The 15 in 2015

 

New Years, how dare you be looming upon us once again?! It seems like only yesterday I was ringing in 2014 and only a short time before that I was cowering under a table welcoming in the year 2000. I remember it so well, with all it’s doom  and gloom lurking in the shadows; as the fireworks crackled, the world was anxiously awaiting Armageddon in the form of a Y2K bug threatening  a massive shut down on a global scale,  or alternatively a massive tidal wave wiping out all of humanity* (The name Nostradamus was thrown around a lot that year)

*neither of which happened but Y2K did give Will Smith something to rap about.

Every year it’s the same old hoopla: most countries trying to out do each other with an epic fireworks display, news programs cover and discuss the end of year frivolities and #DrunkGirlsOfNYE becomes a tag, if not an entire instagram account. Meanwhile I stay tucked up in bed or on the couch because I don’t do crowded place,  I don’t like drunk people and if it comes to choosing between going outside in the cold or staying at home wrapped in blankets, I know which I’d choose!

New Years: that wonderful time when we say goodbye to the old and ring in the new. We make empty promises to ourselves that we will be better than the year before or we set ourselves goals that are destroyed minutes later. Yet…here I am…doing it all over again! I feel like I should set one goal this year: “My New Years Resolution is to keep my New Years Resolution for a whole year”, if I can keep that resolution I may start being more successful when I set legitimate goals.

I have every intention of setting goals for 2015, because even if I don’t achieve them, they are something to strive toward. This year, I am giving myself the 15 of 15. 15 goals for 2015 that I have every intention of trying to at least attempt to give it a go at achieving.

So here it is, my 15 of 15.

Oh how cliché am I? Embrace the cliché!  Anyway, lets see how far I can get; I’m hoping to keep at least one of these active for the whole year, then I can cross off at least two of my goals (see number 15? It’s a loophole). For goal number 2 I am acquiring the list from popsugar that I may have seen on another blog and thought was a really good idea. My reading has stopped this year for a multitude of reasons, so it will be a case of prioritising and using my time wisely in order to fit in a few minutes of reading every night!

I’ve already taken a look through the list to see if there are any categories I can plan ahead for. Ensnared by AG Howard will be my book for “A book with a one word title”; Karen Fowler will by author for “ A book written by an author with your same initials”; and A Week In Paris by Karen Hore will be the book I’ve started but haven’t finished. I’m going to set myself a reading diary for a multitude of reasons but most importantly it will hold me accountable for my reading. I know a lot of the I push myself to finished a chapter at a time, but I think if I set myself a limit of 5-10 minutes of reading per day, then I am more likely to accomplish my goals.

I may not be able to maintain all 15 goals, but I’m going to give them a fair chance; that isn’t be being a pessimist, it’s reality! It can be hard enough maintaining 1 goal and I’ve set 15. Most of these however aren’t overly complicated, they are simply choices. I just have to remember to take a breath, think about the choice and then make the right choice.

Dear world, what is on your list of resolutions for 2015? Don’t like resolutions? What are your goals? What is on your to-do list? What do you want to achieve in 2015?

Read More

Book Review: Unhinged

Unhinged by A.G. Howard

***Please note: This is the second book in a series and the review for the first book, can be found here. Splintered by A.G. Howard.

Blurb on The Back:

In Splintered, A.G. Howard’s dark reimagining of Alice in Wonderland, Alyssa Gardner was crowned a Queen in Wonderland. Yet she chose to leave her subjects so she could live in the human realm. For a year she’s been trying to be regular Alyssa again, with her boyfriend, Jeb, her newly returned mom, her friends, the prom, and the promise of a future in London.

But Morpheus, the seductive, manipulative netherling who haunts her dreams, won’t let her leave her legacy behind that easily. Neither will Wonderland, which appears to be suffering from her neglect.

