 Hey guys it's Liana and I'm here today to talk about the best and worst books that I read in 2019. So these are books that I read in 2019. They may not have come out in 2019, though some of them did, but others definitely did not. So these are, I don't think I need to explain that, but apparently people get upset if you don't. This is my opinion. If you have a different opinion from me, that's your right. There you go. So I'm gonna go through one of each best, worst. I have five best and five worst and I'm gonna do a sort of compliment sandwich approach where I'm gonna take a bad book and then a good book and then a bad book and then a good book and then a bad book and then a good book. And to end on a positive note, I'm going to end with the best book, which means I have to start with the least worst. Oh yeah, did I say that? I'm gonna go in like a sending order of least worst to most worst and least best to most best. So the first two books that I'll talk about will be meeting in the middle on mediocrity. Not the worst, not the best, but like yeah, I don't think I need to super explain this anyway. So I'm gonna go least worst and then least best and then next least worst and then next least best and then next. Okay, I think you get it. Again, my opinion. You may have different books. You might reverse both of these lists and be like, I totally agree with this video if you just set it in reverse order. And again, that is your right. Also, it's a kind of cloudy today, so the sun is in and out. So if I look suddenly bright and glowing and then doom and gloom, I mean, it might be my facial expression, but largely it will be the weather. So what did I say? I'm starting with least worst, right? Okay, so number like fifth in line for worst. So it's the least worst. So it's the bestest of the worst. Yep, is Dark Dawn by J. Christoff. This book is the least worst because, well, for many reasons, but I put it as least worst because I initially gave it three stars just because I still at the time held some love for Nevernight in the promise of what it could be. So I was like, Nevernight is like five stars. And then this is a weak edition, like weak installment of the Nevernight Chronicle. But the more I thought about it, the more it pissed me off. So then I lowered it to a two because in retrospect, that book, what was contained in it was two stars. It was so bad, in my opinion. And what good there was came from other books. So I couldn't rightly give it credit for it because the other books also they would probably be lower in my estimation now too because and I talked about this in my review because part of what was good about the first two books was the promise of where this was all leading and the where it was all leading was Dark Dawn and that was garbage. So that necessarily detracts from the goodness of the first two and the goodness of the first two relies upon the promise of what the future will hold in the future held garbage. Dark Dawn, I gave two stars to, not one star. So I think yeah. Sorry, got distracted by my molest. I didn't pay attention to my star ratings. When I did this, I just did based on how I felt and looking at my star ratings, I think, or whatever my star ratings, I think my fourth worst got a higher lower star. No, I think my third word, that's two. I think my third worst got a higher star rating than my fourth worst. So in theory, they should be reversed, but whatever. None of this is actually like numeric or factual or anything. It's just my feelings. Back to Dark Dawn, a helpful rant review for Dark Dawn. So I don't want to spend too much time on Dark Dawn, spent too much time on Dark Dawn anyway, reading it hours of my life. I'll never get back. The third book in the Never Night Chronicle, can't talk too much about it also because it would be spoilery, the ranch that I have on my channel, and there's a non spoiler section and a spoiler section. But it's very hard to talk about the third book in a trilogy without being spoilery. So even the non spoiler section of that review is somewhat spoilery. Suffice to say, it was one of my favorite trilogies until I read the third one. And now I have unhauled almost every Never Night book that I have. That's how much I hated Dark Dawn. Okay, so my fifth best book, so the worst best, was The Half Drowned King by Linnea Hartzwecker. This I think I talked about it in a video, not very much. I think it was like series that I finished this year because I've been dread the series. I think it's called The Golden Wolf Saga or The Half Drowned King trilogy or I don't know, I think I've seen it both ways. This is a historical fiction book, not fantasy. And for me, that's diverse, but it is if you can't tell from the cover and from the name and from the name of the author. It is a Viking story and it is based on the sagas about King Harold and Linnea has basically fleshed out the sagas of King Harold and had some artistic license with it and moved pieces around a bit and added a couple things and condensed a few things and combined a few things. But ultimately has fleshed out and given personality and life and flesh and blood to the sagas of King Harold. And this is a sweeping trilogy, but the first book I think of the three is my favorite. I think the second book was the weak point. I still liked it and the third book I thought was strong again, but I think my favorite in the trilogy is the first book. It's getting to know and being introduced to all these characters and by the third book they've been through so much and they've pissed you off so much and they've made so many mistakes that yeah, it's rewarding to see where it all goes, but there's just so much baggage in the third book. There's something bitter about it to me anyway, kind of the feeling of seeing Old Han and Old Leia in the Star Wars movies. It's nice seeing them, but it's also like, you know, I don't know