Drama-Lovers Book Club

Just wanna say thanks to @Misunderst0_od  for recommending Shelby Van Pelts 'Bright Creatures'. Sound like fun and I got it in German and it was a great read ! Nice and heartwarming slice of life with an unexpected extra creature :-) In German they translated the title to "Das Glück hat acht Arme" - "Happiness has eight arms", quite fitting. Recommended !

Next stop will be one of my favourite SciFi/Fantasy authors Ian McDonald with those 650 pages called "Hopeland"...I'll see how that will turn out...hope to finish it until the end of the year ;-)

Another month gone by and two more books read

I read Circle of Stones by Duerk.  It had really good ratings, but left me unimpressed overall.

I did enjoy The Ride of Her Life, a true story about a 60 year old woman who was given 2 years to live and decided to ride her horse from Maine to California(USA) after she lost the family farm.  Showed the hospitality and kindness people are capable of. ❤

Heaven Official's Blessing by Mo Xiang Tong Xiu (writer for the original The Untamed story) has a lot of hit and miss moments for me. Sometimes I get frustrated by all the jumping around between characters and shifts in the story, but I'm finally at a part of the story that I like again. Ah... too bad I'm near the end of the book. Now I'll have to wait until September before book 7 comes out, and then I'll have to wait again for book 8. Anyone else struggling alongside me? 

This month I finished two graphic novels and Heaven Official's Blessing volume 5. (Currently reading volume 6.) 

Heaven Official's Blessing by Mo Xiang Tong Xiu

Cardboard Kingdom: Roar of the Beast by Chad Sell

Unaccompanied: Stories of Brave Teenagers Seeking Asylum by Tracy White

Update: Just finished Heaven Official's Blessing volume 6! And then I dropped it and made a crease in the back cover! Oh how heartbreaking! It's the prettiest back cover of them all T_T WHHHYYYYY I'm so unlucky with this series. Another one of the volumes had its pages crushed on the edge. Augh so painful T_T

Hey y'all! For July, I completed only one book and a short audio lecture series:

1. The Keeper of Happy Endings by Barbara Davis. An inspirational story touching on the intertwining of two women's lives; though there's a ~40-year age difference, they share surprisingly similar experiences and discover connections that will change their lives forever. A female-centric book, with mostly unappealing male side characters. Good overall, though filled with 'coincidences' and the last third is a bit Hallmarkish in the way events unfold and wrap up. 3.5/5 stars

2. Reading Pride and Prejudice in the 21st Century is a short Great Courses (*) lecture series on what it is like for contemporary readers of Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice, compared to the original readers. Broken out into sections featuring a look at Elizabeth Bennett as an ideal heroine, Darcy vs Pemberly (i.e., which one made Lizzy change her mind about Darcy as a marriage prospect :P), Colin Firth vs novel Darcy vs other actors who have played the role of Darcy, P&P across cultures, and the P&P multiverse (this last section held the least interest for me because I'm a diehard fan of the 1995 A&E/BBC adaptation and my mind is mostly closed to everything else except probably works loosely inspired by P&P). This is under two hours long, so not in depth but still a good listen if you're a Jane Austen or P&P fan. 3.5/5 stars

(*Though branded as Great Courses, the shorter lectures are usually Audible Originals, and not from The Teaching Company, like the original Great Courses.)

Hello Everyone,

For the month of July, I went down the Hidden Love rabbit hole and ended up reading the webnovel that it is based off of (Secretly, Secretly; But Unable to Hide It) as well as the spinoff novel (First Frost) revolving around the brother's storyline.

★★☆☆☆

★★★★☆

Secretly, Secretly; But Unable to Hide It (偷偷藏不住) by Zhu Yi (竹已) - This is the webnovel that the drama Hidden Love (2023) is based off of.  It was okay, but I wouldn't recommend it.  The perfect green flag ML from the drama has now been tainted in my eyes. Unlike the drama, there is a larger 7 year age gap. ML is a bit of a perv. To give you an idea, let me paraphrase something from the novel. "In order for her to stop thinking of me as an older brother, I need to start acting like a rogue."  Let's just say things were cleaned up for the better in the drama adaptation.

First Frost (难哄 ) by Zhu Yi (竹已)  - This is the spinoff novel of Secretly Secretly.  In this spinoff romance, the male lead is the brother of the FL from the prior novel.  It's basically a former classmates reunite type of love story with some forced cohabitation. I enjoyed it a lot. It made me smile and it made me tear up. The ML (Sang Yan) is a very entertaining character (albeit a little cocky). FL in this can be a bit cold and aloof, but once you learn her backstory, it makes sense. If you've already watched the drama Hidden Love, you can jump right into this series. The timelines happen around the same time. :)

 MichaKu:

Just wanna say thanks to @Misunderst0_od  for recommending Shelby Van Pelts 'Bright Creatures'.

Yay, I'm glad you liked it!

Paradise by Judith McNaught 

Things i liked -

1. First one is by default, that it's genre, romance, n m a diehard fan of romance novels.

2. The language, framing of sentences, loooooong loooooooong ones, 3-4 sentences separated by commas, literally makes u pause n n re-read, which i found quite challenging n which I just devoured here.

3. FL n ML both r literate n cud be the thing I found their conversation, their humour, playing with words quite alluring n it really really paved it's way to my heart.

4. Storyline - love story,  misunderstandings, separation, pull n push, coming together.

Yeah, we have read many novels telling us the same stuff, then what makes this novel different?

I think, it's the WAY, the author has told us, n she has done a wonderful job here.


Things i did not enjoy much -

1. cliché plot by antagonist father of FL, creating misunderstanding between ML n FL by keeping mails frm them, manipulating telegrams.

2. Undue extended number of words allotted to areas like management meetings, while describing the setup viz stores, school, office decor.

3. I don't know whether you people take it in same way but for me it tilts a lot towards right sight when the size of the book is not much big, this one is 7 hundred something pages.

Final virdict - 9.5/10  a must in "to read list"

 aenoee:

Paradise by Judith McNaught 

Judith McNaught was one of my favorite authors back when I devoured romance novels; she wrote great angsty novels, both contemporaries (like Paradise) and historicals. 

 aenoee:

3. I don't know whether you people take it in same way but for me it tilts a lot towards right sight when the size of the book is not much big, this one is 7 hundred something pages.

I had to check Amazon to confirm whether it was really that long! I remember loving this book but not that it was so long. Nowadays, I must think more than twice if I want to invest time in any fiction past 300 pages, which is a sad situation for my reading life.

@ Lucian

Thank you very much for your time and words.

Yeah I liked her style of writing.

Will dig for more of her work.