Rainy Day Reads

Another year has ended and that means it’s time for another list of best books of the year. I happen to have rated 10 books 5 stars this year, so here they all are. There is a bit of everything; fantasy, historical fiction, non-fiction and YA. Six of Crows by Leigh Bardugo I had previously read the Grisha trilogy by Leigh Bardugo and I wasn’t too impressed. But everyone absolutely raved about this book, and I did like the Grisha trilogy, I just had a few issues with it. So I decided to give this a go, and I am so glad I did.  Set in the same world as the Grisha trilogy this book follows an outlaw as he gathers a group of compatriots and misfits to pull off a major heist that seems set to go wrong. There is a wonderful cast of characters and the plot is twisting and turning every which way keeping you on the edge of your seat from the first page to the last.  Crooked Kingdom by Leigh Bardugo This is the sequel to “Six of Crows” and every bit as wonderf...

I’m kicking off a new series in which I will give 5 book recommendations based on a subject. And in honor of Halloween we are kicking off with monsters. I don’t read a lot of super scary books, but I still managed to find 5 books with monsters, although some of these monsters perhaps don’t fit the conventional monster stereotype. From "A Monster Calls" This Savage Song by Victoria Schwab This is part one of a duology. The story takes place in a dystopian version of our world. A city is divided between a corporation that deal out their version of justice, and a mob boss using monsters for his own gains. In this world monsters are created by bad actions - you hurt someone, you spark the creation of a monster. Both sides of the city are trying to control things in their own way, but when Kate and August get caught in the middle, the unstable equilibrium threatens to topple. Kate is the daughter of the mob boss, and she wants nothing more than to be as tough as he...

After meeting the group in Casablanca, next morning we headed to Tangier in the north of Morocco. We were only going to stay there for lunch and then have a guided tour through the medina for about an hour, before heading south again to Chefchaouen. At first I was quite disappointed that we wouldn’t be staying longer in Tangier, as I have read so much about it being the Moroccan headquarters for the beatniks and the hippies. We had lunch and headed to the medina for the tour. This mainly consisted of our local guide telling us that in that house a rich French person lived, and that house had been bought by a rich English person, and that house was now a hotel. Not very informative and a bit disappointing. We passed quite quickly through the medina with no stops to shop, but from what I could tell, the goods on offer were not really interesting either. So in the end I was happy that we would not stay there longer. Perhaps if we had stayed longer and had time to explore by ourselves we ...

So I just got back from my long-awaited trip to Morocco and I have a bunch of reviews, pictures and recommendations to share. There are quite a lot, so one blog post for all of it would be too little. I think I will make a little blog post for each city or place we visited so it will be easy and uncomplicated to search for any specific place. In this blog post I will focus on a few general things about Morocco, so here it goes: The trip I went on a group tour with G Adventures ( www.gadventures.com ), because I don’t enjoy traveling completely solo. This way is an easy way to travel because bookings of hotels and transport and some activities are already taken care of, and you have a number of fellow travellers at hand to share the experience. Of course, there are som downsides to traveling like this; some stops might not rock your boat and you might have wanted to stay longer in one place or gone somewhere completely different. Depending on the trip you choose, you get varied...

This is a graphic novel and it's the first one I have read of it's kind since I stopped reading Donald Duck (does that count as graphic novels?). Brian K. Vaughan is the writer and Fiona Staples is the artist. I enjoyed both the story and the art, but I must say I don't think graphic novels are for me. I don't know why really. When I was reading it, I found it really hard to take the time to really look and appreciate the art and not just read the bubbles and rush through to the end. I guess I could practice that, but I am not sure I want to invest that much in it. As I said I really liked the story but it was just over too soon. And I guess that is sort of the point with graphic novels. They are really short, for the most part, and are made to be series. But at the cost of an actual novel hundreds of pages long, I can't be satisfied with the small chunk of story line in each graphic novel. That was my problems with graphic novels in general. As for this one s...

I mentioned in my first post that I would like to do book reviews on here and the time has come to pick the book for the first one. And man, is it hard! I want to pick a good one, so it will be a positive experience for everyone involved, but I don't want to do one I have already read. I think reviews should be done fairly quickly after the read so your thoughts are still "fresh". After a while you know that you thought the book was good, but you forget the specifics that made you like it. And knowing if a book is good before you read it is obviously quite hard. You can read other peoples reviews of it, but it is so hard to know if you would like it based on someone else's opinion. Even if you generally like some of the same books, some books are just so hit-or-miss for me that I might hate it, even though people with similar reading tastes to mine love it. I also want to pick a stand-alone as beginning with a series seems a big commitment....But boy, is it hard to ...