if there's a word for it. I bet another language has a word for it anyway. So I think the first book is my favorite, but it is a sweeping epic Viking type story filled with Vikings and Viking-y things which I am trash for, but it's also exceedingly well done. That said, if you are not trash for Vikings and you're not into a somewhat dryly written historical fiction book, if you're looking for lots of romance or a plot that's very, I don't know, sort of modern with a fast-paced type, I don't know, revenge story or something like that, it's really like a sweeping epic following multiple generations and multiple perspectives, but it's very Viking-y. It's not trying to be anything else. So yeah, like there's men that have multiple wives and calcubines and there are women that are making practical decisions like marriages of convenience and having the children of important men because it's good for them because they'll be protected and their children will be looked after and people making alliances because it's a good idea or breaking oaths because they're selfish and it's just a lot of, I don't know how else to say it, kind of just gritty, practical historical fiction. So a lot of times I think of historical fiction as being sort of embellished and if you watch something like The Tutors on Showtime, I think The Tutors is all of a sudden filled with passion and romance and all of a sudden there's all these feelings and betrayals and it's all just sort of heightened versus if you watch a documentary on King Henry VIII, it's more like there was this treaty and this decision and it was practical to marry this person and he didn't really care for her. He kind of had the hots for her but then again, you know, his advisors were against it and it's a lot more dry. So the House Around King is more like that. There is feelings though. I don't want to say there isn't and I did really feel for a lot of the characters and I really liked a lot of the characters but it is a little more detached and a little drier than I think a lot of people like. So if you want something heavily emotional and more modern in its sensibilities and its incorporation of just like a bunch of like feelings, that's not really there. But if you like a viking story, it's very viking. Okay, back to bad books. The next worst on my list is Arora Rising by Jay Kristof and Amy Kaufman. I again have a full rant review for this. I think yeah, pretty much all the books on my worst list except the worst worst has a full rant review on my channel. So I don't want to say too much again because you could just watch my full rant if you're curious. Arora Rising I was so disappointed with because I had dark down hadn't come around to let me down yet. So Jay Kristof was still high in my estimation. I still love the Illuminae trilogy, the Illuminae files. And I had previously liked Nevernight and at this point I was still liking Nevernight. So I expected Arora Rising to be good. It's a very least good if not great and oh god, I hated it so much. It was so juvenile. It was so poorly written. The characters were just such a just poorly constructed and didn't make any sense and really childish and the book wasn't at all what it purported to be. It was sold as being kind of this rag tag group of misfits kind of coming together to try to save the universe because somehow it's falling on their shoulders but it's not about that at all. It's about elites who are really good at what they do except the fact that they shouldn't be good at what they do because they're all really childish and selfish and petty and I didn't care for them or root for them and I thought the whole thing was just a mess and I hated every second of it. Anyway I have like a 40 minute length rant review where I just pick apart everything that I loved about it. So if you want to see that go check it out. My next best fourth best book is The Seven Husbands of Evil in Hugo. This is historical fiction. It's like Half-Time King. Actually yeah my best books of the year three out of five of them or three out of the five are not fantasy so maybe I'm not the fantasy lover that I keep saying that I am and of course I am. Seven Husbands of Evil in Hugo. It's historical fiction about this fictional Hollywood actress from sort of the old days of like black and white movies but it's told from the present day where a young reporter has been called in by Evelyn Hugo. Evelyn Hugo doesn't explain why this is the first and only interview she's really ever given but she's selected this reporter and this reporter is coming to her house now and kind of getting her life story from her. So you flip back and forth between the present day and the past and as Evelyn tells the story of her life and loves and her seven husbands which she became kind of infamous for in Hollywood and the book just feels real. I wouldn't have picked it up if it wasn't for all the praise that it gets and it deserves that praise. Reading historical fiction about a Hollywood actress does not sound like my cup of tea but it was such a beautifully written book and Evelyn Hugo leaps off the page. She feels like a real flesh and blood human being who truly was an actress and I could not believe when I finished the book that I couldn't go now and rent and binge watch a bunch of Evelyn Hugo movies when he was describing various movies of hers that were iconic for her career supposedly. I could picture myself going and renting them and then her story kind of just creeps upon you and just you just fall in love with Evelyn Hugo and by the end of the book I was sobbing. It took me like two hours to read the last 50 pages because I was bawling and it's really hard to read when tears are filling your eyes. It was just a beautiful book and I again it deserves all the praise that it gets. It really really does. The third worst book so we're getting worse is Gideon the Knight by Tamsin