Bright Book

On 16th September 2015, I moved to university. Cardiff Metropolitan University to be exact. And I started this blog up to make myself want to read more. I always loved reading but really I never felt like I read enough. I remember saying to my mum so often that English Literature A Level killed my love of reading. But when I took my gap year it seemed to make everything better. I had time to just sit and read and enjoy the books I wanted to enjoy. So I wrote my list in April. And yes I may have only read 9 books off my list in full, I wanted to go over the books I haven’t had a chance to read yet. 

The books I have left are as follows;

This list makes it look like a lot. And in fact it is a lot of hours worth of reading that I have not yet done. However I would like to point out the exceptions. The titles in bold are novels that I have started but yet to finish. Some I have only read a few chapters of, like Lolita, whereas others I am nearly finished with, like Animal Farm. Shakespeare is one of those that I’ve decided to dip in and out of when I have time, especially as I’ve got them on my kindle, yet the majority of these novels that I have not started won’t be finished whilst I’m at university. If anything, it’s purely for the fact that I haven’t been able to bring them with me. I’m expecting that due to the nature of my course, I’ll have quite a bit of reading to do, so I’m not even entirely sure how many of the books I’ve bought to university I’ll be able to finish. My hopes are that I’ll be able to finish at least 3 of the 7, maybe even more. 

Keep an eye out for a few new books to get excited about in the coming months also, as I’m hoping to finish off any advanced copies that I have gotten from NetGalley, and I’m so excited to share them all with you. 

Chapter The First, in which the Messenger of the Immortals arrives in a surprising shape, looking for a permanent Vessel; and after being chased by her through the woods, indie kid Finn meets his final fate

On the day we’re the last people to see indie kid Finn alive, we’re all sprawled together in the Field, talking about love and stomachs. 

“I don’t believe that, though,” my sister says, and I look up at the slight tension in her voice. She gives me a half-annoyed nod of reassurance in the sunshine, then shakes her head again at Henna. “You always have a choice. I don’t care if you think it’s love - and by the way, NOT a word you should throw around so easily - but even if that, even if that word, you can still choose to act right."

“I said I loved that way he looked,” Henna says. “I didn’t say I loved him. You’re twisting my words. And that’s not what I’m talking about anyway. i’m talking about… how your heart fills up. Actually, no, it’s not even your heart, it’s your stomach. You feel it and everything just goes."

Patrick Ness is very surely one of my favourite authors to date. There’s something about the way that this man writes novels that gets me. It’s not even always a tugging of the heartstrings but sometimes I have to go back and re-read passages again and again just to truly realise how beautiful they are. And lots of his writing is insanely beautiful; a view seconded by John Green according to the back of this limited addition copy I own. This novel is no different!

The Rest of Us Just Live Here is told through the 1st person of Mikey. He’s about to graduate from High School and head off to College, but he just has to get through the last few weeks. He has a very tight knit group of friends including his sister, Mel, his best friend, Jared, and the girl he is hopelessly in love with, Henna. However running alongside their story, is one about the indie kids, told in 3rd person at the beginning of every chapter, fighting the threat of the Immortals. 

The way that this story is told is one of the things that took me a while to get my head around. The only real insight we get into the main threat is through these chapter descriptions. It’s what made me keep reading longer, I think, because the longer I left it between reading I forgot what had happened with the indie kids, which was actually way more important than I had originally thought. All of the events that happen to them in the long run add up to the climax of the novel for Mikey; which is actually really, really impressive. 

Another thing I was a little confused about when I first started reading was references to vampires and the undead etc. It took me a while to realise that, in this seemingly normal world, those things happened. They actually existed in the past of this small town and the story relies kind of heavily on you knowing that. I mean, how else are you supposed to believe in the Immortals, or what happens with the deer, if you don’t believe in the law that stands in the universe. 

