spotlight on: my favorite fall reads

Welcome to Spotlight On: a monthly feature hosted her at Stardust and Words. You can find the rest of the spotlight posts here! I did a post that is similar to this one last year, where I talked about the books that capture the spirit of Halloween for me, and I talked about this again in my TTT post last week! Now I want to talk about some books that I love to reread in the fall. Some of these are perennial favorites, and some of them are new-to-me favorites, but they all have the coziness and feeling of coming home that I associate with fall, and they are all perfect for curling up with a mug of something hot and watching the leaves swirl outside the window :)

1.The Count of Monte Cristo – Alexandre Dumas – Swashbuckling, revenge, misty islands, and mistaken identity make this a perfect book for a fall afternoon. It's super long, so you can either power through with the help of a lot of coffee or read an abridged version. I just love how atmospheric it is.

2. Ella Enchanted – Gail Carson Levine – The perfect quick read for when you need a pick me up. I love to make a super elaborate hot chocolate and then snuggle up with this book or its (HIGHLY inferior but still a ton of fun) movie. Gail Carson Levine is one of the best writers I've ever read, and she manages to capture so much emotion and heart in all of her books. Ella Enchanted is my personal favorite, but you can't go wrong with any of her novels.

3. Inkheart – Cornelia Funke – One of my favorite books from when I was in middle school, this entire trilogy reminds me of driving through New England in October. Lovable characters, a great father daughter relationship, and traveling into all of your favorite books means that Inkheart is basically every bibliophile's dream.

4. The Princess Bride – William Goldman – Okay, who doesn't adore The Princess Bride? It is one of those classic fairy tale stories that you absolutely can't go wrong with on a fall day. It's hilarious, heartbreaking and completely engaging.

5. Entwined – Heather Dixon – A darker retelling of the Twelve Dancing Princesses, Dixon conjures up the darker side of fall with her fairy tale. I think of abandoned castles, sleeping beauty on her one-hundredth year of slumber, and dark fall nights lit only with candles.

6. The Hobbit – J.R.R. Tolkien – Do I even need to explain myself here? I don't know about you guys, but curling up in a Hobbit hole with Bilbo is the perfect way to spend October.

7. The Book Thief – Markus Zusak – save this book for the moment that you can almost feel autumn turning into winter. That is the feeling that I associate with The Book Thief. The nights are freezing but the days are still warm enough that you aren't cold, and you can see the frost on the grass early. This book is the most heartbreakingly beautiful thing that I have ever read, and I love every second of it every single time I read it.

8. Jellicoe Road – Melina Marchetta – Looking for a home, looking for your place of belonging, looking for fun, looking for a love. Long, winding paths, mysteries, pranks, making up. Jellicoe Road is haunting, captivating and so perfect for fall days.

9. Love Letters to the Dead – Ava Dellaria – The leaves are dying and falling, but they are so beautiful as they do so. That's kind of like Love Letters to the Dead. Death is something that, sometimes, like the leaves, stares us right in the face. But we have to find the beauty despite of it.

10. We Were Liars – E. Lockhart – Family secrets, first loves, mysteries, blink and you'll miss them clues, an enormous plot twist.

11. Attachments – Rainbow Rowell – Caloo, Calay! There is one scene in this book that talks about October in the best way, and that is why I always associate this book with October and fall in general. It has a homey feel to it too, like a cup of tea and your favorite movie.

12. Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban – J.K. Rowling – I'm not sure why it is just this particular book of the series that I always think of when I think of fall, but I always get the urge to read PoA when the weather starts changing. Maybe it is because I think the movie is beautiful in the way that it deals with the changing of seasons, or maybe it's because this was my favorite one when I was little, but something about it screams autumn to me.

13. A Little Something Different – Sandy Hall – One of those adorable warm and fuzzy contemporaries that I think is perfect for the crispest and clearest fall day. I love the alternating POVs and the fact that it takes place on a college campus just makes me think of walking to class and stomping on the falling leaves.

14. Carry On – Rainbow Rowell– Maybe this also has something to do with the on-campus/Hogwarts/school-time feeling, but I think this book is perfect for reading in the fall. It combined the sparkly brightness of a crisp fall day with the spooky darkness of the chilly fall night. Lovable characters and a little bit of magic rounds off this amazing book :)

15. First & Then – Emma Mills – football/school/first love. The ultimate fall trifecta!

16. Walk the Earth a Stranger – Rae Carson – The aesthetic of the cover combined with the gold rush era historical fiction of the plot makes this one a perfect fall read for me. It is engaging while still being subtle, and isn't in your face with its fun.

17. Aristotle and Dante Discover the Secrets of the Universe – Benjamin Alire Saenz – Adorable LGBT romance, finding out who you are and what you're really made of, "boys like me were made for the rain," adorable puppies. These are all of the things that you need to know about this book please read it, it is my favorite thing in the entire world.




