 Okay besties, who's ready to get freaky? Hello friends, how are we doing? Welcome back to my channel. Welcome to the annual mid-year freak out tag. If you're a regular booktube viewer, you'll notice the tag everyone does around the middle of the year. It's kind of reflecting the year so far and reflect as to what's to come and kind of freak out about the fact that we're halfway through the year. We're not technically not quite yet. Usually I am religious about doing this video at the end of June. Like religious about it. I do not allow myself to do it earlier. But I just got back from holiday last night and although I was still reading on holiday, I feel like I have come back and I'm a bit disconnected from like reading and releases and what's happening, what's going on. And so I felt like doing this video now would be the perfect way to kind of resituate myself on what books I'm excited to read, what books I've read so far this year. Like get back in the booktube brain because I kind of shut it off. I was on a beach for five days just laying in the sun, no thoughts, head empty, literally playing a lot of two dots whilst I listened to audiobooks. That was my five days basically. My vibe right now is just living life. I guess we should just start. Do I have anything else to say to you now? No? Let's just begin. Okay, first question. I'm watching my old video by the way. I'm mute to see what the, because I looked and everyone's videos and no one puts them in the description. It's just a lot of hard work. So I've got a last year's video and I'm watching it to see what the questions are. First one, best book I've read so far this year. Now I think previously I would be like, oh I hate this question, get it out of here because I wouldn't know it. I know what the best book, I'm pretty sure I know. I'm not even gonna look at my good reads to like confirm this, see if there's any other books because this is the one that first comes to mind. Legends and Lartes by Travis Baldry. The first book I read this year, you guys. The first book I read this year because I have a conspiracy theory that I have to read a great book at the start of the year to have a good year. Every single year since me being a reader, since me starting reading again properly with the secret stream, whatever year that was, I'm really bad with years guys. If you don't know this, I constantly mess up years. I couldn't tell you what the year that was. Anyway 2019, 2020? No, 2019 maybe. I don't know. I always have to get a five star read at the start of the year. Last year, 2022, there we go, I didn't. I got a two star and I had like bad juju around me for like the first half of the year. So this year I was like, I'm gonna read a five star. I'm not only gonna read a five star, I read, I think, what I think is still my favorite book of the year so far first this year. I generally believe, like I'm not superstitious about a lot of things but I am superstitious about me needing a five star at the start of the year because it's a proven record at this point. It's a conspiracy theory that I'm actually interested in. So you all know what this is about. We're following like an orc who opens a coffee shop and it's just the most pure gorgeous wonderful book. I can't wait to reread it. I'm probably gonna reread it at some point this year but I love it. I love, I love it with my whole heart. Like I just can't explain to you what a hug this book is. If you haven't read it yet, what are you doing? Like I was thinking about this the other day. I think last night I was thinking about those in the last years. I was thinking like if you haven't read it at this point, like what are you doing? What are you doing if you haven't read it at this point? If you're a viewer of mine and you haven't read it, like I'm also not doing my job properly because you need to read it. It is the most perfect book. It is lovely. The writing is incredible. The relationships, it made me feel stuff that I haven't thought in a long time. But I loved it. I loved it, I loved it, I loved it and I think it's gonna be hard for a book to become my favorite book of the year over this. We still got half the year. This point last year I hadn't read a lot of my favorite books of last year. So I mean there's still a lot of time and I've had a few shitty reading months this year. So I mean it hasn't had the most competition, I will say that, but I loved it. It's perfect and I cannot wait for the sequel to come out later this year. Best sequel I've read so far this year. I think I've read a lot of good sequels. Okay, let's have a look. Shit. Right, let me open up my series spreadsheet and we'll chat about this a little bit. So in terms of what I finished, I've only finished, is it three? Yeah, three series this year. Girls of Fate and Fury which I gave like a 3.5. I read the whole Bill Hodges trilogy but I don't really count that plus I didn't like the sequels as much as the first one. I just read, on holiday I