Dancing Out of November 2016

While I was happy that October was over last recap, I am now even happier that the year is almost over. But it wasn’t all bad. We got to visit my parents with Merijn, I had my first bookstagram pictures go over a 100 likes and I completed my reading challenge for this year. A whole month early!

The Reading Challenge

The Numbers

# Read 90 Books – COMPLETED
Read this month:
Total: 92 /90

1. Odd and the Frost Giants by Neil Gaiman – 4 stars
2. Caraval (Caraval 1) by Stephanie Garber – 4 stars
3. The Visitor (The Graveyard Queen 4) by Amanda Stevens – 4 stars
   – Dreamcatcher by Stephen King – DNF
4. Heartless by Marissa Meyer – 4 stars
5. Timekeeper (Timekeeper 1) by Tara Sim – 5 stars
6. The Worst Witch to the Rescue (The Worst Witch 6) by Jill Murphy – 4 stars
7. A Million Worlds with You (Firebird 3) by Claudia Gray – undetermined rating

Favorite

Timekeeper! And goodreads tells me there will be more. Now I am happy.

Dissapointed

Heartless. I was just expecting more of it.

Not Going to Review

Dreamcatcher was a buddy read with someone from the Dutch goodreads group Books Ever After. But at about the halfway point we both weren’t enjoying the story very much. We both felt it was off to a good start but when the second part came around we lost interest in it. For me I also could not get used to the writing set up. There are chapters within the chapters (some a paragraph long others 5-10 pages), and for me it felt like a struggle to get through some of them. It is a style that I don’t quite enjoy reading. Does Stephen King write all his books like that?

I did not review Odd and the Frost Giants either because I did not have a lot to say about it. The story is enjoyable and the illustrations by Chris Riddell are gorgeous as always.

The Worst Witch book is the sixth in a series but the first one I read. They are easy to get into though and a cute children’s read.

Current Read

⌘ Rivers of London by Ben Aaronvitch – 21%
So far I am not very taken with this. I’m not sure if I will finish.

⌘ The Da Vinci Code by Dan Brown – 21%
Since Dreamcatcher wasn’t working out for either of us, Fransinda choose this book to buddy read instead.

The TBR Challenge

# Unread Books
Total unread books on shelf end of October– 169
Books read in November (that count, no ebooks, rereads etc) – 6
Books bought/received in November (no ebooks) – 6
Total unread books on shelf end of November– 169

Look at that. I remained at the same amount. Who am I even? For now I remain keeping track of this but hopefully next year I can really challenge myself to get this below a certain number. I also need to take a good look at some of the books on my shelves during December and January and possibly unhaul a few so I am good to go again in 2017.

How Was November for Me?

⌘ In November we all had a cold and felt a bit sick for a week. Even little Merijn. It was his first cold. Poor thing. But he slept like an ox during the nights (he does that anyway). And the colds came back at the end of the month. Boo.

⌘ I picked up Amigo’s urn which was a bit bigger than I imagined it would be when I ordered it from the animal crematorium through the phone after seeing it on a picture. But it is very pretty and lovely to set in the house and Amigo deserves a special spot in our house even after death. I might give it another place than where it is now though.

⌘ Keeping up with the theme of ordering things that I thought were going to be smaller was definitely my new phone. I had an old Blackberry. It was already an old version when I bought it and now 5 years later there were barely any updates for it. It shut down and wouldn’t start for 2 days. So I got another one. A Samsung Galaxy J5. I have so little understanding of phones to be honest. I really thought it was going to be smaller. Oh well.

⌘ Merijn turned 12 weeks/3 months this month and he and I had a difficult month. Lets keep it at that. He is growing though and I hope things will be better for the both of us in December. It has gotten better near the end of the month anyway, and he sleeps almost an hour long in the mornings some days now. Whoohoo.

⌘ The last weekend of the month we went to my parents for a few days. Which was what my husband really needed. He was able to get 6 days off and 4 of those we spend at my parents in zeeland (Dutch province where I grew up) which is a good 3 hours drive away. It was a bit of an undertaking with everything we had to take with us for Merijn but we managed.

⌘ I am also an idiot who ordered books through my mothers account but forgot to change the address to our house. And like mentioned above, they don’t live near us. So had to pay extra for shipping. Hear me weep.

What Happened on the Blog?

