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The Bibliomaniac: A Bookshelf Tour

Every blogger and vlogger does one of these at some point, and yet in my five years of blogging, I don’t think I’ve ever talked about my shelves here! Admittedly I have on Twitter, a lot… but I figured a blog post would be nice. ~~Especially as I just tidied / did a massive book cull so my shelves aren’t as cluttered~~ so here goes!:)

MY MAIN BOOKSHELVES:

These shelves are home to about half of the books that I have read and own. I’m usually incredibly obsessive and organised (as in, alphabetising everything I own, from DVDs to school books) but these shelves are in absolutely no logical order. They’re a massive rainbow, which I love sososo much even if it does show that I have way too much time on my hands. (Even the items on the shelves correspond to the colours… yep).

These are part of the ‘main,’ bookshelf, but I count them at their own little sections, as they’re not YAwhich is what the shelves above mostly consist of. Two shelves are home to all of my classic books – from Enid Blyton, to Road Dahl, to George Orwell and my favourite thing I own – a 116 year old copy of Grimm’s Fairy Tales. A larger space is reserved for all of my graphic novels and collected comic editions! I’m definitely going to need more space on this one soon, as I’m looking to expand my series reading. Current favourites are The Runaways and The Wicked and the Divine.

This bit is the untidiest bit D:

This is where most of the books on my to-read (or in some cases, to re-read) list live! I should really order them into some kind of logical sense, but somehow I actually remember where all of these books are placed, so, I guess it’s all good.

Most of the rest of my TBR books are on the my windowsill (top of this left photo) and sitting on my library steps, by my desk! So many books, so little time.

I do keep many of the proofs copies I’m sent – visible at the bottom of the left photo, under my windowsill. Hot Key Books all look so lovely together. A couple of more recently sent ARCs live under my bed, as I’ve run out of room (despite culling 100 books the other day!)

And, finally – signed books! I haven’t been to any bookstore events in a long time (GCSEs, general exhaustion, etc) but I used to go up to Waterstones Piccadilly practically every week or so, attending talks and signings. My signed books don’t live in my room – they’re on shelves at the end of the hallway. But I do like that little area at the end of the house! More rainbow-ordered books!

So, that concludes the bookshelf tour! What do you think of my chaotic order of things? How do you organise your books?

HELLO AGAIN BLOG I’VE MISSED YOU

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Unless you’re on Twitter and have seen my constant whining about exams, you might not know that I haven’t actually blogged in an incredibly long time. Aside from one or two reviews written on revision breaks, every blog post since about February was written and scheduled at the beginning of the year, so that I was able to keep this blog looking alive, whilst also being able to revise.

Comparatively, I haven’t had many exams this summer – I took ten, whilst some people take fifteen to twenty. I count myself lucky for that! However, that didn’t stop me from being a complete wreck over the last few months. The stress I’ve been experiencing over some exams is crazy – it’s not anyone’s fault, but the pressure to get an A* I subjects I’ve been doing well at over the years can be ridiculous. But anyway. Exams and all of the problems with them is a discussion for another day.

The stress, though! I wanted to try and continue hobbies like blogging and reading through exam season, because it’s what keeps me sane. But school became so exhausting, so quickly. Days started to become so much longer, because I would either be in school until incredibly late, or would come home and dive straight into more studying. Subjects fast became incredibly tiring… There are a few things I’ll miss about secondary school, but having maths pretty much all week is NOT one of them.
And in the run up to, and during the actual exam weeks, I’ve barely had the time to think properly, everything has happened so crazily (try being in at 7.00 to revise for your 9.00 English exam, then straight after the exam staying in school until 6 to revise geography, then coming in the next day to revise from 7.30 to prepare for said geography exam, which is 3 hours long later that day. Yeah I don’t know how I’m not dead either).

When I did have small snatches of spare time, I was way too tired to do anything vaguely productive, which really aggravated me because if I’m not doing something useful, I freak out. So three months of sleeping and tumblr-ing has led to me feeling really rubbish, basically.

I’ve read about three books in the space of two months. And two of those were for English Lit. I miss reading so much, and I miss blogging about reading.