and Muir. That book was Yikes. It was just so convoluted and so bizarrely written that I can't even be sure it's bad because I don't even know what the fuck it's about. It doesn't bother telling you anything and that was one of my biggest problems with it. There's things about it that I could have seen myself enjoying. It had a really irreverent heroine who was sort of an anti hero. It had some stabby dark creepy kind of magic in it but it is sci-fi. It had this creepy kind of close circle mystery so there were so many pieces of it that it was something that I totally could have liked that the author never bothered to explain a single thing. A world you're in, who these characters are, context for the stakes or motivations or repercussions of what is going on, just absolutely nothing. And it's not something that because there's books like that too where it doesn't explain things to you at the beginning. It throws you in but then it throws you bones along the way. Well, this did throw bones along the way because all these necromancers are reanimating skeletons all the time. You know, it throws you hints along the way so that by the end of the book you've kind of begun to piece together what this world is and what it's all about. This book doesn't. It throws you in and never ever explains anything. Anything. There aren't context clues or anything. There's nothing. And part of the reason I think this has happened is because Gideon herself doesn't really give a shit about the world and so it never occurs to Gideon to have an internal monologue that would explain a single thing to you because she doesn't give a shit about a single thing. So that goes with her irreverence but you need something somewhere to tell the audience what the fuck is going on because I don't need Gideon to care about the world but I do need to know about this world that Gideon doesn't care about so I can appreciate what it means for Gideon to not care about this world. It was really frustrating. It pissed me off so much. It was just so all over the place and I it was so confusing that it became boring. And then there was this creepy closed circle mystery that with this like this much of the book well not by pages I mean like if this is the book like this much of it kept my interest and was interesting all of a sudden and then that dropped off again and it was also confusing and boring and the ending was like what the fuck? That book was just a giant what the fuck? My third best book of the year was The Secret History by Donna Tartt. This was my first um well so far only Donna Tartt book I've read although I have started the Goldfinch which I am enjoying. The Secret History I didn't really know what to expect except that I knew it was dark academia and I hadn't really read anything before. I hadn't knowingly read anything before that is considered dark academia although I would argue that Harry Potter is kind of dark academia. This follows a group of classic students who are in this small liberal arts college where they are this sort of private study group with this one professor who has selected these students in particular to be sort of his school within a school and you know what the outset at the beginning of the book you know that one of these students dies at the hands of the others. You just don't know what leads to that why why this ends up happening so it's not a spoiler to know that you know that you just don't know why. So you follow these students as they sort of fall into this world of classics and how they get more and more and more obsessed with the classics and with their life being informed by the classics and sort of living them out and idealizing Greek philosophies and Greek ideas and this leading to the death of one of them and they are all kind of really unlikable privileged selfish people and their professor is also a pretty unlikable and selfish and kind of childish person and so it's a dark story about pretty shitty people all end up doing a shitty thing but it's so beautifully written and I just Donna Tartt's writing is like nothing I've ever read before. It's not the lyrical poetical style of someone like Patrick Rothfuss or like Lenny Taylor but there is something that I think I described before as velvety. It's just such an immersive fully fleshed out decadently written book where every single moment is described, not encyclopedic detail because that's boring as fuck and I've read a lot of high fantasies where the magic or the world are just described in this encyclopedic detail where you're just like oh dear god I do not care but Donna Tartt's writing is just sort of painting a portrait of every moment sort of those beautiful photographs or paintings that people do of something incredibly ordinary but it becomes extraordinary because of the way that it's framed by the photographer or by the painter. Donna Tartt's writing is like that where this story and every single moment in it is just decadently captured in a way that makes it art and it's to me a joy to read that even though it's long and dense and dark and about unlikable people it's just such a rich and immersive experience reading her prose but again it's not like anything I've ever read by anyone else and I am experiencing something similar with the goldfinch so I think I'm a Donna Tartt fan. My second worst book was Wicked Saints by Emily Duncan. Emily A Duncan? Is that right? I think we'll let it regardless. You I think would think that this would be my number one worst but like I said I haven't done a rant review for my number one worst so hold on to your bonnets. Wicked Saints again I have a full rant review so if you want to hear me rant about it for like I think a half an hour go and watch that. Oh my god what a hot mess. That book was such a mess. Such a fucking mess. It purports to be this dark and bloody and stabby and magical sort of Slavic YA fantasy. The