Decluttering My Goodreads TBR #3

You can the first posts here (Part 1) and here, (Part 2) !!

If you want to join along and declutter your own Goodreads TBR follow along with these instructions!

Also I’ve made myself a rule that if I have deleted the first in a series, then the rest of the series goes along with it. Just to make things easier on me whenever I get further into this.

• Go to your goodreads to-read shelf.
• Order on ascending date added.
• Take the first 5 (or 10 (or even more!) if you’re feeling adventurous) books. Of course if you do this weekly, you start where you left off the last time.
• Read the synopses of the books
• Decide: keep it or should it go?

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1) The Wrath and the Dawn (The Wrath and the Dawn #1) by Renee Ahdieh

One Life to One Dawn.

In a land ruled by a murderous boy-king, each dawn brings heartache to a new family. Khalid, the eighteen-year-old Caliph of Khorasan, is a monster. Each night he takes a new bride only to have a silk cord wrapped around her throat come morning. When sixteen-year-old Shahrzad’s dearest friend falls victim to Khalid, Shahrzad vows vengeance and volunteers to be his next bride. Shahrzad is determined not only to stay alive, but to end the caliph’s reign of terror once and for all.

Night after night, Shahrzad beguiles Khalid, weaving stories that enchant, ensuring her survival, though she knows each dawn could be her last. But something she never expected begins to happen: Khalid is nothing like what she’d imagined him to be. This monster is a boy with a tormented heart. Incredibly, Shahrzad finds herself falling in love. How is this possible? It’s an unforgivable betrayal. Still, Shahrzad has come to understand all is not as it seems in this palace of marble and stone. She resolves to uncover whatever secrets lurk and, despite her love, be ready to take Khalid’s life as retribution for the many lives he’s stolen. Can their love survive this world of stories and secrets?

Sounds pretty interesting. I’ve heard a few mixed reactions to this but I think I’ll take my  chances and check it out at some point.

VERDICT: KEEP 

2) A Court of Thorns and Roses (A Court of Thorns and Roses #1) by Sarah J. Maas

Feyre’s survival rests upon her ability to hunt and kill – the forest where she lives is a cold, bleak place in the long winter months. So when she spots a deer in the forest being pursued by a wolf, she cannot resist fighting it for the flesh. But to do so, she must kill the predator and killing something so precious comes at a price …

Dragged to a magical kingdom for the murder of a faerie, Feyre discovers that her captor, his face obscured by a jewelled mask, is hiding far more than his piercing green eyes would suggest. Feyre’s presence at the court is closely guarded, and as she begins to learn why, her feelings for him turn from hostility to passion and the faerie lands become an even more dangerous place. Feyre must fight to break an ancient curse, or she will lose him forever. 

Weird nitpicky thing I’m going to point because I just have to ask: what’s with so many YA fantasy series just naming their series after the first book??? I just looked at The Wrath and the Dawn and Sarah J Maas’s other series is just named after the first book in the series,  Throne of Glass. Could it bother you to be just a smidge more imaginative? Also I have A LOT of negative feelings towards the TOG series itself and I know enough about this series and this particular book to know that I doubt I would ever pick this up for any sort of enjoyment.

VERDICT: A BIG DELETE 

3) Sabriel (Abhorsen #1) by Garth Nix

Sent to a boarding school in Ancelstierre as a young child, Sabriel has had little experience with the random power of Free Magic or the Dead who refuse to stay dead in the Old Kingdom. But during her final semester, her father, the Abhorsen, goes missing, and Sabriel knows she must enter the Old Kingdom to find him. 

With Sabriel, the first installment in the Abhorsen series, Garth Nix exploded onto the fantasy scene as a rising star, in a novel that takes readers to a world where the line between the living and the dead isn’t always clear—and sometimes disappears altogether.

I know this is a very influential and well-known fantasy series that should definitely read at some point. However like the Magic 8-Ball would say “ask again later”.

VERDICT: GO 

4) Pretties (Uglies #2) by Scott Westerfeld

Gorgeous. Popular. Perfect.

Perfectly wrong.

Tally has finally become pretty. Now her looks are beyond perfect, her clothes are awesome, her boyfriend is totally hot, and she’s completely popular. It’s everything she’s ever wanted.

But beneath all the fun — the nonstop parties, the high-tech luxury, the total freedom — is a nagging sense that something’s wrong. Something important. Then a message from Tally’s ugly past arrives. Reading it, Tally remembers what’s wrong with pretty life, and the fun stops cold.

Now she has to choose between fighting to forget what she knows and fighting for her life — because the authorities don’t intend to let anyone with this information survive. 

It’s kind of bizarre that I added the second book in a series I haven’t even read :////. Although my interest in Uglies series used to be very high, now I’m not so interested.

VERDICT: GO 

5) Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic by Alison Bechdel

In this graphic memoir, Alison Bechdel charts her fraught relationship with her late father.

Distant and exacting, Bruce Bechdel was an English teacher and director of the town funeral home, which Alison and her family referred to as the Fun Home. It was not until college that Alison, who had recently come out as a lesbian, discovered that her father was also gay. A few weeks after this revelation, he was dead, leaving a legacy of mystery for his daughter to resolve.