18. Some Kind of Happiness – Claire Legrand – a haunting, moving description of depression in and for younger kids, I absolutely adore this atmospheric novel. Forests full of dangers and delights, old family secrets, houses full of relatives, friendships formed in the heat of imagination. A long sip of cold water.


19. Uprooted – Naomi Novik – a lush fairy tale retelling of a few different mashed up tales, there is darkness and dark magic as well as lovely sunlight in this one. Dragons or humans? Monsters or girls? Who to trust and who to be wary of? Magical and unconventional girls who have friendship above all. Lovely.

21. Milk and Honey  – poetry for autumn. Poems about breaking, loving, healing, becoming. Poems about the worst times and the best times, extremes that stick with you. Beautiful verse, beautiful illustrations, read it in an hour or linger for several.

What are some of your favorite fall reads?

xx
Caroline

top ten books I don't talk up enough

Top Ten Tuesday is a weekly feature hosted over at the Broke and the Bookish. This week's theme is: "March 22: Ten Books I Really Love But Feel Like I Haven't Talked About Enough/In A While," and I am really grateful for the chance to look back into my bookish past and rediscover some old faves that I may have forgotten about!

1. The Goose Girl by Shannon Hale– Anidori-Kiladra Talianna Isilee, Crown Princess of Kildenree, spends the first years of her life under her aunt's guidance learning to communicate with animals. As she grows up Ani develops the skills of animal speech, but is never comfortable speaking with people, so when her silver-tongued lady-in-waiting leads a mutiny during Ani's journey to be married in a foreign land, Ani is helpless and cannot persuade anyone to assist her.
Becoming a goose girl for the king, Ani eventually uses her own special, nearly magical powers to find her way to her true destiny. Shannon Hale has woven an incredible, original and magical tale of a girl who must find her own unusual talents before she can become queen of the people she has made her own.

2. Jellicoe Road by Melina Marchetta– I'm dreaming of the boy in the tree. I tell him stories. About the Jellicoe School and the Townies and the Cadets from a school in Sydney. I tell him about the war between us for territory. And I tell him about Hannah, who lives in the unfinished house by the river. Hannah, who is too young to be hiding away from the world. Hannah, who found me on the Jellicoe Road six years ago.

Taylor is leader of the boarders at the Jellicoe School. She has to keep the upper hand in the territory wars and deal with Jonah Griggs—the enigmatic leader of the cadets, and someone she thought she would never see again.

And now Hannah, the person Taylor had come to rely on, has disappeared. Taylor's only clue is a manuscript about five kids who lived in Jellicoe eighteen years ago. She needs to find out more, but this means confronting her own story, making sense of her strange, recurring dream, and finding her mother—who abandoned her on the Jellicoe Road.

 

3. Graceling by Kristin Cashore – Katsa has been able to kill a man with her bare hands since she was eight - she's a Graceling, one of the rare people in her land born with an extreme skill. As niece of the king, she should be able to live a life of privilege, but Graced as she is with killing, she is forced to work as the king's thug.

When she first meets Prince Po, Graced with combat skills, Katsa has no hint of how her life is about to change.

She never expects to become Po's friend.

She never expects to learn a new truth about her own Grace - or about a terrible secret that lies hidden far away...

4. Eleanor and Park by Rainbow Rowell – Two misfits.
One extraordinary love.

Eleanor... Red hair, wrong clothes. Standing behind him until he turns his head. Lying beside him until he wakes up. Making everyone else seem drabber and flatter and never good enough...Eleanor.

Park... He knows she'll love a song before he plays it for her. He laughs at her jokes before she ever gets to the punch line. There's a place on his chest, just below his throat, that makes her want to keep promises...Park.

Set over the course of one school year, this is the story of two star-crossed sixteen-year-olds—smart enough to know that first love almost never lasts, but brave and desperate enough to try.

5. The Covenant Series by Jennifer L Armentrout – The Hematoi descend from the unions of gods and mortals, and the children of two Hematoi pure bloods have godlike powers. Children of Hematoi and mortals--well, not so much. Half-bloods only have two options: become trained Sentinels who hunt and kill daimons or become servants in the homes of the pures.

Seventeen-year-old Alexandria would rather risk her life fighting than waste it scrubbing toilets, but she may end up slumming it anyway. There are several rules that students at the Covenant must follow. Alex has problems with them all, but especially rule #1:Relationships between pures and halfs are forbidden. Unfortunately, she's crushing hard on the totally hot pure-blood Aiden. But falling for Aiden isn't her biggest problem--staying alive long enough to graduate the Covenant and become a Sentinel is.