read Only Human which is the last in the Themis Files guys. I finished another series, you proud of me? Woo! Yeah, I read this on holiday. I didn't just like this but I gave it a three star because I just don't feel like this really needed to happen. I love the first two books. I think what they do is so fresh, so fun and this just felt a bit like it could have been a novella, almost like a kind of sequel novella for like fans of the series. I just didn't feel like it went in a particularly interesting direction. What about series that I have continued? Oh! Okay, did I read that this year? I guess I did. Okay, hold up, hold up, hold up. Oh winners of The Burning Issue of the Day and Death Beside the Seaside by T.E.Kinzie. This is the fifth in the series. I'm gonna say this is the sixth. I read this on holiday guys. This was another The Vibes. Death Beside the Seaside, I was reading it at the Seaside. Well, kind of not a British Seaside, a Portuguese Seaside. But all the same, the vibes were pretty good. I read this right at the start. Yeah, I gave this five stars. I gave this a 4.5 because I wanted to give it a five star. I gave, well you guys should just give it a five star because here's the thing, right? I don't think when I give these a five star, other books have to do more to get a five star from me. They're not exactly on equal footing with other books. I gave five star but this whole series I think is now just gonna be a five star for me because I love the characters so much. The following Lady Hardcastle and her maid flow, who are Bezzie Mayes. They've been spies in the past and they just like keep getting caught up in murder. They're trying to retire and have a nice quiet life. But murder keeps following them and it's so annoying. And I just love this series so much. So yeah, now I'm to the sick. I'm hoping to read all that. I think there's like four more but then in the year there'll be four more out and I'm hoping to read them all this year. But then I'm like, oh my god, I run out and I have to wait every year for them. So yeah, these are probably the best sequels I've read this year. I just love this series. I think I'm going to give every book in it a five star because I'm so attached to the characters. I love them and I love just the humour and the wit and the writing style and the joy. I feel like we've been speaking a long time already and we're only two questions in. So in the words of Fifa Ahara, should we speed things up a bit? Should we speed it up a little bit? New release you haven't read yet but want to. Okay, we have quite a few here. Luckily I keep all of my new releases on the top shelf of my car. The number one, let's say two, okay, because obviously I want to read all of these. Number one, it only just came out but Yellow Face by RFQang. Oh my god, it says Rebecca FQang on this. Interesting. Are we differentiating between the thrillers and the fantasy that way? Maybe. This is probably my most anticipated book of the year. I went to, if you watched my Wrapped Up vlog from like last week, week before, I don't know, time is a construction. You and I went to the talk for this and she was just incredible and I'm so excited for this. This is like a kind of satire around the publishing industry where we have these two characters. One is an author of colour, one is white. Their friend, the means, the author of colour dies and the white author witnesses this and like steals her manuscript and tries to pass herself off as racially ambiguous and it's, you know, a scathing critique from what I've heard of like the racism within the publishing industry, the kind of like, what's the word I'm looking for? Words. My brain switched off this past couple of days and I'm struggling to turn it back on. Like the, you know, okay, let me describe the phenomenon rather than trying to use the word. I was trying to be clever. Publishing, saying they're doing things to be diverse and like to support diversals has been not really like it's all just for show. It's all fake, you know? They're like not really doing anything. You know, it all happened during the pandemic and during Black Lives Matter and stuff where like they'd set up imprints for diverse authors, but then those imprints quietly shut down and hire more diverse editors when those editors were quietly let go. Like it was all of that, you know? And so this is what that tackles upon. So I'm so excited. I think our quang is on track to be one of my favourite authors of all time ever to exist because, you know, Babble is in my top five books of all time. And then a lot of you called me crazy for putting this in my five star predictions, but I just know I'm right. Like I don't, I don't even know, I don't know how to explain it to you. Like it's gonna be five stars, but the writing retreat by Julia Bart. I know it's about shit crazy. I don't know what to expect. I'm trying to stay away from people talking about it too much because I don't want to get spoiled for