A book by the woman who created The Bechdel Test? I’m sold.

VERDICT: KEEP 

6) Bitch Planet, Vol 1: Extraordinary Machine By Kelley Sue DeConnick

Eisner Award-nominated writer Kelly Sue DeConnick (Pretty Deadly, Captain Marvel) and Valentine De Landro (X-Factor) team up to bring you the premiere volume of Bitch Planet, a deliciously vicious riff on women-in-prison sci-fi exploitation.

In a future just a few years down the road in the wrong direction, a woman’s failure to comply with her patriarchal overlords will result in exile to the meanest penal planet in the galaxy. When the newest crop of fresh femmes arrive, can they work together to stay alive or will hidden agendas, crooked guards, and the deadliest sport on (or off!) Earth take them to their maker?

Collects BITCH PLANET #1-5.

I already have this in single issues. But I’m going to keep it on in case I do decide to get the volumes instead.

VERDICT: KEEP 

7) Habibi by Craig Thompson

From the internationally acclaimed author of Blankets (“A triumph for the genre.”—Library Journal), a highly anticipated new graphic novel.
 
Sprawling across an epic landscape of deserts, harems, and modern industrial clutter, Habibi tells the tale of Dodola and Zam, refugee child slaves bound to each other by chance, by circumstance, and by the love that grows between them. We follow them as their lives unfold together and apart; as they struggle to make a place for themselves in a world (not unlike our own) fueled by fear, lust, and greed; and as they discover the extraordinary depth—and frailty—of their connection.
 
At once contemporary and timeless, Habibi gives us a love story of astounding resonance: a parable about our relationship to the natural world, the cultural divide between the first and third worlds, the common heritage of Christianity and Islam, and, most potently, the magic of storytelling.

This is very high ratings (of course though I don’t really base my interest all on Goodreads ratings). Although I’m very wary that this isn’t an #OWNVoices book since its about Middle Eastern characters and culture. Ultimately I’m probably taking this off my TBR for now.

VERDICT: GO 

8) Giant Days, Vol. 1 (Giant Days #1) by John Allison

Susan, Esther, and Daisy started at university three weeks ago and became fast friends. Now, away from home for the first time, all three want to reinvent themselves. But in the face of handwringing boys, “personal experimentation,” influenza, mystery-mold, nu-chauvinism, and the willful, unwanted intrusion of “academia,” they may be lucky just to make it to spring alive. Going off to university is always a time of change and growth, but for Esther, Susan, and Daisy, things are about to get a little weird.

Collects issues #1-4

I’ve realized from these Decluttering Posts that I’ve had a sudden disinterest in a lot of comics and graphic novels. Don’t get me wrong there’s still plenty out there I love and a lot that I still want to get to, but it’s still this pattern I’m noticing that I’m losing interest in certain titles.

VERDICT: GO 

9) Outcast, Vol. 1: A Darkness Surrounds Him by Robert Kirkman

NEW HORROR SERIES FROM THE WALKING DEAD CREATOR ROBERT KIRKMAN! 

Kyle Barnes has been plagued by demonic possession all his life and now he needs answers. Unfortunately, what he uncovers along the way could bring about the end of life on Earth as we know it. 

Collects OUTCAST BY KIRKMAN & AZACETA #1-6.

I mean it sounds interesting enough but not entirely sure I’m going to keep on my TBR.

VERDICT: GO 

10) Stitches by David Small

One day David Small awoke from a supposedly harmless operation to discover that he had been transformed into a virtual mute. A vocal cord removed, his throat slashed and stitched together like a bloody boot, the fourteen-year-old boy had not been told that he had cancer and was expected to die.

In Stitches, Small, the award-winning children’s illustrator and author, re-creates this terrifying event in a life story that might have been imagined by Kafka. As the images painfully tumble out, one by one, we gain a ringside seat at a gothic family drama where David—a highly anxious yet supremely talented child—all too often became the unwitting object of his parents’ buried frustration and rage.

Believing that they were trying to do their best, David’s parents did just the reverse. Edward Small, a Detroit physician, who vented his own anger by hitting a punching bag, was convinced that he could cure his young son’s respiratory problems with heavy doses of radiation, possibly causing David’s cancer. Elizabeth, David’s mother, tyrannically stingy and excessively scolding, ran the Small household under a cone of silence where emotions, especially her own, were hidden.

Depicting this coming-of-age story with dazzling, kaleidoscopic images that turn nightmare into fairy tale, Small tells us of his journey from sickly child to cancer patient, to the troubled teen whose risky decision to run away from home at sixteen—with nothing more than the dream of becoming an artist—will resonate as the ultimate survival statemen.

Well this sounds wild af. Will I read it at some point? Possibly??? Are there other things I’d rather read before this? Yes.

VERDICT: GO 

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TOTAL: Out of 10 
KEEP: 2 
DELETE: 8

Thanks for reading and leave a comment down below!!! 

Sav