However, what really shocked me about this novel was Ness’ way of discussing mental health amongst teens and how it feels to suffer with it. We learn that Mel, Mikey’s sister, is a survivor of an eating disorder and we are reminded of this throughout with Mikey’s uncontrollable fear of losing her to it again. Mikey isn’t immune either. Mikey struggles with OCD and this broke my heart to read about. Not only is it like obsessively washing his hands or his face, but it’s counting the panels in a room or the corners of a sheet of paper; feeling like he’s stuck in a loop. There’s a time when he’s washing his hands at his work place and Jared comes over and turns him away, just holding him there until he’s calmed down, which nearly had me in tears. 

Jared is probably one of my favourite characters in this novel. He is everything I’d probably ever want in a best friend; supportive, funny, gay and the god of cats. Yep. You read that right. God of cats. It’s my favourite best friend dynamic I’ve ever read about, even though at times it does show that not all friendships are smooth as silk. Mikey is happy to say that they’ve been together time and again just as friends, looking out for each other in their time of need, but they know that they’re just best friends. Even though they probably shouldn’t be because of their parents running against one another in the upcoming election. 

Now I can’t talk about Patrick Ness without talking about how he discusses relationships. Henna is Mikey's romantic interest in this novel and she's not described as being the prettiest of girls but there is something about the way that she is described that lets me know how much he genuinely cares about her; as a friend and as a girlfriend. Another really interesting dynamic in this novel is Mikey's jealousy over the new guy Nathan and how he is with Henna, who wants him to join her group. There is such an animosity between Mikey and Nathan that it almost comes across as a kind of sexual tension in places, but this is mostly resolved by the end of the novel. I won't tell you how. But Mikey spends most of this novel confused about how Henna feels about him and if he really does want to be with her. There are definitely moments where he evidently feels that he should let go and leave her to her own life, move to college and enjoy his life. 

Family is another relationship that we see throughout this novel. Mikey's family is dysfunctional to say the least. His mother's running for an election and his father is an alcoholic. But even with this him and Mel have to help with looking after Meredith, their 10 year old little sister who is seemingly normal. The worst thing is that Meredith is seen to be given preferential treatment because she doesn't come with a label. This, alongside their mother's campaigning, leads to a lot of contention when Meredith's favourite band, Bolts of Fire, come to play a concert in their small town. All of the families present their own challenges throughout this novel. Everyone is presented with their own challenges and they are all important, even if they aren't seen as the chosen ones. 

The message that you don't have to be the chosen one makes this novel incredibly special in my eyes. It shows that even if you're not chosen for the biggest event, or that your friends may have it slightly easier than you; you are still important. You aren't defined by the status of your mental health or how many fissures you've closed to keep out the Immortals. What matters is that you stay true to yourself. You aren't required to be anything special, and sometimes it's not the best thing to be named the chosen one. Especially if you're an indie kid, in this universe. 

Total pages - 345

Total read time - 3 hours 45 minutes

Rating /10 - 9

Recommend - I recommend you buy it immediately

Note to finish on quickly, after Typhoon Haiyan in the Philippines, authors Keren David, Candy Gourlay and Keris Stainton set up a charity drive for the Red Cross. Patrick Ness auctioned off a chance to have the winner's name in this book. This is where the name Henna Silvennoinen came from. Second place was one of Patrick Ness' friends Jared Shurin (note the same name exactly in the novel) who agreed that if he made a donation to the Red Cross anyway his name would be in the book. I think it's rather funny that up until this point the character was a 'non-committed "Josh"'. However these are just names used fictitiously. 

You want to know how I got famous? This is how. 

Weren’t proper famous. Didn’t last more than a few days. Weren’t popular famous neither. I mean most famous is we-love-you famous or you-done-something-good famous- this was the opposite. For a few days me and Blaze was the official scumbags of the universe. But what I’m saying is - we ain’t. We ain’t and we weren’t. 

Taking a guy off the street and tying him to a radiator and keeping him sounds psycho but if you know me - if you knew my whole life what happened up to that day - you’d get it. I mean you probably still wouldn’t like me - so what that don’t mean nothing anyway - but you’d know I ain’t a nutter or evil or any of that other stuff what they said about me. 