Alyssa is torn between two worlds: Jeb and her human life…and the intoxicating wildness of Wonderland – and Morpheus. When those worlds collide and Wonderland starts to invade her “real” life, Alyssa must find a way to keep the balance between the two realms or lose everything she loves.

My Thoughts:

This book ultimately decided what it is about this series that I love and what I hate. What I love is the dark, whimsical, magical and haunting world that is Wonderland and everything in it and what I don’t like is the “reality” aspect and the almost whinging teenager that is Alyssa. I kind of loved her in the first book and started getting really annoyed with her in the second.

I’m still addicted to this series, the first book had me hooked within it’s pages; the second book has me faltering a little bit but I enjoyed it never the less.

I did mention, when reviewing Splintered, that there was an love triangle aspect that was sort of on par with Twilight and the whole Team Edward and Team Jacob. I guess for this book Team Edward would be Morpheus – offering Alyssa an immortal life with some mystery and excitement where as Team Jacob would be Jeb – offering Alyssa a quiet, stable life which is filled with their dreams of becoming artists etc etc. See what I did there? I tried to make the life with Jeb sound a little bit more exciting than it presents itself. Long story short, I’m team Morpheus and I kind of knew that from the very first book but the second book put everything into place for me. I’m drawn toward liking Wonderland and all it’s darkness and mystique; I’m drawn toward the adventure and thrill; I’m drawn toward the seductive and playful Morpheus and long story short, Jeb bores me. Sure, he’s selfless and would do anything for Alyssa and I feel bad for him but BLAH.

Have I digressed? I feel like I’ve digressed a little bit. I didn’t love this story as much as Splintered and I think that has a lot to do with it being set in the “real world” rather than in Wonderland. Was it a good story? Yes, it was great; it added a lot of plot twists and changes to things learned in the first book and I especially loved the cliff-hanger ending. I think it’s a great second book in the series and I still love the characters and so I can’t wait for the release of Ensnared!

Added note: The font is still dark purple and beautiful – I was expecting Dark Blue though!

Rating: 4/5 Stars

Read More

Book Review: Splintered

Splintered by A.G. Howard

Blurb on The Back:

Alyssa Gardner hears the thoughts of plants and animals. She hides her delusions for now, but she knows her fate: she will end up like her mother, in an institution. Madness has run in her family ever since her great-great-great-grandmother Alice Liddell told Lewis Carroll her strange dreams, inspiring his classic Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland.

But perhaps she’s not mad. And perhaps Carroll’s stories aren’t as whimsical as they first seem.

To break the curse of insanity, Alyssa must go down the rabbit hole and right the wrongs of Wonderland, a place full of strange beings with dark agendas. Alyssa brings her real-world crush – the protective Jeb – with her, but once her journey begins, she’s torn between his solidarity and the enchanting, dangerous magic of Morpheus, her guide to Wonderland. But no one in Wonderland is who they seem to be – not even Alyssa herself…

My thoughts:

I’m so obsessed with this book.

First of all, my confession is this: I have watched all the variations of Alice in Wonderland movies but I can’t recall ever really reading the book, nor have I read Through the Looking Glass. That being said, I am familiar with both stories and I generally have a good idea of what happens. Personally, I love the Alice in Wonderland story and I’m obsessed with it.

(I just remembered – as a child I had Alice in Wonderland and The Looking Glass on cassette…but I only ever listened to Wonderland and that’s why I know it so well)

When I found out about this book, I had to have it and I had to read it. I kind of love the idea of “what happened next” when it comes to classic books and so forth; sometimes i can end horribly and destroy the mystery of “what happened next” but in this case I really loved it! I loved the spin on the original story and I love the love triangle emerging throughout the book (even if it is a bit Twilight/Bella/Edward/Jacob for my liking). I also love the descriptive detail of the outfits and the style and I find the whole book to be very descriptive in that regard but not in an overly annoying “flouncy” sort of way; it was detail in modest sort of way.

