It is 4 days before the end of the year and I have not reached my reading goal. But that’s okay! Because the holiday BookTube-A-Thon is starting tomorrow (the 29th and ends on the 31st of December). Woohoo!
The holiday BookTube-A-Thon is supposed to be more relaxed and stress free than the summer one, but there are still four challenges that readers can choose to conquer. Having learned my lesson from participating in the summer BookTube-A-Thon, I have carefully chosen my TBR pile for the next three days. Only small books for me, I’m a slow reader. Here are the challenges and the book I chose for each.
Challenge #1: Read a book that has your favourite colour on it
A pretty simple and straightforward challenge except for the fact that I don’t really have a favourite colour so we’ll just go with blue here. This book obviously has blue on the cover so we’re good and it’s also a very short read so we are extra good! Hot Milk was one of the books nominated for this year’s Man Booker Prize and Levy has already been nominated for the Man Booker in the past so I’m very curious to see what it’s all about. Short books usually fail to impress me, but the story of Hot Milk sounds very interesting. Book synopsis:
Two women arrive in a Spanish village – a dreamlike place caught between the desert and the ocean – seeking medical advice and salvation. One of the strangers suffers from a mysterious illness: spontaneous paralysis confines her to a wheelchair, her legs unusable. The other, her daughter Sofia, has spent years playing the reluctant detective in this mystery, struggling to understand her mother’s illness.
Surrounded by the oppressive desert heat and the mesmerising figures who move through it, Sofia waits while her mother undergoes the strange programme of treatments invented by Dr Gomez. Searching for a cure to a defiant and quite possibly imagined disease, ever more entangled in the seductive, mercurial games of those around her, Sofia finally comes to confront and reconcile the disparate fragments of her identity.
Challenge #2: Read a book in a genre you discovered this year
Swimming Lessons by Claire Fuller
For this I’m going with mystery books since I started reading more mystery novels this year and I enjoyed it, so in a way, I discovered the genre this year. I received an ARC from Penguin UK for Claire Fuller’s second novel which is coming out on the 26th of January and I decided to go ahead and read it since it’s short and I’m very confident I will have a great time with it. Book synopsis:
Ingrid Coleman writes letters to her husband, Gil, about the truth of their marriage, but instead of giving them to him, she hides them in the thousands of books he has collected over the years. When Ingrid has written her final letter she disappears from a Dorset beach, leaving behind her beautiful but dilapidated house by the sea, her husband, and her two daughters, Flora and Nan.
Twelve years later, Gil thinks he sees Ingrid from a bookshop window, but he’s getting older and this unlikely sighting is chalked up to senility. Flora, who has never believed her mother drowned, returns home to care for her father and to try to finally discover what happened to Ingrid. But what Flora doesn’t realize is that the answers to her questions are hidden in the books that surround her. Scandalous and whip-smart, Swimming Lessons holds the Coleman family up to the light, exposing the mysterious truths of a passionate and troubled marriage.
BookDepository: Swimming Lessons
Challenge #3: Read a book that was a gift
Rise: How a House Built a Family by Cara Brookins
Although this is not technically a gift, I will consider that it counts for the challenge since this will be an ARC I received from St. Martin’s Press. Rise is coming out on the 24th of January and it is a memoir of Cara and her children that built their own house all by themselves. Book synopsis:
After escaping an abusive marriage, Cara Brookins had four children to provide for and no one to turn to but herself. In desperate need of a home but without the means to buy one, she did something incredible.
Equipped only with YouTube instructional videos, a small bank loan, a mile-wide stubborn streak, Cara built her own house from the foundation up with a work crew made up of her four children.
It would be the hardest thing she had ever done. With no experience nailing together anything bigger than a bookshelf, she and her kids poured concrete, framed the walls and laid bricks for their two story, five bedroom house. She had convinced herself that if they could build a house, they could rebuild their broken family.
BookDepository: Rise: How a House Built a Family
Challenge #4: Read 3 books
I have three books and I’m ready to go! Hopefully I will be able to finish all of them this time. I am very excited to begin the holiday BookTube-A-Thon and get to read my wonderful TBR.
I hope everybody is having a relaxing and enjoyable holiday time and have fun reading for the BookTube-A-Thon!
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