like what the real shit going down is. But I know we're going on a writing retreat. It's all about female friendships. It's dark. This is the secret history it's been come to. I'm so excited. It's gonna be five stars, guys. I don't want to tell you. It's gonna be five stars. Oh shit, poor Megan. And for that question, I said daughter of the moon goddess. Most anticipated release for the second half of the year. Okay, well, spoiler alert, my video for all of my most anticipated releases of the second half of the year is coming out on Thursday. So I won't give a lot away, but I'd say let's give three most four, four. We'll give four most anticipated, right? We'll just go through these quickly. Love The Orestacle by Allie Hazelward. I love Allie Hazelward. She's my favorite romance author ever to exist. Me and her, we just get it. We get the vibe. She gets what I want. Love Theoretically. Just another missing person by Jillian McCallis I feel like it's called. This is the author of Wrong Place Wrong Time, which you guys know I actually loved so much. It's gone up in my estimations over time. The more that I think about it, about what it does, about the kind of book that it was, I love it even more. You've heard me speak about it loads. Why am I like, I was talking and I was like going to zip up my jacket mid chat. Okay. Where's the zip for that? Oh there, okay. So Wrong Place Wrong Time is about a mother who witnesses her son kill someone and she's like going back a day every time to try and figure out what's going on and how this happened and try to stop it. I don't know what just another missing person's about. I will find out for you for the, for the video, but I'm so excited to see what Jillian McCallis does next. The last devil to die, I feel like it's called the next Thursday matter club book, already pre-ordered, already so excited. I'm so excited. I believe it comes out in like September, October, but I tend to always read them in November because November screams murder mystery month to me. I feel like I always read them in November. So I probably won't read it until November. But, but yeah, this is a fourth book in the Thursday matter club series, one of my favorite series of all time. I've given them all five stars. I love this series so much and I cannot wait to be blessed with another. And then we'll just throw in book shops and bone dust, which is a pretty cool trilogy on the lattes where I think it's set at a library, while our main character is like visiting a library on her orquests at one point. So yeah, those are probably my foremost anticipated that I can think of at the top of my head. They're the ones that come to me instinctively. Biggest disappointment. Oh, shit. I don't want to be negative. Okay, we'll just touch on it quickly. You already know where on the shelf I'm going. I mean, this just happened. So it's fresh for the moon goddess. Like, I don't want to talk about it. We've spoken about it. I spoke about it in my last two videos. My last two videos been me reading it, and then my wrap up where I'm talking about how depressed I am about my reading month. So we don't talk about it again. Like if you're a regular here, which we probably are if you're watching this video, we're going to talk about it again. But like, hence me mentioning it in last year's mid-year freak out tat is one of the most exciting books. I'm so upset. This was first objection with me. I gave it, I think I gave it two and a half, but maybe there's a two. At one point, I wanted to come outside and have a little cry. His thing, I love beautiful lyrical writing, but I don't know how to explain to you. I read out some of the lines and I think I hit the wrap up or the vlog or both. I don't have to explain to you. Like, one of those lines is fine. A couple of those lines, like kind of beautiful, like those, that kind of writing is fine. But it's like every word, every line. It was just not for me, guys. And I'm really sad about it. I don't know, are there any other disappointments that meet this? Because I don't know if there are. I'll have a look quickly. Oh, to be fair, okay, there's one other. I'll put a picture of that, Five Survive. Is it the bottom of all this? Is it a candle? Okay, it's a mask. Five Survive by Holly Jackson. I did a whole reading vlog for this as well, because I thought it did not cross my mind it could be anything less than a four star because Holly Jackson, to this point, had been one of my favourite authors of all time. I love the Good Girls Guide to Murder trilogy with my whole heart. I thought it was literary genius. And then I read Five Survive and it was like, it was bad. It was brown. It's about these characters who like on this bus and a sniper is trying to kill them. And I just thought it was the dumbest. It was badly written. I don't want to say that because it's mean, but like that's how I felt. That was my feelings. They're my dreamy disappointments. I don't want to talk about them. Can you