I took my last exam last Friday, and now I have five weeks before I go back to school for a summer job (what am I doing!!!) so when I’m not asleep during this blissful break, I’ll be excitedly blogging and diving into books again! I can’t wait to make some cool stuff. I want to plan some awesome discussions and pretty graphics and talk about BOOKS AND STUFF. So watch this space.

I’ve missed you, blog. Hello again. 😀

End of an Era

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~~bet you all thought ‘end of an era’ meant i was giving up blogging hah~~

I went to see Mockingjay: Part 2 a few nights ago. I was blown away. Of course, at points it felt a little dragged out, as any book split into two films does. But that was okay. I didn’t really want it to end.

The Hunger Games was the first YA book I read. I was in a charity shop (I always thought this was in 2008 but it must have been 2009 at least, now I’ve done the maths), and it was on the adult shelf my dad was looking at. I picked it up because it was that cool collectible edition with the changing cover. It looked quite good. I put it back because my dad said it looked a little violent.
A girl tapped me on the shoulder when she saw me put it back. She looked about sixteen, and when I think back to it, she was actually a bit like a present version of me, with blondey-gingery hair and glasses… But anyway.
“I really recommend that book. It’s SO good. You’ll love it!” She said. I smiled at her, gave my dad a pleading look as if to say “It can’t be that violent, then!” And persuaded him to buy it. output_J4k28u

I read and reread it all the way up until the end of year six. I was so stunned by the story. It was nothing like the younger-age books I’d had access to read before. This was full of violence, gore and rebellion, but an underlying message about how powerful it can be to act against the bad things in society. I was in love with it. I had never loved characters so much before.
My friend in primary school and I took to obsessively talking about it at every given chance, and hanging out on the Hunger Games Wiki page. (If you look hard enough on there, there’s a bunch of blog posts by Wiki users creating their own Hunger Games fanfiction. I’m so glad I’ve forgotten my username. I’m not reading through my rubbish again 😛 )

I had finished all three books a while before the movie had been announced. I was ecstatic when I found out I’d be able to see it on a big screen. This was huge, as huge as Harry Potter to me, if not an even bigger thing, because I was actually starting to communicate online with people from the fan-base, which I hadn’t been able to do when Harry Potter movies were being released. I would take over my mum’s computer every day after school to obsessively refresh Hunger Games news sites.

I went to see the first movie with two of my closest friends and I’m pretty sure they had to hold in the urge to tell me to shut up, because I was sniffling the whole way through.

Just before Catching Fire came out, I started to really discover fandom culture. I joined some of those fan groups on facebook for various books and films. While I was taking in all of this new fandom culture, I was also starting to ‘properly’ blog, and I was being sent increasing amounts of teen books to review. It was so exciting – I jumped from The Hunger Games to The Enemy by Charlie Higson, then to Divergent by Veronica Roth, then to a plethora of other things. I started going through the teen section of the bookstore. I was a pain in the butt to everyone I knew, because I became overexcited when anyone referenced Katniss.

It was great.

Catching Fire and Mockingjay: Part 1 were so brilliant. I’m so glad to have grown up from the ages of 9 – 15 with these films. I think it’s the perfect time for them. They introduced me to so many things.
Without The Hunger Games, I don’t think I’d be the YA reader I am today. Without The Hunger Games, I don’t think I’d really think the way I do now – the books introduced me to the idea of questioning norms and the way the media can distort things. It’s scary, how close some events in the stories are to real life. There’s serious life lessons in them.

To be honest, The Hunger Games led me to discovering so many new things online and in fiction that my visible obsessiveness died down a little. I haven’t seemed as excited about the last two films’ releases – I’ve hardly put anything on social media about them. But inside, this fictional world still bears a lot of meaning and is one of the most important things I’ve read and watched.

Mockingjay: Part 2 came out the week before my mock exam week, so I couldn’t see it for a while. When I did, it was a bit overwhelming. When the credits started to roll, I was hit by the fact that there wasn’t going to be another film next year. This was the end of them, this was it.

It feels a bit like the end of an era. It is the end of an era. I’m probably going to look back on this post in a few years and groan about how soppy I can get over this stuff, but ah, well. Because The Hunger Games really is an important series to me.

To the girl who told me to buy that book – thank you.