I stand by the fact that I am incredibly lucky to have this blog. This novel is the yet to be released novel from Carnagie nominated author William Sutcliffe, and I’ve had an opportunity to read it. And let me just start off by telling you that this book is stunningly beautiful; but it’s beautiful in a way that you don’t expect it to be. I mean, in what way can five teens kidnapping a man and chaining him to a radiator be beautiful, I hear you ask. Well… let me tell you. 

The story of Concentr8 follows a lot of points of view, over the course of five days. It all however stems from the ever more present disorder known as ADHD. In this version of London that Sutcliffe has developed for the reader, Concentr8 was used to subdue a majority of the populous. However when we join the novel we are mid rioting and hysteria after the government decision to stop supplying this medication. This is where I feel the beauty of this story begins. We have this really cinematic moment of the five teens stood in a shopping centre watching a crowd of people looting, and it’s that moment where you can imagine a camera panning across faces, all slightly different. It has one of those very rare qualities where I found myself wanting it to be a BBC mini series, just so I could watch what was happening. 

Before we delve any deeper into this story, it only feels right to talk about our characters. There feels to be a very distinct hierarchy between the teens in the novel, although they all maintain they’re not a gang. Blaze feels very much like the leader of the group. He’s the instigator for the abduction essentially. He decides that they need to do something big, get peoples attention. And this is what he thinks will work. He comes across as very indifferent to a lot of things, always appearing very blank faced with no real expression and no real care as to what he’s doing. This changes toward the end as he realises the effect of his actions, but in the early stages of the novel it is very difficult to pinpoint exactly why he does what he does. There are also only a couple of chapters from his point of view, perhaps highlighting that we’re not really meant to understand Blaze as a character, which makes him feel rather like a real teenaged boy. 

After Blaze we have Troy. Troy is the one who opens and closes the novel. He’s Blaze’s ‘best friend’/right hand man and the only character who sticks by Blaze through it all. He is very much more open about he feels and definitely is one who looks at both sides of the argument, even being the one who communicates the most with the hostage. He appears to be aware of how the others all feel in the novel but is able to see beyond that to the greater good of what they are doing, despite knowing where they will all end up. 

Karen comes next in my mind. She’s the only girl of the group and is Blaze’s girlfriend. I feel like she’s used as a bit of a relief for Blaze. He’s so stressed and what not that they head up to the office frequently. They seem very close at the beginning of the novel, to the point of her egging him on to ‘get him’ (the hostage), but as the story progresses we see that she drifts further and further from him. She becomes more than happy to simply let him take what’s coming for him and try and get herself out of any major trouble that might come her way. She’s very loyal, until she’s likely to lose something from it. She’s also an object of Troy’s desires, although nothing comes of it. I would have liked to have seen the two of them together perhaps, maybe if she had thought Blaze to be worse for her earlier, if only to see a different side of Troy. 

Then at the bottom of this group are Lee and Femi, my personal favourite character. Lee is very much the sheep. He follows the group because he can’t think of anything better that he could be doing, getting himself into trouble and is often referred to as the thick one of the lot. He definitely does do some very stupid things which nearly hurt a lot of people, but then it’s easy to think that it’s stupid. I don’t personally suffer from ADHD so I don’t know how his mind works with regard to needing to release energy etc. 

Femi however is the character I relate to the most, hence why he’s my favourite. Femi is the only one who really comes to terms with what taking a hostage really means for their prospects. He knows that he’s wrong for being involved in the group and spends quite a lot of the novel trying to get out of the warehouse where they end up. There’s something about Femi’s gritty realistic attitude and how he talks about how upset his parents would be that really struck a chord with me and made me really feel for him. 

