 So we're gonna go with that, okay? I have read so many books. I kind of forgot the beginning of the month already. It's a wonderful life needs primer, but make it stupid. No! Welcome to my June wrap up. I have way too many books to hold them all up. I'm about to lose them all. So I think it's 22 and a DNF at my last count. So we're gonna go with that, okay? Welcome. No! Yeah, I read a lot of books in June. I read pretty much everything on my TBR. I still haven't finished Jade War. But I'm gonna read Jade War very, very, very soon. Hopefully with Jess Owens if she's still down. Because she is in the midst of a reread, I believe, of Jade War and has not yet braved Jade Legacy. So we're gonna do Jade War and Jade Legacy together. Emotional support. But I did read a bunch of other books. So let's go through them. The first book I read was Death on the Nile by Agatha Christie. I have read so many books that I kind of forgot the beginning of the month already. I have seen all of the adaptations of it. I think I have seen literally all of the adaptations. Almost there's like maybe some foreign language ones that I haven't seen. So I was very, very familiar with the story before reading it. But I wanted to read it anyway. I was familiar with and then there were none before about it and I still really, really loved it. I also really wanted to give Poirot a second chance because I read Murder on the Orient Express and I really didn't care for it. But I love all the adaptations. Well, I love all the David Sushi adaptations of Poirot. So like I like Poirot when it's adapted. The only Poirot that I had read until now was Orient Express and I was not a fan. So I was hoping that it wasn't just that I don't like Poirot but that maybe just that one doesn't work for me. And I did like this better. I still don't know if I like Poirot books. We'll see. I'll try a few more. Cause like I have been liking Agatha Christie like other Agatha Christie books. Poirot was just like not doing it for me. But that's on the Nile. I did, I did enjoy it. I did like it definitely better than Orient Express. But not as much as I have like some other Agatha Christie. It's definitely miles away better than the new adaptation by Kenneth Branagh. Yikes on bikes to that movie. I do really like the David Sushi adaptation as usual. He's just, he is Poirot. And I did listen to this on audio, the audio book narrated by David Sushi. Not the audio book narrated by Kenneth Branagh because of course he also did an audio book. Kenneth Branagh needs to stop trying to be David Sushi. It's like it's not going to happen. We've got our Poirot. We don't need to go away. I do recommend the audio book and this was, this was good. I don't know how it would have felt about it. If I didn't already know the who of the who done it. But that being said, it was still interesting to see knowing what already, how it ends and then who did the doing of the done it, when and how clues for that were being placed or if they were not placed or how the reader was being tricked. So I enjoyed it. Not my favorite Christie. This cover is my favorite Christie cover, I think. Although the Book of the Month edition of and then there were not is also really, really cool. Book of the Month is doing a good job with covers for Agatha Christie. I'll give them that. So anyway, yeah, it was, it was good. I, I'm glad I read it. Next was a reread and that was The Heroes by Joe Evercrombie because as you well know by this point, Bethany and I are hosting a read along on the podcast. The episode for this went up earlier in June. So I'll leave a link for that down below. If you want to check it out, we were joined by Hilary from Book Born to Chat about the Heroes. And she in a surprising turn of events, this is if not her favorite, now one of her favorite First Law books. So it was really fun hearing her perspective on it. So yeah, like I said, if you want to hear us chat about it, leave that link down below. But as you know, I love First Law. So one more needs to be said. Next up is a book that I've also chatted with Hilary about quite recently and that is Darling Girl by Liz Michaelske. She and I ranted about this, vented about this maybe. Either, either is accurate. I sort of commenced her to read it with the understanding that neither was expected this to be great because Peter Pan retellings of a bad habit of being terrible. We were like hoping for the best but expecting the worst. And even though we were expecting the worst, it way overshot our expectations. I could not have imagined a book being this bad. So she and I talked about it for like an hour and a half. It's completely spoilery, but also we don't think you should read it. So go ahead and check out our chat if you missed it. Next up, I didn't read them all back to back like this, but I put them all in my TBR stack or my wrap-up stack all together because I didn't put them in my wrap-up stack until I had finished the last one and then I just put them all in the wrap-up stack because I wasn't going to talk about them in my wrap-up unless I had finished them all. These are all the books that I read for my books that inspired music vlog. So I don't really want to talk about them too much in this wrap-up because I talked about them at length in that vlog. But I'll just go through them really quickly. Hang on, but before I do that, I was going to do this first because I was like, before I forget, and then I forgot. I did read some books that I don't have physical copies of, so I wanted to get through those since they're not in my stack. Books that I did not have physical copies of include The Psychopath Test, which someone on a live stream I was watching, like