Book of the Year 2015 (so far...)

Thursday again. Where do the weeks go? I guess this one seems shorter because I was travelling on Monday. I spent the weekend in Lewes with my pal Emma. There was baking and eating and walking and Netflix and it was generally just a really lovely time. It also means that this week is only a 4 day working week. Hurrah.

This week I’m throwing back Thursday in a different way, because we’re halfway through the year, so I’m going to talk at you about my Top 5 of 2015…so far! This year has been super actually from a bookish point of view, because I’ve read stuff I might not normally have picked up and pretty much all of it has been excellent.

There’s still some crazy exciting looking stuff on my TBR for the back end of the year too so as ever it will be interesting to see how many of these 5 books still make the cut at Christmas.

Naomi Novik’s Uprooted is a book I discovered via Netgalley, and that I was drawn to by the cover. I totally judge books by their covers, I’m not even ashamed to say it. Cover art is so amazing these days, how could you not? Anyway, I read it and loved it and have m own shiny bought-and-paid-for copy on its way to me because as marv as these e-ARCs are, I kind of feel like when I love a book, I ought to show that love by you know, buying it. So I did. Uprooted is amazing. It’s about this little village on the edge of an evil forest. The villagers are protected from the ways of the wicked woods by The Dragon who lives in a tower and who every ten years takes a girl from the forest to live with him as payment for his service. It’s amazing. Did I say that already? Italk about it in more detail here.

I cannot tell you enough times how much I loved The Gracekeepers. I already reviewed it, but, seriously: this book ticked all the boxes for me. It has it all. It’s just incredible and I love it and I wanted to read it forever and I swear to you if you are not reading this book then you are doing life wrong. It’s sort of part fairytale and part dystopia and completely utterly glorious.

Last Night in Montreal is a book I probably wouldn’t have read (yet) because let’s be honest, when you hear Emily St. John Mandel you think Station Eleven. Everybody has been all about Station Eleven for ages and I really really want to read it but I was sent a copy of Last Night in Montreal around about the time of the UK publication earlier this year and figured it was probably polite to read that one first. I’m so glad I did, because eurgh, so good. So very very good. It’s about this girl called Lilia who has spent her entire life leaving her life and the people in it, behind, never looking back. When she leaves her latest lover, he’s not quite so cool with it, and he follows a trail of breadcrumbs to find her only to discover there’s so much more to Lilias story than he ever thought. It’s so beautifully written and so intricate and there are all these threads to the story that weave together perfectly and it’s just a stunning piece of writing, and I talk more about why I love it so much in this post.

I talk all about Sarah Pinborough’s The DeathHouse here, but I’ll just tell you quickly again now that this book blew me away. It got right under my skin and broke my heart and just made me feel all the things and I absolutely loved it. Loved it.

And finally we come to The Girl WhoCircumnavigated Fairyland in a Ship of Her Own Making which, well, I don’t really know what to say. I’m planning a proper post about the Fairyland books at some point, but basically: every person ever needs to read these books. This is the first in the series and holy smokes it’s been a long time since I fell in blooklove like this. Jen pointed me in their direction, I say pointed; it was more on a very insistent demand that I read them. Which I did, because Jen has yet to rec me a book I didn’t love, and I fell. I’m talking Alice levels of love here, I’m talking his Dark Materials, I’m talking Harry Potter. That’s how much I loved it. It’s amazing.

It’s all about twelve year old September who meets The Green Wind at her window one day and is taken on an adventure to Fairyland. Fairyland is being ruled by the fickle and mean Marquess and only September with her friends, A-through-L, the Wyvery (his Mum is a wyvern; his father is the library) and a wonderful mysterious boy by the name of Saturday, can save it.

