My Bookish Life

I brought The Poppy War  by R.F. Kuang last year in autumn. I saw it on Instagram and did some research on it and thought "this sounds interesting, let's order it". Only to read it over the last three weeks and to finish it on Monday. I've one word for it: brilliant! “If there is a divine creator, some ultimate moral authority, then why do bad things happen to good people? And why would this deity create people at all, since people are such imperfect beings?”  The story starts with a young girl, Rin, who's living in the south of Nikan with abusive foster parents. She's a war orphan and supposed to marry an opium dealer. She's out of the way with this and the Fangs - her foster parents, who are also dealers - will have full control over their opium business in their village with this arranged marriage. But Rin has own plans. She manages to convince the Fangs to try taking part in the Keju to study at one of the Academies in the country to get away. Her goal...

Between life and death there is a library, and within that library, the shelves go on forever. Every book provides a chance to try another life you could have lived. To see how things would be if you had made other choices . . . Would you have done anything different, if you had the chance to undo your regrets? I started this book on a late evening during work after I finished another one. I haven't read anything from Matt Haig before but heard so many good things about this one and the synopsis sounded really interesting. So I started it, not knowing what I would get and immediately was hooked... It starts with Nora, a young woman who works in a music store where she teaches the piano. The day starts with her, sitting in the school library as a young girl, playing chess with the librarian, Mrs Elm. They talk about glaciers and what she wants to become, when she gets some terrible news. Then we're at the present. A day like everyone else it seems. But it's the day Nora deci...

  “The stars incline us, they do not bind us.” I finished this book about an hour ago and I'm once more ruined. My feelings are ruined by a book. Probably my fav so far this year.  Definitely 5/5 stars!  But let me tell you how it came to this...  I brought this book last November for myself as a birthday present (yes I do that). It sat in my shelve for ages, never coming around to read it, although I just heard good things and the cover is just stunning, it sat there and waited. Waited for the moment I'd pick it up. The moment was this Tuesday, shortly before my parents arrived for lunch. I didn't really get around to read it that day, only the prologue and it intrigued me. Since I had a massive headache on Wednesday, I didn't even picked it up for two days an the madness started on Friday when I finally picked it up again. And I couldn't put it down! It took me a few chapters to get into Chloe Gong's writing style but I absolutely loved it! She's really go...

“...writers are a savage breed, Mr. Strike. If you want life-long friendship and selfless camaraderie, join the army and learn to kill. If you want a lifetime of temporary alliances with peers who will glory in your every failure, write novels.” ― Robert Galbraith, The Silkworm  Time to review book #2 of the Strike Series. Also since Career of Evil will be out in a few weeks on BBC One. I hope you guys got a taste of Strike in my first review and maybe some of you started reading. 😊 There won't be lot's of thoughts on the main characters this time because we already had that so I'll start with the plot of the book... Because of the Lula Landry case in The Cuckoo's Calling, Strike got very popular as private investigator and had quite a few cases during the beginning of the book. Mostly cases like "is my partner cheating?", quite boring to be honest. A "friend" of his, Cullpepper, and journalist, sometimes has some cases for him too. But...

“If there's a book that you want to read, but it hasn't been written yet, then you must write it.” ― Toni Morrison I said it myself and I hear others say it: I write. Some will now say "Any idiot writes these days!" others might say "Not everyone can write!" and then there are the ones - like myself - who say "Everyone CAN write." It doesn't matter if you publish it, or where you publish it. I doesn't even matter what you write. It can be a fanfiction, a novel, a short story, a poem, a children story etc. It doesn't matter! If you want to write, if it makes you truly happy, if you feel good while doing it: do it! Keep going! Is it art? It is in my opinion. Books are art. Like paintings. Like music. Over centuries the human race created stunning things. Amazing things no one could have thought of at the beginning. The Colosseum in Rome, the Seven Wonders of the World, La Gioconda, Van Gogh's Sunflowers, L'Opera ...