naked cover says let them fear her so you get the sense that it's going to be this this super powerful and also ruthless female main character and all the words and the names in it are either from or inspired by Slavic names and words so it has in theory that it's going to have this great atmosphere but it doesn't have any of those things. I mean it technically has all of those things but it's it's horribly executed so so horribly executed the characters don't make sense the plat doesn't make sense the world doesn't make sense the whole thing is just hot garbage and it's all just window dressing for ultimately some fan fiction for somebody that always wanted Alina to end up with the Darkling and the Grisha trilogy except the Grisha trilogy is actually well written so if you wrote a fan fiction if you wrote an alternate Grisha trilogy where Alina ended up with the Darkling I would think that was kind of yikes because I don't think she should end up with someone abusive and evil but it would be well written because the Darkling is an interesting character and Alina is actually a powerful character but the characters in Wicked Saints were just shells that were attempting to imitate it's kind of like if you see Game of Thrones costumes and Game of Thrones characters and then you go to Party City and you get the costume version of that so it's recognizable as that's Daenerys because it's got the blonde hair it's got a dragon on the shoulder got this like leather corset thing going on but it's it's not Daenerys it's just a blonde wig with a dragon on the shoulder and a corset you know what I mean so Wicked Saints was like the Halloween costume version of the Grisha trilogy wherein the Darkling and Alina end up together oh god that book was such hot yikes my second best book of the year was The Spider by Leo Kuru I have a video I think where it's something to do with what makes a book perfect or something like that and I already declared the first book because this is the second book in a series the wolf to be like my perfect book and the spider is even better than the wolf so there you go but it's not number one if you don't know because you haven't ever watched my channel I've talked about this a few times this series and then The Spider itself is a reimagined I guess this is technically also kind of historical fiction except it's alternate history fantasy so you would arguably four out of five of the books on my best list are not fantasy but in any case the project of this book is to conceive of a world in which homo sapiens are not the only humanoid species to have survived the ice age and so we follow the Anakim who are sort of these highly developed and highly evolved Neanderthals as well as like homo sapien descendants who are sort of human people and they're all players on the political warring map of Europe in sort of Middle Ages so geographically this is taking place on what is now Britain or England only the the northern part of it is the territory of the Anakim and the southern part of it is occupied by our homo sapien ancestors and there's war and politics and intrigue and backstabbing and such incredible world and culture building to have invented this entire people but not just invented a people the way you invent elves and dwarves where you can kind of do whatever the fuck you want because you're inventing a fantasy world that doesn't have rules other than what you set this is set in our real world it's just suggesting that what if these other species had survived what would how would they have gone on to evolve so it does have to make sense for our world there's some liberties you can take but it it's not a magical world you can't have magical reasons for this so the anthropological work that he's done in crafting this people and this world and to conceive of how their anatomy would inform their culture and how their culture would inform their anatomy and then how they would interact with our ancestors how they would be same how they would be different oh my god it's so good it's also a bit on the dry side like i'm talked about half drunken i obviously don't mind that about books and i like it and i studied anthropology so the anthropological aspects to it is just so good so so good fucking love it the spider is the second book in this trilogy that is following the political machinations warmongering power struggles and personal relationships of both anaconda the humans and oh so good my worst book of the year was veins of magic by emma ham i haven't really talked about this book and i didn't really talk about the book that came before it because this is the second book in a duology because it's an independent author it's self-published so i kind of feel weird about going out of my way to rant about an indie author's book because indie authors are already kind of out there on their own that said it was terrible and i spent money on it so i mean you put your book out there for its public consumption and criticism so here we go um i have a bunch of emma ham's books on my kindle because before i ever read a single one of them i was sort of collecting them when they would be truly cheap on kindle because the covers are so pretty and they're all sort of magical or fairy or fey or fantasy type romances and from the covers and from the fact that that's what they are i would have imagined they'd be something like grace draven's books which i fucking love grace draven and if these books were like grace draven i'd be so so excited because emma ham has a lot more books out there churning them out manes of magic is the second is a sequel to heart of the fey which i read last year and heart of the fey was awful it was awful and then time passed and um memory softened the harshness of my critique and i just remembered feeling it was bad but not all of the whys it wasn't fresh in my memory why i hated it so much and i have like i