The story is clever and moving and funny and playful; the language is all kinds of incredible, smart and pretty and whimsical; the characters are characters you want to put in your pocket and keep there forever( SATURDAY!!!!); and the illustrations, I WANT THEM ON MY WALL. There is so much going on in this world and it feels like a modern day Wonderland. This book, I swear. It’s like if Through the Looking Glass and His Dark Materials had beautiful perfect babies (and then read book 2, read book 2 and we’ll talk about Coraline).  I can’t wait til I have children and I can read them this book. It deserves all the accolades. It deserves to be on every bookshelf ever.  It’s so amazing it makes me want to cry tears of happy.

Review: Last Night in Montreal

I love this book. I LOVE THIS BOOK.

Yep, this is going to be one of those reviews. I’ve been intrigued by Station Eleven ever since all the buzz about it began, to the point that I wanted to read it so badly I almost broke that book-buying ban in January. I didn’t, I was very well-behaved and I bought it in February instead. I haven’t read it yet though, because you know, TOO MANY BOOKS and so Station Eleven is sitting pretty on my TBR and whispering to me about how between it’s pages lies a world of apocalypse and Shakespeare and making me want to read it so badly and I am getting waaaaay off the point here, because that’s a thing I do, apparently. What I am trying to say is that my wanting to read Station Eleven means that Emily St. John Mandel has been well and truly on my radar for a while and after reading Last Night in Montreal over the weekend she’s well and truly going to stay there.

Last Night in Montreal was Emily’s debut novel, it was published for the first time in the UK this month and I was lucky enough to receive a copy from the publisher for review. My review, in a nutshell, is that I loved this book.

You know I’ve got more to say than that though: all the words, I like to use them. So, sit down, pour a glass of wine (as long as you’re over 18, encouraging underage drinking is totally not my thing) and let me talk at you about Last Night in Montreal

Last Night in Montreal is a little bit like magic. It’s all about dark secrets and half remembered memories and lost languages and it’s just so fascinating and beautiful. The narrative is kind of broken, and the whole things jumps from here to there, from this to that and it’s all kind of disjointed but at the same time every seemingly lose thread ties cleverly and neatly into another. It’s really really really well-written, it’s that kind of evocative writing that I live for, where a sentence can hit you smack in the chest and make you gasp and the details are so well drawn that you can smell the cigarettes in a smoky bar, that you shiver in the cold Montreal air, that you feel the pain of not-knowing deep in your soul. It’s poetic, that’s what it is, it’s writing that’s like poetry. It’s like crime fiction, a thriller, but not at all in the way you’d expect; it’s not a mystery but it still kind of is and it’s not a love story but fuck it made my heart hurt and it takes the ‘it’s not about you’ cliché and it throws it back in your face. Maybe its not about me, but I’m still affected, I’m still hurting and then on the other side of the coin why does matter how I hurt because it’s not about me. This novel explores all of that, I think. I’m not making much sense; I know what I want to say but  I’m not sufficiently caffeinated today and it’s all getting lost in amongst the whole I LOVED THIS BOOK thing. All I know is that I think that at its core, that’s what this book is about – that the people you love can hurt you, they can and they will, but it’s about what you choose to do after the fact that matters, how you move forward. 

Last Night in Montreal is something different, which I am always going to be all over. I keep reading about how there’s only so many different stories out there and so when I find somebody who tells one of those stories in a new and unique way I kind of want to yell about it. That’s what I’m doing right now okay, I’m yelling at you to read this book, dammit. The writing is so masterful and so clever, and the way it’s structured, the way it unfolds endlessly intriguing. I couldn’t stop reading, I couldn’t stop reading and I couldn’t stop feeling. And then there’s the whole language parallel, all the stuff about lost languages and forgotten languages and dead languages was properly fascinating and so neatly entwined with the story that it makes me want to fist pump. I love that stuff.

And I know, that's totally a gratuitous picture of Roger Federer which I have totally included because of the fist pump but whatever. Does one really need a reason to share a picture of that tennis playing face? I think not. The point is, I just really think you probably ought to read this book. Okay? Okay.