Again, like most books I read, I like when there’s a bit of a twist and you might not necessarily see things coming; it’s those moments when you’re on the verge of your seat because you know something is going to happen or some sort of confession is going to come out and you just have to keep reading until it happens. For me, when I read a book, that’s a great feeling.

I love the beauty of this book, the cover is gorgeous, the font-type and chapter headings are beautiful and the font-colour is a gorgeous dark purple but not in an overbearing sort of way.

Overall, I loved this book and couldn’t really fault it…actually, that’s a lie, I didn’t love that it was set in Texas…it’s such a trivial thing but when I was reading and found that out…it was a little bit disheartening? Again, it’s trivial and other than that I can’t fault the book really!

Rating: 4 & 3/4 out of 5

Read More

Book Review: That Loving Feeling

That Loving Feeling by Carole Matthews

Blurb on the Back:

Ever wondered what you’d do if your relationship lost its spark?

Juliet Joyce has been happily married for twenty-five years. But with two children who treat the house like a hotel, a mother who’s just moved in and a father who’s announced he’s gay, Juliet and her husband Rick have little time for romance.

Enter Steven Aubrey – last seen twenty-six years ago, when he jilted Juliet on their wedding day. He ignites a passion in her that she though was long gone. But will Steven sweep her off her feet or can Rick rekindled that loving feeling they’ve lost? There’s only one way to find out…

My Thoughts:

Very, VERY, rarely do I find myself hating every character in a book. I think we found a winner here though. Actually that’s a lie, there are one or two characters that aren’t really significant that I don’t mind, but the majority of the characters I hate.

Some are hated because I feel like they were written with the intention of being disliked, but the others are just hated because I personally think they are idiots.

This is a story of a middle aged couple who are essentially going through a crisis of being bored with their relationship which has fallen into a stale sort of comfort zone. It’s a story which I am certain plays out on a regular basis in reality simply because relationships can have their rollercoaster type moments. Unfortunately (fortunately?) I didn’t really connect with the characters as it was very hard to understand where they were coming from. I’m not middle aged and I haven’t been married for 20+ years; it’s hard to sympathise (empathise?) with a character when you can’t really feel what they feel in a situation. That being said, I don’t doubt that I’ve reached a point in past relationships where I’ve felt something along those same lines of stale-comfort-zone.

I liked the story but I didn’t love it and that isn’t a criticism of the writer or the writing style; even the content would be ok, I suppose. My problem is that I have a strong dislike for these types of stories; Happily Ever After by Benison Anne O’Reilly was very similar in content and I hated that simply because you find yourself wanting to scream at the characters because you can see where they are going wrong and want them to know they are making the wrong choices. I guess that’s life really; if I had someone looking in on my life they’d probably have given themselves and aneurism for yelling at me so much.

Did I like the book? I felt it was unnecessarily long and draining but still somewhat enjoyable. I didn’t like the characters even though they had their own little quirks and they were interesting (I just hate them as “people”) but just for once, if I pick up one of these types of books, I want the characters to say “ok, my life sucks, but I’m going to do something to fix it right now instead of looking for a way out; if I’ve tried every possible thing to fix it and nothing works, then we’ll figure out a plan B AND I’ll be honest about it”. But that would hardly making for an interesting story right?

Rating: 2/5 Stars

Read More

Book Review: The Overnight Socialite

First of all, I have to apologise if any formatting issues occur with the publication of this blog post. My laptop kicked the bucket and so I’m using a very old, very glitchy, laptop that has many quirks; including, it appears, a very outdated version of windows live writer.

This week I read The Overnight Socialite by Bridie Clark.

The Blurb on The Back:

In this beguiling retelling of the classic Pygmalion, we meet Lucy Ellis, a Manhattan transplant who dreams of making it as a fashion designer but instead toils away on a Garment District assembly line. Poor Lucy is starting to think the unthinkable: maybe it’s time to pack it in and move home to Minnesota. Then, during a torrential downpour, at her most bedraggled and disheartened, Lucy meets Wyatt Hayes IV, man-about-town and bored Ph.D. anthropologist.