If she fails in her duty, she faces a future worse than death or slavery: being turned into a daimon, and being hunted by Aiden. And that would kind of suck.

6. The Coldest Girl in Coldtown by Holly Black – Tana lives in a world where walled cities called Coldtowns exist. In them, quarantined monsters and humans mingle in a decadently bloody mix of predator and prey. The only problem is, once you pass through Coldtown's gates, you can never leave.

One morning, after a perfectly ordinary party, Tana wakes up surrounded by corpses. The only other survivors of this massacre are her exasperatingly endearing ex-boyfriend, infected and on the edge, and a mysterious boy burdened with a terrible secret. Shaken and determined, Tana enters a race against the clock to save the three of them the only way she knows how: by going straight to the wicked, opulent heart of Coldtown itself.

The Coldest Girl in Coldtown is a wholly original story of rage and revenge, of guilt and horror, and of love and loathing from bestselling and acclaimed author Holly Black.

 

7. This Song Will Save Your Life by Leila Sales – Making friends has never been Elise Dembowski’s strong suit. All throughout her life, she’s been the butt of every joke and the outsider in every conversation. When a final attempt at popularity fails, Elise nearly gives up. Then she stumbles upon a warehouse party where she meets Vicky, a girl in a band who accepts her; Char, a cute, yet mysterious disc jockey; Pippa, a carefree spirit from England; and most importantly, a love for DJing.

Told in a refreshingly genuine and laugh-out-loud funny voice, This Song Will Save Your Life is an exuberant novel about identity, friendship, and the power of music to bring people together.

8. Inkheart by Cornelia Funke – 12 year-old Meggie lives with her father, Mortimer, a bookbinder. Mo never reads stories aloud to Meggie because he has a special gift: when he reads a book aloud, the characters come out of the book and into the real world.

One night, when Meggie was a small child, Mortimer was reading aloud from a book named Inkheart when an evil villain named Capricorn, his aide Basta, and a fire-eater named Dustfinger escape from the book and into their living room. At the same time, Mo's wife Resa gets trapped within the book .

Twelve years later, Capricorn is on a hunt to find and destroy all copies of Inkheart and use Mo's abilities to gain more power for himself in the real world. Meggie discovers her father's secret and, along with the help of Dustfinger and Meggie's eccentric aunt Elinor, fights to free her father and destroy Capricorn.

9. Cruel Beauty by Rosamund Hodge – Based on the classic fairy tale Beauty and the Beast, Cruel Beauty is a dazzling love story about our deepest desires and their power to change our destiny.

Since birth, Nyx has been betrothed to the evil ruler of her kingdom-all because of a foolish bargain struck by her father. And since birth, she has been in training to kill him.

With no choice but to fulfill her duty, Nyx resents her family for never trying to save her and hates herself for wanting to escape her fate. Still, on her seventeenth birthday, Nyx abandons everything she's ever known to marry the all-powerful, immortal Ignifex. Her plan? Seduce him, destroy his enchanted castle, and break the nine-hundred-year-old curse he put on her people.

But Ignifex is not at all what Nyx expected. The strangely charming lord beguiles her, and his castle—a shifting maze of magical rooms—enthralls her.

As Nyx searches for a way to free her homeland by uncovering Ignifex's secrets, she finds herself unwillingly drawn to him. Even if she could bring herself to love her sworn enemy, how can she refuse her duty to kill him? With time running out, Nyx must decide what is more important: the future of her kingdom, or the man she was never supposed to love.

10. We Were Liars by E. Lockhart – A beautiful and distinguished family.
A private island.
A brilliant, damaged girl; a passionate, political boy.
A group of four friends—the Liars—whose friendship turns destructive.
A revolution. An accident. A secret.
Lies upon lies.
True love.
The truth.

We Were Liars is a modern, sophisticated suspense novel from National Book Award finalist and Printz Award honoree E. Lockhart.

Read it.
And if anyone asks you how it ends, just LIE. 

what is on your lists this week? 

xx

Caroline 

spotlight on: fantasy

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There is something that I've been wanting to bring to These Stardust Words for quite some time, and that is a spotlight series. every month, I want to take a different facet of the bookish lifestyle and highlight it. Be it genre, covers, shipping, writing styles, etc, every month there will be a different theme under our spotlight! 

For March, I want to spotlight a genre, and specifically fantasy. Usually I can manage one or two fantasy books a month before I feel myself slumping and have to go for a more contemporary feeling, but lately I have been tearing through some truly amazing fantasy, one after the other. 

Though I know fantasy is an acquired taste for some, I truly believe that there is a fantasy book or series out there for everyone. So in an attempt to lead those who are less fantastically-inclined in their reading choices to some magical worlds, I've included middle grade, young adult and adult selections. In the adult section, there are some picks for perhaps the more adventurous souls. 

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