a legal live stream recommended it. It was a lot more narrative than I was expecting, but from how they talked about it, I thought it would be more, I don't know, I mean it is nonfiction, but I thought it would be more technical. It's more narrative. It was interesting and it was kind of about how psychopathy, is that the word, came about like how the word for that came about and how it is applied and like we think of these things as relatively cut and dry, like if you have this diagnosis as well then they know, but like it's actually kind of nebulous and the way that the history of its treatment and its labeling and that kind of thing is a little concerning. But it was, it was an interesting read so I would recommend it. It's not very long. And then I also read The Forever War which was a reread by Joe Haldeman. I reread that because my friend Michael asked me to participate in a project that I don't think is up yet related to sci-fi books and I hadn't read The Forever War in a while so I wanted to refresh myself so that's why I read it again. It's not a favorite, it wasn't a favorite when I read it the first time and it didn't really change I think it got worse in this reread. But it is an interesting book that is a classic for a reason but it's kind of hard to read it. It's like sociopulturalness is pretty dated and kind of offensive but the science ideas in it are pretty interesting. Okay, yeah, those are the only books that I don't have physical copies of that I read in June. Okay, off we go. So back to the books that inspired music. There were six. They were in Watermelon Sugar by Richard Brodigan. I mean The Devil by Nick Toshies. 1984 by George Orwell. The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck. East of Eden by John Steinbeck and Billy Lyre by Keith Waterhouse. Like I said, I talked about them at length in that vlog. If you want to see that, I'll leave that linked down below. But I really enjoyed doing this project and I definitely got to read some books that I normally wouldn't read. So overall, this was pretty successful. I liked the majority of what I read. Next up is The Wall of Storms by Ken Leue. My patrons and I are doing a read-along of The Dandelion Dynasty. So we read The Wall of Storms in June. And we haven't chatted about it yet, like our official, you know, live chat to discuss it. But I think nearly everybody, like my patrons, but also outside of my patrons, like in the general reading sphere on booktube, et cetera, I think the consensus is that The Wall of Storms is better than Grace of Kings and because I'm me, I liked Grace of Kings better than The Wall of Storms. I liked The Wall of Storms, don't get me wrong. I definitely liked The Wall of Storms and I'm liking The Dandelion Dynasty. But I did like Grace of Kings, a smidge better, because of course I did. These books are kind of hard to talk about in any kind of brevity because they're really dense and meaty and expansive and there's a lot to them. This being a sequel makes it doubly difficult to talk about. The things that made me like it a little bit less were that there's a lot more tech talk in this than in the first one. Ken Liu likes to have a lot of that in when he describes inventions that are in his world, devices, things like that. He goes into a large amount of detail into how they work and I appreciate it insofar as he's put a lot of thought into this actually functioning and I believe my understanding from my friend Kyle is that he actually does, for the most part, if not always, create prototypes of the stuff that is in his books to confirm that it would function which is like, that's really cool and if you're going to have a lot of lengthy explanations of how stuff in your world works better that than just stuff you're pulling out of your ass that is just magic and there's no way to confirm that that works and you're just making stuff up then I'm really irritated. So here, I have an appreciation for it but it was still a lot. There was a lot of times where that was going on and it would just go on for so long that it would ruin the flow of the story. So I respected a great deal but I can't claim to enjoy those parts of the book that much and then also without spoilers I felt like the conflict, the setup of the conflict and who's involved in it was a little bit more interesting and nuanced and complicated and gray in Grays of Kings here it was a much more traditional conflict villain setup and still very, very well done but there was just a delicious messiness to it in Grays of Kings that I just personally found much more fascinating than Wall of Storms. Wall of Storms, like I said, well done, very well done it has layers and complexity don't get me wrong but just as compared to the conflict in Grays of Kings is a little more on the traditional cliche side and I don't want to say cliche because it really isn't it's well done it's just more of a traditional kind of conflict narrative than what you get in Grays of Kings so those are my reasons I still think it's really good but I like Grays a little better next is The Golden Fool by Robin Hobb I did a poster review of this kind of in combination with Fool's Arendt which I did read two months ago because Fool's Arendt I did not like that much and I didn't really want to post a review for it for that reason and this was so much better and I really feel like Fool's Arendt is a prologue to this which is mainly why I did the video together with the both of them Golden Fool, we're back this is so good five stars yes I still think I like Farseer trilogy better than Tawny Man Trilogy but I have not finished the Tawny Man Trilogy so my opinion might be swayed by the final