There are more characters than these that have points of view as well. There’s the mayor who bears a very funny resemblance to Boris Johnson in description, and has a very warped sense of what’s happening. There is a journalist trying to get the scoop for the newspaper about what is happening from inside of the warehouse, as well as uncovering some juicy gossip about Concentr8. In addition to both of these there is also comic relief in the unlikeliest of places; the negotiator, who seems very unhappy when people come to tell him how to do his job. 

But despite having to search through all of these characters for clues and information that might be useful, whilst trying to think about feelings and how they’re going to resolve this situation, there is a steady running theme throughout. These children have all been labelled with ADHD. All of them have been put into the system with medication which has been pulled away from them and they have been let down by the governmental system. It’s very microcosmic of our society and how we treat children with ADHD currently. So much so that at the end of each chapter there are snippets from educational essays and other resources into the effects of medication for ADHD and how ADHD affects children. It feels very well researched which makes this novel feel so realistic and so worrying. It is scary to think that eventually this may be a think we may have to face. 

Overall I loved this novel. Greatly. I’ll definitely be buying myself a physical copy because the cover is beautiful and I think it’ll be one that I recommend to lots of people. You can pick up your copy of Concentr8 on the 27th August (THIS THURSDAY!) and I definitely recommend that you do. 

Total pages - 324

Total read time - 4 hours 15 

Rating /10 - 8.5

Recommend - Yes. Definitely. 

When I first started by blog I bought 3 books from my list and thought they’ll keep me going. And slowly I’ve accumulated more and more to the point where I have a pretty nice looking TBR pile on my desk. But when one’s on holiday, one accumulates books. I thought I was pretty good on this holiday in particular as I actually only paid for two of these myself. I have a friend who I was staying with a the time and she was having a clear out of all her old books. Three of which I just happened to want to read. So those jumped into my suitcase but then we went shopping when she stayed with me and we couldn’t pass up the opportunity of buying new books. These are what I picked up on my holiday. 

1. Fangirl - Rainbow Rowell 

Cath and Wren are identical twins and until recently they did absolutely everything together. Now they’re off to university and Wren’s decided she doesn’t want to be one half of a pair anymore. She wants to dance, meet boys, go to parties and let loose. It’s not so easy for Cath. She would rather bury herself in the fan fiction she writes where there’s romance far more intense than anything she’s experienced in real life. 

Now Cath has to decide whether she’s ready to open her heart to new people and new experiences, and she’s realising that there’s more to learn about love than she ever thought possible. 

I’ve loved the premise of this book since it was released. There was just a lot of hype around it and I was worried that it wouldn’t live up to the expectation that you bought into. So when my friend said she had this book I jumped at the chance to read it. I know that Rowell’s work is well loved and I hope that I can add her to my list of favoured authors and continue to buy more of her books. I also really like the fact that the twins names when stitched together make Catherine. Just a little thing that made me smile when I saw it. 

Good reads readers have given this book a 4.2 out of 5 stars.

2. Will Grayson, Will Grayson - John Green and David Levithan

One cold night, in a most unlikely corner of Chicago, two strangers cross paths. Two teens with the same name, running in two very different circles, suddenly find their lived going in new and unexpected directions, culminating in heroic turns-of-heart and the most epic musical ever to grace the high school stage. 

Now I love a good John Green book. I loved both Looking for Alaska and The Fault in our Stars but I’ve heard mixed things about this book. Really, I think my nervousness to read this comes from the fact that it’s written by two authors. Now I’ve never read any of David Levithan’s work, although I want to, and it seems like a strange way to go about writing a book, with two different people. I suppose however that it must work as neither of the characters are alike, supposedly. However for now it joins the pile to be read at some point in the future. 

Good reads readers gave this book a 3.9 out of 5 stars.

3. Nineteen Eighty-Four - George Orwell

For a moment he was seized by a kind of hysteria. He began writing in a hurried untidy scrawl: 

     they’ll shoot me I don’t care they’ll shoot me in the back of the neck I don’t care down with big brother they always shoot you in the back of the neck I don’t care down with big brother. 