said a bunch of her books on my kindle and i think i had recently read some grace draven books and i was thinking to myself i was like well and i see her covers all the time online and the covers are beautiful and i was like well heart of the fey was the first book i'm pretty sure it's the first one she wrote first one she published so i sort of talked myself into reading veins of magic thinking well i'll wrap up that duology and the second one might be better the first one was the first one so much like a first draft her first stab at writing would understandably be the worst so maybe it gets better it gets worse oh god at least heart of the fey kind of had the barest bones of a beauty and the beast retelling in there to kind of create some kind of a structure in there veins of magic it was still about those characters but it had abandoned being a beauty and the beast retelling and it was just off-roading on its own path and that path was directionless and it was just so much yikes oh my god the prose is bad the characterization is bad the romance is bad their smut the smut is bad the only good thing about these books are the covers and this book like wicked saints is better written yeah yeah it's that bad there's a lot of passes that i'll give indie books and self-published books i wouldn't give traditionally published books such as some grammar errors and some spell spelling mistakes some formatting errors just things that that are less polished that i'll forgive it for a lot more because i know that an indie author or self-published author has very few if at all people helping with the creation of this this work they don't have a whole team of editors and marketing specialists and beta readers and everything it's sort of a one woman or one man operation so i'll give it a lot of passes for a lot of more technical issues but at the core it still needs to be a good story with good characters and this was a whole god no amount of professional editing and professional fixing you'd have to rewrite the whole goddamn thing every single word at which point it's not even the same book so it wasn't one of those because again like wicked saints has some potential at least in terms of the inspiration for it and the fact of a sort of slavic inspired world with some religious magical tensions it's it would need a huge amount of work to make it good but it would be kind of worth it there'd be at least some a kernel of a thing there to kind of make it worth it to push to maybe make it into something good veins of magic it's just oh no no no just nothing nothing nothing nothing oh god and my best book of the year is A Little Hatred by Joe Evercrumpy ah no one is surprised you had to know it was either going to be a spider or a little hatred and tbqh i wasn't sure until like the moment that i wrote them down which i'd put as the top but A Little Hatred was just i think i put it at the top just because i've read so much Abercrombie whereas at Leo Karoo i only have those two books and i love those two books but with Abercrombie A Little Hatred was like the culmination of all of those other books all of the first law trilogy and all the stand-alones and the short stories all the best parts of them coming together plus new greatness so it was just i just have no words the incredible people sometimes say that at Joe Abercrombie's world building is not good but i would argue that it is good because you don't notice it and that's an amazing thing if you're thinking about the world so actively to me that makes it seem like it's not doing what it's supposed to do if that makes sense you shouldn't notice it you should just be in it and i think he does that exceedingly well i'm not thinking to myself like with Gideon what is this world where are we and i'm not thinking to myself the way that i would with Brandon Sanderson oh how cleverly we have executed this structure here yes you have created this unique thing but i'm thinking about it as opposed to just being in the world with Joe Abercrombie the world just feels like it just exists and we just visited it i don't feel like i'm watching someone build it it just exists which i think is better it feels more organic so we have this world that he's now been building across all these books so part of it the work is already done for him except he's brought it into a new age an industrial age which is something that fantasy doesn't do very frequently fit down for that it brings back some of my all-time favorite characters from across the series i mean sandan glockta sandan glockta is back but he doesn't lean on someone like glockta to just okay people are going to be here for glockta so i don't have to put effort into it i'll just throw in some glockta and call it a day he's written some incredible new characters he's learned from some past mistakes with some previous characters and built upon the frameworks that he's had before and and really created it's i mean he's always been a master of characterization but he's brought it to the next level as opposed to being an author where you're like well they've kind of shot everything they've got and now it's regurgitation no it feels new and fresh and honed and sharpened and just gets better and better and better oh it was so masterful so incredible and original and fun and dark thought-provoking and gritty and everything i could have possibly wanted my next joe abracame book to be it was and more and oh my god i need the next book immediately so yeah those are my best and worst books of 2019 let me know in the comments down below your best and worst books if you agree or disagree with my selections if you've read the books i talked about if you haven't read the books i've talked about so on my worst list then i'd go ahead and recommend you don't read those i post videos on saturdays sometimes wednesdays so like and subscribe and i'll see you when i see you bye