In Which We Discuss Books I Read in my 27th Year, Week 8/52

Six books this week - 1st October to 7th October.  Two I'd read before, a library book, and three books from my unread pile.

The Forbidden Game is an old favourite.  Like Labyrinth meets Jumanji, and I know those are both movies, that's why they're not bolded.  A girl buys a board game for her boyfriend's birthday party and ends up working her way through a house full of nightmares, fending off the advances of a kind of Hades-Loki figure.  This was the audiobook version, which was pretty good!

Amanda's Wedding is another book I've loved since my teenage years.  Again, the audiobook.  I liked the reader.  She did the accents quite well, and this is the first audiobook to make me start giggling like a lunatic while walking to work.

I liked The Secret History much better than The Little Friend.  The Little Friend is written from the viewpoint of the most annoying character, while The Secret History is about the death of that character.  Much better.

The Lie escalated quickly.  It goes from being a little bit mysterious to dead bodies being basically everywhere.  And I was never quite sure what the titular lie actually was.

Fairest was a great addition to Marissa Meyers series, and now I'm really looking forward to Winter.  It took me an amazingly long time to realize it was a Snow White reference.  Now that I know more about Queen Levana I want to go back and read Cinder again.

Finally, Tale of Murasaki.  It's a fictionalized account of the life of Murasaki Shikibu author of The Tale of Genji.

And an update to my unread pile.  89 books left, after buying a collection of Gaiman's work on Humble Bundle, which bumped it up by 18.  I quite want to complete an entire line, like in bingo.  Maybe line 9, since there are only three left in there anyway.  I'd also like to read one from each row.

In Which We Discuss Books I Read in my 26th Year, Week 23/52

Only four books this week; two that have been clogging up my unread pile for years, an old favourite and the last Horror High.

Deadly Rumours was originally published as The Dead Girlfriend, which I've not actually read before.  It's eighties teen horror and I love that.

Geisha, a Life is the autobiography of Mineko Iwasaki, who provided some of the information behind Memoirs of a Geisha.  I liked Memoirs, so when I saw it in a charity shop, I bought it.  That was several years, perhaps a decade, ago.  I finally read it, and I really liked it.  Mineko Iwasaki was the most successful geisha in Japan, and she goes into a lot of detail here. 

Nation is a Pratchett novel I've loved since it was released.  It was the audiobook I listened to, which is a fairly recent purchase.  The performance doesn't distract from the story, though it doesn't enhance it as much as Blair Brown's performance as Rose Madder does.

Finally, The Little Friend.  I finally finished the fucking thing, after making myself read twenty-five pages a day.  The main character is a bratty pain-in-the-arse who decides to go about causing trouble because she thinks she's in Harriet the Spy.  I very sincerely wanted her to go away and stop making poor Danny's life worse.  What an unpleasant child.  The novel also lacks catharsis, which I consider to be a major crime.