Books: 4
Red Queen by Victoria Aveyard *****
I thought this was an interesting book, the first half especially, but without giving too much away, I thought the romance story was very unoriginal. Reading it I was thinking it reminded me of about 3 other books I have read in the last couple of years. It’s no secret I don’t much like romance plots and it’s mostly for this reason. It gets very repetitive. The world that was created was very good, shame about the romance.
Swarm (Star Force book 1) by B.V Larson *****
I’ve seen quite a few reviews slating this book. All I can say is with a name of the series like ‘Star Force’ you shouldn’t be expecting great depth. But for what it is, I thought it was action packed and an enjoyable read. I’d recommend it to anyone looking for a good Military Sci Fi book to wiz through. And if you enjoyed it then there are loads more books in the series after this one.
The Testing by Joelle Charbonneau *****
I feel like I’m saying I enjoyed reading this but….. too much. It was a good read. A typical dystopian novel, the testing itself is intriguing and I didn’t want to put the book down. BUT. I felt like the characters should have been worrying about other things than they were. For example, without any spoilers, they were told something right at the start that would happen at the end of testing. But they didn’t start worrying about it until just before it was about to happen. I know they had other things to worry about but if it were me, I would have been thinking about it the whole time, not just when it was about to happen.
Noughts and Crosses by Malorie Blackman *****
I wanted to like this book. I mean I really did. But Sephy (One of the two main characters) is just SO immature. I know she is young and is suppose to be somewhat immature but surely not THAT bad. If you were in the middle of everything that was happening, for ALL your decisions to be ignorant and immature, is just silly. That wasn’t my only gripe either. I thought the characters motivations for doing things were very thin. At some points it seems she pulls out great reasons and then completely forgets she mentions them/they become completely irrelevant. It was very annoying. There are good parts, though they closely follow things that happened it real life during apartheid and its aftermath. It was an alright read but I definitely won’t be bothering with the rest of the series.
DNF: 1
Pandora Star by Peter F Hamilton
It was just such a long book! I don’t mind that in general. Some of my favourite books are massive tomes but be long for a good reason, please. The book jumps around to different points of views, all of which live in different towns on different planets in the commonwealth. After about the 4th train station was described in all its detail I was starting to get very annoyed. I was sold on this book as ‘a solar system mysteriously disappears behind a force field, a spaceship is sent to find out why’. After about 10 hours of reading, they haven’t even built the space ship yet. But they have described every train station and the layout of every town we go to. I’m sorry I had to give up on this as it sounded so interesting and exciting.
Craft:
Now that my massive cross stitch project and my tunisian crochet blanket are out of the way I am looking forward to doing a lot of smaller projects. I’ve started designing a pattern for slip stitch crochet fingerless mittens. And I’ve also made a hat using a slip stitch crochet pattern (I’ll be making another of these as I have enough yarn left over to do it again then I will share it with you all). I’ve been doing a lot of mini swatching of crochet stitches this month. I want to figure out a way to crochet a scarf that keeps it soft. I much prefer knitting when it comes to scarfs as it’s just softer but I can’t knit anymore for health reasons. It just takes too much energy. I’m determined to work out a crochet scarf that I am happy with. Working through my yarn stash is going well. I’ve managed not to buy any all year!
My Month:
Christmas cards have been written, presents have started to be wrapped. And I hope (Fingers crossed) that I am able to get out this weekend to shop for christmas decorations. I’ve been planing for this all month, but have been feeling iffy these last few days (perfect timing!). We’re hoping to go to a garden centre that has turned into a bit of a winter wonderland with decorations everywhere. My dad keeps joking he would prefer to bring me to the pound shop but has agreed. Hopefully, I’ll have christmas lights and tinsel up soon (and a tree if they have them already otherwise dad will be going back to get one next week). I’m averaging an outing about every two months, which is amazing for me.
I hope you’ve all had a good month.
Bloglovin / Twitter / Pinterest / Goodreads / Ravelry / Tumblr / Google+
Ever The Crafter 