He sat back in his chair, slightly ashamed of himself, and laid down the pen. The next moment he started violently. There was a knocking at the door. 

Nineteen Eighty-Four is the first of two books that are on my reading list that I bought. It’s one of those that people read for English class in sixth form and do coursework on, or they study it for exams sometimes. I’ve just always been intrigued by it’s story and I’ve always been a huge lover of dystopian fiction. The fact that it is also written before 1984, about what would be in place by 1984 is something quite interesting to read. This is what Orwell deemed the world would be like, but in fact we are getting closer to that kind of world now. I just feel like although this is literature, and fantasy, that it must have some element of underlying truth. 

Good reads readers gave this book a 4.1 out of 5 stars.

4. One Night, Markovitch - Aylet Gundar-Goshen

Two men - Yaacov Markovitch, perennially unlucky in love, and Zeev Feinberg, virile owner of a lustrous moustache - are crossing the sea to marry women they have never met. They will rescue them from a Europe on the brink of catastrophe, bring them to the Jewish homeland and go their separate ways. 

But when Markovitch is paired with the beautiful Bella he vows to make her love him at any cost, setting in motion events that will change their lives in the most unexpected and heartbreaking of ways. 

I came across this book not so long ago on the Waterstone’s website. It seems to be pretty hands down my kind of book. It has all sorts of romance but also a sense of intrigue and danger. It also sounds like both of these lead characters will be funny and/or at the very least likeable. I can’t wait to get started reading this, because other than the blurb, I’ve not heard much more about this novel. 

Good reads readers gave this book a 3.9 out of 5 stars

5. We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves - Karen Joy Fowler

Rosemary doesn’t talk very much, and about certain things she’s silent. She had a sister, Fern, her whirlwind other half, who vanished from her life in circumstances she wishes she could forget. And it’s been ten years since she last saw her beloved older brother Lowell. 

Now at college, Rosemary starts to see that she can’t go forward without going back, back to the time when, aged five, she was sent away from home to her grandparents and returned to find Fern gone. 

This is the second book from my book list that I picked up on my holiday. I wasn’t looking to buy a book when I was in Trafalgar Square, meaning to just look around the gallery’s and enjoy the feeling of being back in busy and bustling London. However there was actually a festival on so we decided to try and find somewhere a little bit quieter until we got our bearings. Waterstones was a good plan for us. It was in here my friend pointed out a particular youtube personality who I watch frequently, and so then it was very obvious that I had to buy a book just so I could talk to them. Following this encounter I was very giddy for the rest of the day which made up for the appalling opera we attended. 

But yes, this contemporary novel won the Pen/Falkner award for fiction in 2014 and I’ve heard many a good thing about it. Apparently it’s got a good twist half way through and it’s not actually all that long; about 370 ish pages. So I’m planning to speed through this one. 

Good reads readers gave this book a 3.8 out of 5 stars

So it’s safe to say that on top of this I’ve got a lot of reading to get done before the 21st of September when I start my university degree. 

Milo didn’t know why he missed the sound of the saucepan drawer that day. He must’ve been sleepy or maybe Gran was extra quiet, but by the time he felt the flutter in his chest which told him that Gran needed him, and by the time Hamlet was squealing his head off in the garage because he’d swallowed too much smoke, it was too late, the kitchen was on fire. 

“It’s not your responsibility to check on your gran,” said Mum.

She leant in and kissed Milo’s hair. She was always doing that: telling him off and then kissing him. She smelt of burnt things and sticky perfume and sleep. 

In honour of the release of the paperback version of What Milo Saw being available on August 13th, I was able to get a copy from NetGalley for review. And I am so lucky I got this opportunity. This novel follows 4 points of view, but mostly that of Milo, a nine year old boy with retinis pigmentosa, an incurable medical condition, causing near or complete blindness. For Milo, he can see through a pinhole which means that he has to focus really hard on things, and often notices different things to others. This becomes important when his great gran is taken into Forget Me Not, a nursing home which seems too good to be true. 