Reviews

⌘ The Graces by Laure Eve
⌘ Crooked Kingdom (Six of Crows 1) by Leigh Bardugo
⌘ The Hammer of Thor (Magnus Chase 2) by Rick Riordan
⌘ The Prophet by Amanda Stevens

Top Ten Tuesday

Books to Read if Your Book Club Likes Standalones // Top Books I Recenly Added to My TBR Shelf on Goodreads // Favorite Movies // (Bookish) People I Am Thankful For // Type of Books to Buy for the Book Collector

Other Posts

Bookshelf Scavenger Hunt Tag // Dancing Out of October 2016 // My Bookish Dreams // My Harry Potter Life Tag // Dutch or English? International Reader

What Did I Watch?

⌘ Orphan Black / Season 2 / Finished
We got around to finishing season 2 and my husband was so dissapointed we didn’t have season 3 to watch straight away.

⌘ Penny Dreadfull / Season 1 / up to episode 6 or so
I don’t think we are really sold on it. I love the idea but I don’t think the execution is done very well. It just goes down too many different lines and backgrounds too early on for me. But we’ll probably still finish the season.

⌘ Scooby-Doo! Music of the Vampire / movie
You all KNOW I love Scooby so I always watch the movies when they are shown on Cartoon Network. I hadn’t actually seen this one yet. It was good though the singing wasn’t needed for me.

⌘ Ice Age 5 / movie
We finally got this one on dvd. I’ve mentioned before that I have a love for these movies. I kind of felt this one lacked the interaction between the main trio from the first movie. I get that a lot of characters have been added since then but I watch the movies for their interactions and relationships. They should still be there, more so then they were shown in this movie in any case.

⌘ Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find them / movie
I loved it. ❤

⌘ Captain America: Civil War / movie
We both weren’t very taken with this one. It just wasn’t feeling the whole Iron Man and Captain America interactions compared to the other movies. And I missed some of the humor.And why is this a Captain America movie anyway? It feels more like an Avenger one.

Best of My Bookstagram

I got a picture over a 100 likes this month. For the first time. Yeay for me. I also finally got over 700 followers.

Now that we are nearing Winter, the days are getting darker and I am having more trouble finding time to take pictures with natural lighting. Does anyone else struggle with this and how do you deal with it?

Best liked

Other

Elsewhere

Blogs

⌘ Michelle from The Writing Hufflepuff answers your questions about Amsterdam in Blogsterdam.
⌘ Cait from Paper Fury shares with us how to control our TBR pile. Much needed for me. And she very helpfully created a list to choose to let books consume your life.
⌘ Josephine from Word Revel talks about consumerism on bookstagram
⌘ Austine from Novel Knight is hosting the Beat the Backlist 2017 challenge where you read as many of your backlist books (books published before 2017). Read about it here. I’m certainly planning on signing up. And to make it extra fun there is the Hogwarts House Mini Challenge! Check that out here.
⌘  Ely from Tea and Titles is holding a Disability Diaries event this coming January which will be a week long. Read more about it here.
⌘ Nikki from Alice in Wonderland showed how to start doing calligraphy
⌘ Need some gifting ideas? Check out these posts. Gift ideas for Sherlock Holmes fans by Literary Hues.  Great gifts for the Hufflepuff in your life by The Fictional Reader. Or a grand list of sci-fi books to gift by X+1.

Dutch Blogs

⌘ Liesbet from Zwartraafje talks about the ya convention at the Boekenbeurs in Belgium She also shared her book shelf statistics.

Other

⌘ Amanda Lovelace (author of The Princess Saves Herself in this One) is hosting a readathon in December #readthemargin to read marginalized authors. See the post on her instagram

What Is Up Next Month?

⌘ Obviously there is Christmas. But before Christmas there is Sinterklaas in the Netherlands. It is a Dutch children’s holiday. With my husbands family we celebrate it by exchanging small anonymous gifts with rhymes. For a small budget we always end up with a lot.

⌘ And yes Christmas. Depending on my husbands work we’ll probably end up going to my parents for two days or so.

⌘ As for reading I mostly just want to read the next two The Others book I still need to read. They are reasonably lengthy so that will probably take up most of the month. I would also like to get to The Diabolic and Fantastic Beasts screenplay. Screenplay you say? Why yes, because I did love the movie and that cover is hard to pass up. Shhhh.

Linking Up

The Sunday post is a weekly meme hosted by Kimba @ Caffeinated Book Reviewer. This is a bit of a recap post of the week (or month) where you can link to the posts you made this week, share news and wrap up your reading.

Links

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