Youtube daily Aug 9 2017

Hello there, it's Samantha. Today I'm coming to you with my July and biannual bibliothon

wrap-up. It's currently the 8th of August, so I am filming this a little bit late. I'm

really sorry about that, but I have been working a lot and I try and film videos

after work, and literally just, the words that come out of my mouth are like... what

even are you saying? And that is why I'm not doing a separate biannual

bibliothon wrap-up. And like, I already went over what challenges I completed in

my biannual bibliothon vlog, so this is literally just gonna be like my thoughts on the

books. If you wanna know what challenges that I completed and how I did during the biannual

biblitohon, you can check out my vlog, which I will link down below.

So the first book that I finished in the month of July was Once and for All by Sarah Dessen.

I received a free e-copy of this book via NetGalley.com in exchange for an

honest review. Which I did write a review on Goodreads, so if you're interested in reading

all my thoughts, I'll link that down below. If you don't know what Once and

for All is about: this book is about a girl called Louna, whose mother is a

wedding planner. And she works with her mother and Louna is really cynical about

love because she had this tragic thing happen to her ex-boyfriend, which I'm

not gonna say because it's a spoiler. And then there's this boy called Ambrose. He starts

working for her mother, and they form a friendship. And then one day they come up

with this bet to see who could date like the other person because Ambrose is like

a serial dater - he dates like a new person every other day pretty much. They basically

have to swap like dating styles so he has to date someone for three weeks

and she has to date two or three people a week for three weeks.

And whoever wins gets to choose whoever the loser will go out with. And I'm sure

you can see where it's going. But I thought it was okay. This one was only a 3.5

out of 5 stars for me. I just thought it was really predictable and the characters

were quite flat really in my opinion. And also, I really didn't like the like past

plot line which happened. I just really cared more about the present characters

rather than what happened in the past. It just wasn't my favorite thing in the

world so I only gave it a 3.5 out of 5 stars.

The next book that I finished in the month of July was: When Dimple Met Rishi

by Sandhya Menon. I was so excited for this book. I heard such great reviews.

This is another one that I also received from NetGalley.com, in exchange for an honest

review. I was really highly anticipating this and then I read it and I was just like oh.

If you don't know what this book is about, this book is about a girl called

Dimple who's really into app development. So much so that she wants to go to this thing called

insomnia con in the summer. And that's where you get to develop your own app and

then if you win the competition, it actually gets like funded and turned into a real

app that people can use. And Dimple is super passionate about this. And she is Indian

and her parents are like really traditional, whereas she is definitely not. So her

mother's wanting her to get married to a nice Indian boy and they want to do an

arranged marriage for her but she doesn't really know about this. Meanwhile,

Rishi is the boy that her parents have chosen for the arranged marriage but

Rishi is super excited about this arranged marriage idea because he

really believes in like the traditions of the Indian culture. So he really wants

to do what his parents want him to do. So he wants to marry Dimple. He ends out going

to Insomnia Con. He thinks that dimple will know who he

is and he walks up to her and goes "hello future wife" and she throws her iced

coffee at him. Which was a really funny moment, and, don't get me wrong, this book

has so many funny moments, and lots of cute moments. But I had two big problems

with this book. One was me. It was like my own thing at the time, I just really

wasn't feeling like a romance book. Like I had just read Once and for All, and I was like

"I'm so sick of this. I want something that's action-packed. This is boring." So that was

one thing. It was like my own personal issue was that I just wasn't feeling the

romance at the time. The other thing was, I found the pacing to be a bit off, like

I found the first 10% really hard to get into, but then all of a sudden I couldn't

put it down for like the next 60%. And then the last 30% of the book was really

slow again. For me the pacing just wasn't quite

there, so I only gave it a 3.5 out of 5 stars.

Which still isn't a bad rating, I just think, if I'd read it at a different time, I

would've loved it, but I still really enjoyed it and I would definitely

recommend it. It's definitely different from other contemporaries that I've read.

The next book that I finished in the month of July was Our Dark Duet by V E Schwab.

This book was so amazing. If you don't know, this is the sequel to This Savage Song

which came out last year. I actually have a spoiler free review of that already up

on my channel, so if you're interested in checking it out, I will link it up in the

card. I can't really go into details about what this book is about, but This

Savage Song is about this world where monsters exist and it follows two

characters: August and Kate. August is a monster who wants to be more like a human, and

Kate is a human, who wants to be more like a monster. Because her dad rules half the city and he

like controls the monsters and she wants to inherit that role in the future. And

she wants to prove to him that she can do it. She's like such a badass! I love Kate

as a character so much. And August is just like the sweetest. Anyway this book

was really different because the characters had

developed so much from the first book. And I also really liked some of the new

characters that we met. I also found it really interesting that there was sort

of a non-binary character in this book. I don't know if people would say that it

was good representation, because it was a monster, but still it was a character

who used non-gendered pronouns. Which I just thought was quite progressive. I have not seen

that in any book that I've read. But I've just never read about a non-binary

character before, so I don't know if people would be like "Oh that's

bad representation because it's a monster", but I thought it was a good

thing to include into it. It was interesting to have a bit of variety in

this book. Also this book was just super action-packed and amazing. And this book

is 470 pages long and I read it in two days, and I worked on

one of those days. Like I worked an eight-hour shift, but I still managed to

finish it in two days because it was so good. I obviously gave this one a five

out of five stars. And those are all the books that I read before the biannual

bibliothon started. And now on to the ones I read during the biannual

bibliothon. So the first book I finished during the biannual bibliothon

was Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone by JK Rowling. I listened to

this one on audiobook and obviously I love this book. This is a reread for me, I

haven't actually reread it since 2014 so it had been a few years. And I loved this

book so much the third time around. I just loved the whole introduction to

the Wizarding World. I love it all so much it makes me so

emotional to see these characters back at the beginning. I love it! It's just

so good! Harry Potter is just my favorite series.