sense that? Like usually sometimes with disappointments, I'm like, yeah, let's fucking let's trash this. Whereas those two are viscerally painful to me. They're very upsetting. So we're moving on. Biggest surprise. Okay, this is more positive. Oh, okay, okay, okay. I can think of one off the top of my head, but very unhelpfully, it's one I don't have with me. It's Nothing to See Hit by Kevin, Kevin Wilson, I want to say. I lent this to my boyfriend's mum and she really enjoyed it. I just haven't got it back from my head. So it was around her house. She really loved this as well. So this is following these kids who spontaneously combust and we're following a main character who is best friends with their new stepmom and she's called to come and help look after them and like nanny them. And actually, it's such a beautiful book about like found family about trauma within childhood, about like recognizing and caring for kids who have been cared for probably before. It was just beautiful. And I feel like I can't do it justice talking about it. I was recommended this by Courtney Summers, one of my favorite authors. We did a video where she picked what I read and it was incredible. But yeah, I'd never really heard of this before. I think I'd seen the cover a few times. It's quite like a recognizable cover. But I hadn't really heard about the book and I didn't know what to expect. And I kind of went into it with like, I don't know, like, yeah, I'm going to enjoy this, but I don't know what to expect. And I just loved it. I thought the writing, the writing was so interesting. The way that the words we use and the way that characters played off one another and like the decisions that characters made were very interesting. Like I like books where characters act in ways that aren't entirely described and like their motivations and their feelings and everything aren't quite clear and like where characters act in a way that is perhaps just ever so slightly off-kill to them what you would expect from like a normal interaction. Does that make sense? And it was probably the only five star that I read this year. Yeah, that I've read so far this year that I would say like wasn't an author I was I already loved or it wasn't a book I was highly anticipating. It was like one of the books, probably one of the only books that I've read off the cuff this year so far. It's like a video or something that I wasn't expecting anything and grew on to love. Favorite new author debut or new to me? Okay, so Kevin Wilson would probably be my answer for that. Oh, no, no, no, no, no. Hang on, hang on, hang on guys. El Cozumano with Fini Donovan is coming out and I want to say you guys told me for years, years at this point, I feel like I was going to love this and I held off because I just I felt a lot of pressure. I felt a lot of resting on this, you know, this is like the mystery book everyone on Booktube loves and I'm like, okay, this is like a lot on my shoulders, but I loved it. You know, I loved it. You all know what this is about. Following Fini Donovan, who is a single mum and she's like struggling financially, her ex-husband is on site if I ever see him. I'm genuinely, I have no regrets. She's a struggling author and she's like in a coffee shop talking to her agent about her new plot. Woman over here thinks Fini is a hit woman and hires her to kill her husband. Not Fini's husband, the woman's husband. Her and also her kid's nanny kind of, it just goes wrong. This book just is ridiculous. It's so much fun. It is just, I thought the writing was so good. The writing was so compulsively readable. It was such a fun read. I grew to love them as characters. I feel like often I don't, you know, the books that I'm really telling you about that I loved are books where I actually love the characters because usually, like I say, it goes to me writing plot characters. Like characters is usually something that I, I don't really get people who like run fan pages for characters. Like I just, I, that's not me, right? For me to say I fell in love with these characters is like a lot. That's a high praise for me and I can't tell you how much I love this and I'm so glad I finally read it. I know that this is going to be a favorite series. I'm so excited to continue. I've already got the second one. I just thought it was incredible. It was so much fun. The mystery was really fun. I feel like there was a good amount of plot twist. You know, it's like a kind of mystery where like you're not trying to solve, you know, the greatest puzzle on, but it was really a fun time and I'm so glad I finally started it. A book that made me cry. Has there been any? I don't know if I've cried this year. Right. I feel like I remember saying to you at some point this year like, oh, I teared up at the end. I almost cried at the end. Yeah, what was it? I was on, I remember me saying this in a vlog. I remember saying I was on reading sprints of my patrons and I almost cried at the end, but I