installment but Golden Fool is really good is really emotional is Hobb at her best absolutely wrecks you and yeah I'm really looking forward to reading Fool's Fate next up is a book that I DNF'd I think it might be my it might be my first DNF of the year maybe my second I can't remember what the second oh yes it is definitely at least my second Night Breaks by General Angelus and like it's not because this is like I have read much worse books this year that I have read in their entirety but those books like the reason that I finished them for the most part would be because it was in some way like an obligation book I had agreed to read it with somebody or something like that there was no reason to read this other than to want to it was not on my TBR it was not a buddy read it was not anything the main reason I picked it up now was this is a sequel to where dreams descend I didn't really like where dreams descend that much like I probably wouldn't have even considered going on to read the second one not because it was the worst thing ever just because I thought it was like extremely forgettable and very mediocre and just like not my kind of thing these are like YA romance centric fantasy books the first one is influenced or inspired by Mulan Rouge and Phantom of the Opera I like Phantom of the Opera I don't really like Mulan Rouge and I don't really feel like those influences were anyway yeah I didn't really plan to read on but then I was informed that the sequel where the first one took inspiration from those other two musicals this one it was my understanding takes its inspiration from Hades Town which I am obsessed with and I have seen Hades Town on stage now three times and I might very possibly see it a fourth time so like I knew I had tickets to see Hades Town when I found that out and I was like well after I go see Hades Town so after seeing Hades Town three times I started reading this and immediately it irritated me to the high heavens like from the beginning I was like I am already so annoyed with the writing style with the types of characters that these are with the type of thing that this is going to be and I was just like I don't want this I don't want to read this I'm not going to have fun with this there's no reason to read this I'm not going to do a review for it I'm not buddy reading it with anybody nah I'm nah there's no reason so I just it's still in its wrapping as you may have noticed because I was listening to I got the audiobook from the library so this is all still in its perfect condition and I can pass it on to somebody who will like it more next up is the sort of truth book that we read for the month and that was Faith of the Fallen by Terry Goodkind the live show for this was on my channel this was formerly my favorite sort of truth book I mean I never had lists and favorites and official anything like that when I read these books originally but back when I read them I was being asked and now in my right collection being asked I was like I remember that being probably my favorite this time around it was not my favorite but it was really interesting to me to read it now and to understand what it is about it that really hit so hard for me because it was definitely a situation of being the right book for the right reader at the right time like when I read this the first time it was the exact book that I needed for where I was like mentally and now I am not there anymore so now reading it I was like it's quite flawed I still had a good time reading it I still think it's a pretty good book but yeah it was giving me something that I desperately needed at the time and I don't need that anymore so now I can just sort of assess it on its own actual merits and I was like okay it's pretty good but like it's not the life-changing experience that it was for me back when I read it the first time so now if you want to hear me and Bethany chat about it the live show was on my channel but I'll leave a link down below anyway so check it out the next step is a backless book of the month book because I like to get through those when I can to clear those out that is Fountains of Silence by Ruta Sopeties I had been meaning to read Ruta Sopeties for a long long time and I do own a couple of other books from her nothing but incredible things about Ruta Sopeties books and I mean I own two others so I'll probably read them in particular between Shades of Grey because of my own ethnicity and family background briefly if you don't know between Shades of Grey is about a Lithuanian girl who was sent to Siberia during Soviet occupation and I'm Latvian and I have many great many members of my family my ancestors also went through that so that's something that I feel closely tied to so I would like to read that book for that reason because it's not something that there's a lot of books about Fountains of Silence is about the Franco era of Spain Franco dictatorship in Spain and this is a thing in history that I did not know about so I like you know in historical fiction authors find out a thing that is lesser known and they're like people don't know about this why don't people know about this and write a book about it so I appreciate that this gave me new information and new knowledge that yeah I feel like it is kind of surprising people don't know about it or that it isn't talked about more but I don't think this was that good a book like I don't think it was very well written the characters felt very two dimensional I did not care about any of the characters like literally at all and I also couldn't really tell them apart for a lot of the time like by the middle of the book I had enough like facts about them and I was like okay when