There is danger in dreaming. But there is even more danger in waking up. Blue Sargent has found things. For the first time in her life, she has friends she can trust, a group to which she can belong. The Raven Boys have taken her in as one of their own. Their problems have become hers, and her problems have become theirs. The trick with found things though, is how easily they can be lost. Friends can betray. Mothers can disappear. Visions can mislead. Certainties can unravel. I think The Dream Thieves is my favorite of the series so far (RONAN) but BLLB was excellent as well. This was the first book of the series that I read on audio, and the narrator did a fantastic job with all the characters. I finally know what a Henrietta accent sounds like! Blue Lily, Lily Blue picks up almost immediately where The Dream Thi...

Top Ten Tuesday is a meme hosted by  The Broke and the Bookish . This week's theme: Freebie!   Top Ten Fantasy Subgenre recommendations Remember that sci-fi subgenre flowchart that I made for Sci-Fi November 2014? It had such a great response that I was inspired to make one for fantasy too. It just hasn't happened yet. Today I'm taking a step towards actually making that flowchart by listing different subgenres of fantasy and some of my recommendations for them. These are both if you're new to the genre entirely or are looking for good books in subgenres you don't usually read. I've attempted to list a classic and a contemporary novel for each , but I don't think I've read quite enough to be able to fill out all of the categories. This list is by no means exhaustive! Here goes!   Epic Fantasy     Urban fantasy   Sword & Sorcery       Portal Fantasy   ...