And I'm now going to reread the rest of the books, probably on audiobook. And I

feel like that's gonna be a really good thing to have during uni, just cause like

Harry Potter is such like a constant in my life from childhood, that to have it

when I'm going into this brand new weird world which is uni, I think it will be

really great. And I obviously gave Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone a 5

out of 5 stars.

The next book that I read was The Gentleman's

Guide to Vice and Virtue by Mackenzie Lee. I also listened to this one on

audiobook. And I only found out after I finished it, that the person who narrates

it was the guy who played Tom Riddle in Harry Potter the Chamber of Secrets,

which is just so weird, but like now I know that I'm like "oh my god yes, that

was his voice!" anyway, side note. I loved this book. If you don't know what The

Gentleman's Guide is about: one, there's a great trailer on epic reads

which I'll link down below, but I'll also explain it to you, in case you don't know. This book is a

historical fiction book set in the 1700s and it's about this guy called Monty who

is bisexual and he's been kicked out of his, like, really fancy boarding school and

basically he gets to have one year before he has to take over his

Dad's like estate or whatever. But, during that year, he's going to go on a

tour of Europe with his best friend Percy, who he just so happens to be in

love with, and his sister, Felicity, who he does not get on with whatsoever. But

these characters were just so great. It was just so much fun, and it went in such

a different direction than I was expecting. I really liked the

representation in it. We had a bi character, a gay character, and I'm pretty

sure that one of our characters was asexual, although it was never said, but

there was something that happened that really made me think that this character was

asexual. If anyone else agrees, please let me know. If anyone else is like "I

know what you're talking about and no", also let me know that because I'd

like to know and not sound like an idiot!

But this book was just so much fun. It also had some really dark themes running

throughout, which I was not expecting. I would like to put a content warning out

there for abuse, and there was definitely some suicidal thoughts in there at one

point. It wasn't talked about heavily, so you know, it wasn't like it really put a

damper on the book, it was just like included and added to the story. This

book was so good. I gave The Gentleman's Guide to Vice and Virtue a 5/5 stars

because it was so good!

Anyway, the next book that I finished for the read-a-thon

was The Hate U Give by Angie Thomas. Oh my god I can't believe it's taken me

this long to get to it! This book was so fantastic. It was so important and so

eye-opening. Just everyone needs to read it. I gave it a 5/5 stars, clearly, but

this book was just fantastic. I really enjoyed the writing style as well, I

found that it was like quite a quick read for such a heavy topic. Obviously

there were some things in here that angered me, ie the ending. There were some

things in there which didn't go how I wanted them to go, but you know it's real

life. It's raw and real, and that shit happens.

This book is about an African-American girl called Starr, who witnesses her best

friend being shot by a policeman when her best friend was unarmed and

literally not doing anything wrong. It's about the aftermath of that and it's

just such an important book.

And the final book that I finished during the

biannual bibliothon, I didn't actually finish during the biannual bibliothon. If

you watched my vlog you'll know that I only had 40 pages left, so I was just

like I"'m going to count it". That was The Archived by Victoria Schwab. This was one

of the few Victoria Schwab books which I haven't read. I have to say I wasn't the

biggest fan of this book. I only gave it 3.5/5 stars, which is like a first

for me. I have loved every single book I've read by V E Schwab. This was like "what?

what? I didn't love it?!?" I have a written review for this one as well, which I'll

also link down below, if you want to hear all of my thoughts. I don't really know what

my problem was with this book. But this book is about a girl called Mackenzie, and

this is set in a world where there's this thing called The Archive where,

basically, whenever someone dies, their soul goes to this place.

She's something called a Keeper which means that basically, sometimes

souls wake up, and then it's her job to go and put them back into the

correct place. All of a sudden, something starts going wrong and all these souls

keep waking up. It kind of just turns into a crazy, wild ride. But, don't get me

wrong, it was really interesting. I just found that it was a little bit hard to get

into. Like it took me about 50 pages until I was like actually getting into

the story. This is the first book that I've read by her which was told in first person,

which I feel like was just really weird and different from her

other books. It just wasn't my favorite thing, obviously I still enjoyed it -

I gave it a 3.5, and I will be continuing on with the sequel. As I said, I didn't actually

finish this one during the Biannual Bibliothon, and I didn't

actually manage to finish it until August, but we're going to count it in there.

These were all the books that I finished during the month of July and during the

Biannual Bibliothon. Please let me know what books you read during July down below.

And also let me know if you took part in the biannual bibliothon, I'd love to go

check out all of your videos for it. I also have to choose out of my TBR jar, but

because this video is going up so late, I already did it, but I did film a clip, so

I'll insert that now so you can see what my challenge was.

So I'm gonna choose one. Okay.

My challenge for this month is to read the first book in a new series. For that

one, I actually have a book already on my TBR for this month, and that is To All the

Boys I've Loved Before by Jenny Han. I'm super excited to read this book. I'm glad this

challenge came up and hopefully I'll be completing it.

So that's my challenge for August. I think I'm going to be able to complete that.

And that's going to be all for today's video.

I'll see you very soon with another one! Byeeee!!