a name would pop up you're the one that does this saw this went to here it has this job but it still wasn't like a person to me with a personality it was just like oh under the title of your name falls these facts under the title of your name falls these facts I know which one you are but they didn't have like distinct voices distinct personalities distinct anything so the thing that I most enjoyed about this book was learning about this thing of history because I don't think it was very atmospheric either I didn't really feel transported to a different era of Spain or Spain at all it felt very flat and lackluster and kind of going through the motions to me if you love this you know I'm happy for you so I appreciate the project and I do appreciate learning something from it like I like that I've learned something but I don't think it was that good a book so I'm a little nervous about reading particularly between shades of grey I will feel like personally let down by it if I don't think it's a good book just because of my personal connection to that history so I'll be like you did a sturdy by not doing this better if in fact I don't like it that much I'm hoping that I really really like it but anyway it wasn't bad but it was very meh in my opinion next up is a book that is quite popular and I've been looking forward to it for years and that is Dark Matter by Blake Grouch and this book the only points I can give it and this is not nothing are that it is very readable it is compulsively compellingly bingeable but it's really stupid it's really really stupid so reading this book is like not dissimilar from watching like you know bad TV shows we were like this isn't good this doesn't make sense but you know it's kind of addicting to watch this so Dark Matter is the I gave it a one sentence review on Goodreads not dissimilar from the one sentence review that I gave to a ladies guide to Mischief and Mayhem which was it's a wonderful life meets primer but make it stupid because I don't want to spoil anything because this is a popular book and if you want to read it then you know be my guest I don't want to spoil it for you but the like science because it's like a science thriller or a sci-fi thriller or something I guess that's how you call it because it like takes a sci-fi concept and then basically the book itself is a thriller instead of being you know a murder mystery or something like that it's to do with like a sci-fi thing and the sci-fi thing is so poorly executed it is it is laughably bad the execution like I am not a scientist I am merely a person who has consumed some sci-fi and occasionally watched a PBS documentary about this that or other science concept like I am not an expert but I know that this is not how this works and would never work it was it was really really really stupid so yeah if you're going to be irritated by that kind of thing then don't read this but if you can find entertainment from things that don't make a lick of sense then maybe read it because it's a quick one and you'll get through it fast because it is a thriller so you'll most likely find yourself wanting to turn the page wanting to know what's next and what the mystery is etc but it's not a phone bell next up is the book my patrons chose for me to read and vlog for them and that was Hyperion by Dan Simmons and I really really enjoyed this and I already started and have almost finished the fall of Hyperion I was I thought I might finish it before the end of June but you'll soon see why that didn't happen because I got a little sidetracked by something else anyway I did really really enjoy this I could see why it's so widely talked about and yeah I mean I talked about it at length and level I did for my patrons it's um yeah I am impressed by this I am there are specific things about it that date it for me like you can tell that it is a little bit older and not just because of like writing style but like certain things in it I have a little bit of trepidation about where I think that might be going and what that might mean but I have an open mind and the journey is still excellent so if it does go more in a direction that I would not think that favorably of I will still I think will think that this is um a quite staggering project even if like the end point is one that I'm like I would have preferred not that but anyway I was very very very impressed with this and as I said I am already almost done with fall off Hyperion and I will in all likelihood continue on to read the next I think there's four books um so yeah I'm very glad they picked this for me next up is a book that it pains me to say I really really really hate it that was Daughter of Red Winter by Ed McDonald I better read this with Alan and he and I are going to chat about it soon date to TBD as of the filming of this video maybe we've already chatted by the time this goes up I don't know I received an ARC an EARC as well as a physical ARC this was one of my most anticipated releases for the year and Ed McDonald is the author of the Ravens Mark trilogy which is um on my list of top 10 fantasy of all time so like I am a fan I am a fan of Ed McDonald he did write Daughter of Red Winter my understanding is before he published and before he wrote and then published Ravens Mark um and so he went back to this old manuscript polished it edited it down it's also my understanding this was like three times longer and that he had to like chop it down a lot fix it up a bit and it's now being this series is now being this is the only thing that makes this make sense for me because this feels like it was written like it's a very amateurish writing style like there's things about it that I'm like