Wyatt has just been publicly dissed by New York’s reigning socialite, and boasts to his best friend that he can transform any woman – even a trailer-born nobody like Lucy – into this year’s “It” girl. Set against the gold-plated world of Manhattan’s social elite. The Overnight Socialite, a media sensation in its own right, puts a witty twenty-first century spin on a timeless story of transformation and unlikely love.

My Thoughts:

I really should read, and pay attention, to the blurb on the back. It wasn’t until I typed the blurb on the back that it all really sunk in what I had just read. Here’s the thing, I’ve never read Pygmalion but I generally know of the story and apparently I really should read it, (go figure) and so didn’t know at the time of reading The Overnight Socialite that this book is a modern day retelling. Essentially, I read the entire book thinking I was reading a scrip to a really bad sequel of She’s All That and basically imagining Rachel Lee Cook and Freddie Prinze Jnr in the lead roles of the book. This book, to me, at the time of reading, was She’s All That meets Gossip Girl (I never watch the latter but I’m very familiar with She’s All That and I confess that I did land up watching that movie upon completion of The Overnight Socialite).

There were some things that I liked about the book. I liked that it hooked me and I couldn’t put it down, even though I felt so negatively about it (remember, “I thought it was a really bad sequel”) but I generally liked the characters and was hooked into their personalities. I don’t know if it’s just me but I was really shipping two of the characters together (I won’t write any spoilers) but they didn’t land up together I wasn’t too impressed.

I, surprisingly, didn’t love the ending either. I mean it was good, it was all tied up nice and neatly but it just felt too neat, too abrupt and just too….clean. I was just expecting more of the ending, more action, more heartache,just MORE.

Is it a good read? Yes. Is it an easy read? Yes. Did I love it? Not as much as I would have liked. I liked the writing style of Clark, I just wanted more; I think I might try and read some of her other work and see just how creative she can be.

Read More

Book Review: The Book of Tomorrow

 

The Book of Tomorrow by Cecelia Ahern

The Blurb on the Back:

This is a story about how tomorrow can change what happens today…

Tamara Goodwin has everything she ever wanted and she never has to think about tomorrow. But suddenly her world is turned upside down and she has to leave her glamorous city life for a new one in the country. However, Tamara is soon lonely and longing to return home.

Then a travelling library arrives in the village, bringing with it a mysterious leather-bound book lock with a gold clasp and padlock. What Tamara discovers within its pages takes her breath away and everything starts to change in the most unexpected of ways…

My Thoughts:

I’m not going to lie, this books cover grabbed my attention and refused to let go. I am very guilty of judging books by their cover – if I don’t love their cover or there isn’t something beautiful artistic about a cover, then I tend overlook it; but this one, this book, had shimmering, elegant tentacle like arms – invisible to the rest everyone in the store except me – which reached out, coiled around my brain and refused to let go. I was hooked on the book before I had even picked it up.

Double whammy – it’s by the same author who wrote P.S. I love you which is basically on of my all time favourite movies and gave me the overwhelming urge to drop everything and fly over to Ireland.

I really loved this story; I love the elements of ‘magic’ – or the unexplainable – I loved the elements of reality mixed with scandal and mystery. It was one of those stories that you can quite easily become immersed in. I found myself needed to know what was going to happen next; I found myself needing to know what had happened in the past; and I found myself speculating on how the story was going to wrap up because toward the end you start trying to piece it all together and then you get to what I could only feel was a completely unexpected but well executed end of the story. I was left with a closed book and in awe of the ending. (I love twisted endings; that’s why I love Jodi Picoult books so much!)

The twists and turns within the story are gripping and unexpected. It’s a beautiful book a beautiful story and contains some really though provoking and inspiring messages. There were countless times when I would read a line and think to myself just how relevant or important that message was to me and it’s really reawakens that love of reading and writing.