Other than Milo, we read from the perspective of his mother Sandy who is running a failing beauticians from the shed in their back garden. They’re starting to struggle with money, and Sandy is also struggling with her own weight, using diet pills frequently. Most of Sandy’s story focuses on the family breakdown after Milo’s dad left them for a new life in Abu Dhabi with his “tart”. 

We also hear from his great grandmother Lou, a ninety-two year old woman struggling with dementia. She is the one to set fire to the kitchen and is taken to Forget Me Not. There’s a very sweet relationship between her and Milo as she’s mute. She writes a lot of things down on her pad of paper and Milo talks to her. It’s a very interesting view to read from as often it’s things that Lou sees that help us to understand what Milo’s seeing. 

Finally we read from someone other than a member of Milo’s family. Tripi is the cook at Forget Me Not, which is how he befriend’s Milo. He’s a Syrian refugee seeking asylum so that he can earn money and pay for someone to find his sister whom he lost in Syria. His story is so heartfelt, and Milo’s urge to help him throughout this novel really is beautiful and it showsa very childlike ignorance to what’s happening in Syria. However that’s what really makes me love when Milo and Tripi are featured together because for Milo there’s no reason that a person should suffer and he makes it his job to help. 

All of the characters in this novel are beautifully well rounded. At times it can be said that Milo and Lou both feel like unreliable narrators as their ability to see things clearly and remember them are impaired. But despite that this novel is still a beautiful depiction of family getting through things together. It deals with things like unusual pets and funny things like that, but also juxtaposed are things like loss of a loved one and being young and being old and how the two sometimes feel like one in the same. 

This novel is beautiful. I can’t say it enough. I sat on the train home and cried whilst I finished it, and it’s worth reading all the way through if only for the stunning craftsmanship of the last line which ties together the whole story beautifully. It’s very much like The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Nighttime, by Mark Haddon or The Rosie Project by Graeme Simsion in the style of the writing and the impaired lead character. The innocence of Milo is very similar to the characters represented with Asperger’s Syndrome in these two novels, both of which I would highly recommend.

Total pages - 400

Total read time - 3 hours (roughly)

Rating /10 - 8.5

Recommend - Yes 100%

Pick up a paperback copy of What Milo Saw on August 13th 

This is my first graphic novel I’ve ever picked up and it was a bit of an impulse buy, if I do say so myself. I came across this little number in Urban Outfitters when I was wandering through the sales and saw it was down from £8 to £3. It was so unbelievable that even the cashier had to double check the price. I just wish I could get the sales stickers off of it. Philippa Rice is an artist who illustrates comics and lends her art to animations and models, and her art style only adds to the allure of this particular novel. 

Rice’s graphic novel follows her relationship with her boyfriend Luke, also an illustrator. It shows that the things that matter most in relationships aren’t the big romantic gestures, but the little ones. It goes through their lives together from meeting, their first dates, to moving in together and their relationship now. It also doesn’t romanticise relationships; showing silly arguments and misunderstandings which are present in all relationships. But then again, it shows all of the small moments that you tend to throw away; they’re the ones that seem so small that they really can’t be of any significance in the grand scheme of it, but in the long run they’ll be the things you look back and remember if things do go tits up. 

The colour palette of red, black and white makes all of the events seamlessly flow and the general connotation of red is love; so it kind of makes sense. It’s also got some of the cutest dialogue  that I’ve ever seen and I can only hope that it’s been said. This includes conversations about milkshakes, pillows and even phone lock screens. I stand by what I tweeted a little while ago about this book. It’s very much relationship goals. It shows that no matter what, if you’re in love you can make it work. Everything will work itself out and you shouldn’t be overlooking the small things that someone might do for you. Because in the end those are the things that will help you out of arguments, or even just remind you of good times. Even if vanilla is the weak version of chocolate. 

Total pages - 112

Total read time - 10 minutes

Rating /10 - 7

Recommend - Yes. Definitely.