you can see kind of like the Ed McDonald that I know and love and things that like clearly where his interests lie the types of things that he likes to do and his stories like you can see it in there but I can't be like there's utterly nothing of Ed McDonald in here there obviously is but it's like the really really crappy like store brand version yeah like the story concept itself is a pretty good one and I could see if I someone told me of this this pitch for an idea and who would I like to see write it I'd be like Ed McDonald would be great to write that but I feel like yeah I feel like if he started from scratch nowadays with this story concept he could write something great but I think this just has too many leftovers from when he was a less competent less experienced writer it's I mean I'll talk about it more with Alan when we have our chat because I have a lot of thoughts but I give this one star and I would have liked it if I wasn't for the fact that this is an arc that I agreed to review that I would agree to talk about it with Alan and that this was by Ed McDonald and I kept holding out hope that something would change my mind and I it didn't this was awful next up was I think the only other Sally Rooney book that I had left to read she might have one other the only Sally Rooney book that I owned anyway that I still had to read and that was conversations with friends this was the earliest book at least again an earlier book of hers than normal people or obviously the newest beautiful world where are you and this does feel it's not as bad as the Ed McDonald situation by reading this I was like okay this is not as good as normal people or beautiful world where are you but this is still the quintessentially the same kind of thing that you get and you expect from Sally Rooney so I did really really enjoy this it just felt like a less good version of what I had seen her do in normal people and beautiful world where are you because I think those two are better books but I definitely enjoyed this and I don't regret she's clearly grown as a writer which is always nice to see and now we come to the reason why I did not finish Fall of Hyperion and that's because I got swallowed up into the Simon snow hole now I don't like that phrasing I absolutely do not no I can't say that okay let's try that again I got sucked into the Simon snowverse that's better I didn't want to read Carry On pretty much since it came out but I either knew this like when it came out or learned it shortly that this was a spin-off of fangirl and for years I was like well I can't read this until I read fangirl even though everyone in their mother was like you can read it you don't have to read fangirl I was like I must read fangirl but I don't want to read fangirl so earlier this year my wanting to read Carry On won out over my not wanting to read fangirl and I did read fangirl and I actually really really liked fangirl way more not just like more than I expected to which I did like more than I expected to do since I expected not to like it but I like I loved fangirl reading Carry On and um was immediately obsessed with Carry On and within two days I read Carry On Wayward Sun and Anyway the Wind Blows and um that's it no more I've run out of Simon's notebooks because I would have kept going if there was more I would have just kept going I would not be filming this right now I'd be in the middle of reading whatever came after that I am a fan and also I'm kind of sad this has nothing to do with anything well it kind of you can see this is a hard cover of Carry On with this dust jacket but originally this was not the cover for Carry On um it was this like I'll put a picture of it and that's the that's this edition that I have um and then as a when they started releasing these covers instead they did a promotion where like they were sending out just a dust jacket to cover your old carry on hard cover so a friend of mine because I missed that promotion a friend of mine she got she got one of those and she didn't really care about it so she was like so I put the new dust jacket on the old carry on book but now they've released them in hard cover with these covers and a different um hard cover book inside different end papers different color like this is the old carry on book like this is like the old this goes with the old cover and the old font of carry on yeah so I wish I had kept the dust jacket I did for a while but then Kaz sat on it so it got kind of squished and I was like oh am I keeping this for um so I got rid of it and now they're they're doing these in hard cover which I've ordered because it is a different book underneath as well and it's not um you can see this is kind of flat like it's not embossed like the the word like the title is for the others like it's not shiny you know you know so anyway I've ordered it but like I could have just had the old edition of carry on complete now this is like a weird Frankenstein carry on in addition to these editions I do have the Barnes and Noble editions and I will shortly have the Indigo editions because I'm obsessed and I'm gonna film a review I think for the whole series so that's to come but basically I really really love these books and we'll probably just re-read them because there aren't anymore and I'm currently looking at options for merch because I don't have any and I need some yeah those are all the books that I read in June let me know in the comments down below your thoughts and feelings about my thoughts and feelings I know I post videos on Saturdays other random times I upload them on Saturdays so like and subscribe join my Patreon if you feel so inclined and I'll see you when I see you bye