didn't want them to see me cry. What was that? End of watch, the Stephen King one. Is that really my answer? Like I did like the ending to that trilogy and it got me a little bit emotional with the characters. You know, I'd read the whole trilogy back to back. So I was quite like attached to the characters. And I feel like the ending is quite a fitting ending of that trilogy. But like, is that really my answer? Nothing made me cry. If you guys have been here a long time, like I feel like last year I was like, I cry at books. I cry. I think my answer last year was Jade Legacy. Oh God. Oh, you know, that was a mess. I barely cried this year. Well, I want to feel more, you guys. I want to feel more. I want to feel more. Okay. Well, moving on, what's the next one? A book that made you, yeah, a book that made me happy. Always hating this question, because I'm like, like books don't really make me happy. That's not why I read books. I read depressing books. I don't want to feel happy. The fuck? Probably the closest I felt to happy is a murder book. Lady Hardcastle, I can't see anything else. It's like, well, all legends and lattes, we're just chatting about shit we've already spoken about these because I love these characters and their relationship and the wit and the humor and that these are kind of written with a smile is how I would describe it. And then this is just so heartwarming and touching and beautiful. But is that happy? What is happiness? I'm not sure I know. So yeah, my answers are probably these. I don't read books to be happy, you guys. It's not me. Oh, I was about to super thanks myself. That's embarrassing. Most beautiful book I've bought or received this year. Last year I said, daughter of the Mingodas. Wow, how the mighty have fallen. If I've gotten many books this year, so far this year that I go, wow, that's beautiful. You know what I mean? Usually I have a good answer for this, but I don't. I guess you could say God killer. That's pretty beautiful, right? My focus, who knows? That's a pretty beautiful cover. But I haven't really, I haven't gotten many special editions of stuff this year. I feel like, yeah, I don't really have an answer for you. I need to hold some of the more like cloth bound, I need to hold these. These that I collect, the cloth bound editions of Agatha Christie books. There's a few more out that I haven't got my hands on. And I feel like I need to slowly get more of these because these are usually my answer. I love, and I mean love, these special editions. Like they're just so gorgeous to me. So I need to probably get my hands on a few more of those. Oh yeah, I hate this question. I forgot how much I hate this question. What books do I need to read by the end of the year? All of them. I say this every year. What do you want me to say? Like any, all of them. We've got this stack here. Shit, I'm not gonna be focused. Oh fuck, Jesus Christ. Okay, hi. I've got this stack of books here that are books that have been on TBR Cluedo so far this year that I haven't read yet. Okay, now about a good chunk. Let me separate the ones that I do have plans to read. We'll talk about the ones that I don't have plans to read. So these, how many? One, two, these six. Okay, that's a bit more manageable. The other ones I have concrete plans to read very soon. Two of them I'm reading this week. But these six I don't have plans to read. I don't have concrete videos that are going in. So these I need to read before the end of the year because they've been on TBR Cluedo. The two books that I read when I was on holiday, and I'm currently reading Spare by Prince Harry by The Audio Book. Okay, we're only talking about that yet. I'm not ready to formulate thoughts on that yet. Those are the ones that had previously been on TBR Cluedo that I hadn't read yet. So these are the ones that I need to read before the end of the year. I'm really excited for a lot of these, particularly the Song of the Killies and Honey and Spice. I'm really excited for these. So yeah, I don't have set plans to read these yet, but I will fit them into vlogs hopefully over the next month or so, next two months if I'm realistic because I would like to read all of these soon. So yeah, so there we have it. That is the end of my mid-year wrap up, no? Mid-year freakout tag! I hope you enjoyed this video. Apologies if it feels a bit like, feel like I'm a bit wild energy still coming back on holiday, but I hope you enjoyed the video. Let me know any of your answers to any of these questions down below. What books are most excited for? Biggest disappointment? Best book you've read so far this year? What books do you have to read so far this year? I'd love to know any of your answers to any of these questions. If you got to the end of the video, comment a sunshine emoji because I'm depressed that I was in the sun and I've come back to England and it's great! So anyways, thank you guys so much for watching. I'll see you very soon in another video. Bye!