Kerri Carrie Rating: 4.5/5 Stars

Read More

To-Do List: Books

So apparently I’m back in the business of reading books. For a while there I didn’t want to pick up a book, I didn’t want to look at a book, I pretty much didn’t want to hear the word “book” being used. For some reason, every time I picked up a book and started reading the very first line, I would involuntarily start yawning and occasionally make audible noises similar to that of someone groaning because they are completely and utterly bored out of their damn mind. Essentially I was. Even the most exciting of books that I have read before, the classics that I truly love, were doing nothing for me. I just didn’t want to read.

There came a point in time, somewhere between seeing the second Hunger Games movie and last month when I decided I couldn’t wait any longer and I needed to know how the whole thing ended. I hadn’t read the first two books, I have only seen the movies, but the next part to the movie franchise is taking far too long (in my mind) and I quite simply needed to know what happened next. So I bought Mockingjay and painstakingly pushed myself to read the whole damn book. Essentially the book is how I imagined it to be so it wasn’t an overly difficult read, it’s just because my mind was so closed off to reading that I had to push myself to keep reading. I’m almost certain there’s at least one page in that book that I just sort of glanced over rather than reading it properly.

Either way, it helped. Since reading Mockingjay, I went on to read Cecelia Ahern’s  The Book of Tomorrow as well as Douglas Adam’s The Hitchhikers Guide to The Galaxy. By read, I mean, I SUPER READ, because I managed to get through both books in 3 days. I’m not a fast reader, I never have been, so reading 2 books in such a short amount of time is an accomplishment.

To keep the momentum going, I’ve compiled a list of books that I have on my bookshelf that are yet to be read plus some books that I have just purchased (my birthday is coming up! It’s a present to me!) that I need to get through before the year is out!

First of all the books I already have:

Carole Matthew That Loving Feeling

Bridie Clark The Overnight Socialite

Jodi Picoult The Storyteller

 

The books I have just purchased from Book Depository

Giovanna Fletcher You’re the One that I want

Giovanna Fletcher Billy and Me

AG Howard Splintered

AG Howard Unhinged

Cecelia Ahern How to Fall in Love

Does anyone have any other book-reading suggestions?

 

Read More

Book Post #1

Recently (and by recently, I mean at least 2 months ago) I finished reading The Picture of Dorian Gray. I love the classics, I really do. There’s nothing better than picking up a book that predates your parents and falling into a world of etiquette, intrigue and odd sense of timelessness. I studied literature in University, it’s my thing, I love getting lost in books and I love the adventure of each and every story.

However.

For some reason the classics have been killing me lately. The Picture of Dorian Gray wasn’t the first, in fact Dracula may have been the catalyst for my sudden declining interest. I can’t read them. I just can’t handle it. The language is driving me nuts, the countless chapters in which nothing eventuates is driving me bonkers and I’m finding the characters void of any really character. When I read a book, I want to cry with a character, I want to be happy with a character, I want to get angry AT a character and want to throw the book across the room. But these feelings have been declining and I haven’t felt my usual self when it comes to literary classics.

In order to remedy this problem, I’m going to read what I like to call Junk Food Novels. I call them JFN’s because they are just like what junk food is to your health. You know junk food is bad for you, you know you’re not going to get any nutritional value from it and yet you can’t help but get a few moments of bliss when your eating it. Which is like JFN’s; I know these books aren’t good for me and I know I’m not going to learn anything ground breaking but I also know that for a few moments, I’m immersed in a whole new world in which I can get angry at the characters.

So here are some of the books I’m going to be reading over the next month (or three), this is also called “That time I didn’t feel like changing my camera settings, so please excuse the horrible quality”:

 

	That Part Was True - Deborah McKinlay
Recipe for Scandal - Debby Holt
	That Loving Feeling - Carole Matthews (Lets be honest, I got this book because it reminds me of a song)
The Overnight Socialite -Bridie Clark

I will review each and every book I read on completion of reading them so stay tuned. I will probably be reading them in this order.

Read More