Book Blog Tag: Once Upon A Time Edition!

Time for another Book Blog Tag! This one was co-created by Marie Shen and I was tagged by Raina Nightingale over a year ago, so it's about time I get around to filling it out!

“Cinderella” – A book that changed your life 

Not so much changed my life as rekindled (ha! Fire puns....) a love of reading after I spent a whole three months being totally burnt out!

It was just after college which, being an English major, I was required to take a bunch of literature courses. That was the whole reason I chose English as my major, though, so that in itself wasn't the huge issue... It was the last semester in particular, where I was studying Shakespeare, Jane Austen, and Postmodern American Literature all at the same time. The Shakespeare course wasn't too terrible, because I could choose the order in which to take the exams, divided between five tragedies, five comedies, and five of his history plays. I took the tragedies first to get them out of the way, and then the histories, saving the comedies (my favorite) for last. The disappointment came when I found that not only was Romeo and Juliet not included in the tragedies (the five being Othello, Macbeth, King Lear, Julius Caesar, and Hamlet), but the comedies also did not include Midsummer Night's Dream, but did include Measure For Measure--my least favorite! (Why is it even a comedy, anyway? Omit the last scene and it's a sheer Greek tragedy all the way through!) Couple that with getting a lower grade on my Jane Austen final because the professor disagreed with my thesis, not the quality of my writing, and the depressiveness of postmodernism in the American Literature course... By the time I finished, I had the strange sensation of not even wanting to pick up a book. That feeling lasted, as I said, for one month, then two... almost the entire summer.
Then in September, my youngest brother started high school and one of his assigned readings for English was Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury. I knew a lot about the book, since it had come up many times in my American Literature course, but I hadn't actually read it. One day, I found the book just randomly on the couch, so I began reading.
I found a much more intelligent, intriguing story than I was expecting. Especially when I got to the line, "Good writers touch life often..." I found the thing that motivated me toward writing. I wanted to write stories that "touched" life, that were grounded in some kind of relatable aspect, instead of pulling readers away from their reality. I found it ironic that the whole premise of this dystopian society was that they burned books for the information they held... and yet the book itself is littered with quotes from the books they sought to erase from humanity, immortalizing those quotes in particular. Most of all, as I reached the end of the story, I found a renewed interest in reading books that mattered, books that I felt "touched life often" in some way. A few years later, I set and achieved a personal challenge of reading 100 books in one year. Thanks to Fahrenheit 451, or I might have waited even longer to pick up reading again!

“Sleeping Beauty” – A book that took you forever to finish 

There is something to be said for my penchant of checking out books at the library or picking them up on sale and then just... taking years to get around to reading them because my "undiagnosed attention-deficit coping tendencies" mean that I'm wildly inconsistent about reading habits. But as far as "from the time I start the first chapter to the time I end the last chapter", I think it would probably be Sword of Shannara. I had just been watching The Shannara Chronicles on Netflix, all right? And I liked the lore and the way it incorporated "high fantasy in a contemporary post-apocalyptic setting" very well, but at the same time I felt (as all readers do when watching a screen adaptation of a book) that there was something lacking in the speed at which the show needed to jump through the timeline. I picked up Sword because I thought I would be getting more of what I saw on the show. It was too much more. So much exposition, not enough of the hallmarks of "this is a post-apocalyptic version of the world we know!" and really no relatable characters to speak of. I took probably several months to read this, if not a year. I'm trying to go back and see when I actually started reading, how much progress I made, but it's unclear. But we'll just say, I started it, and then subsequently read every other book instead of it until I felt so guilty (maybe it was even during lockdowns when nobody had access to libraries) that I went ahead and finished it. And the payoff wasn't even worth it. So there you go!

“A Thousand and One Nights” – A book you could not stop reading 

On the other side of the spectrum, there are the books I read in exactly one sitting! One in particular, The Princess Academy: The Forgotten Sisters by Shannon Hale, I distinctly remember picking it up one morning because I "just wanted to read the first couple chapters", and then "just one more chapter" for every single chapter thereafter, until I finally reached the end and thought, "Well, that was not how I was intending to start my day!" Her style is just so captivating and I especially loved the characters in that series, I just couldn't help myself!

“Little Red Riding Hood” – A book you recently read in an unfamiliar genre 

At first this prompt was hard to answer, because I tended to stick with familiar genres I know and enjoy, without branching out much, but then I remembered a book I read recently, in the Historical Nonfiction genre.

On the recommendation from a friend (who lent me her copy), I read Until We Meet Again by Michael Korenblit, and it tells the story of his grandparents, two Polish Jews fighting to survive the Holocaust, just after meeting and getting engaged. I am not apt to read much nonfiction, but I found myself invested in their story, through scraping a living in the Jewish ghettos, and being arrested and shipped off to the concentration camps--including the terrifyingly notorious Auschwitz. The courage, steadfastness, and perseverance displayed by these people is truly inspiring!

“The Wild Swans” – A book with your favorite sibling relationships 

It's a bit of a crazy answer for this prompt, but I picked a whole series, the Chronicles of Lorrek by Kelly Blanchard. You don't see as much of the siblings in later books of the series, but definitely at the start, you have a pair of brothers, some cousins, and in-laws all very close with one another, and I really appreciated the portrayal. They fight, they argue, there are misunderstandings, but when the chips fall, the siblings are definitely looking out for one another. Family sticks close, no matter what happens. Of course, as I hinted at the beginning of this response, the series is definitely not about any kind of sibling relationship, but it's a side feature of the series that really elevated my enjoyment of the series.

“Snow White” – A book filled with beautiful prose 

There are a couple books that immediately come to mind as ones that had such delectable prose that I didn't want to stop reading them, and every time I opened them up, there were phrases that caught my attention. You know the ones, the words and imagery so amazing that you have to stop and say the words out loud... The first such series would have to be "every book in the Tales from Goldstone Wood series by Anne Elisabeth Stengl."

It starts with the novel Heartless, and although it claims "each story can be read as a stand-alone", there's just something magical that happens when you read the books in order and see how they build on one another! 

But the reason I picked them out for this prompt is that every time I read another book from this series, it's all just so magical and poetic and allegorical and ethereal!

The same goes for Uprooted by Naomi Novik. It was the first novel I read by her, and the way it almost started like a retelling of Beauty and The Beast, but then branched off into its own variety by including elements from Slavic folktales and such, it was just a beautiful experience that I very much enjoyed from start to finish!

“Rapunzel” – A book that you procrastinated on reading after buying 

When I first started out as a book blogger, I admit there were some books I was more excited to read than others. It also happened that as word got around about my "book review blog", I gained confidence in responding to offers of books, and it felt like I connected with more and more authors, who in turn would occasionally offer their books at a discount, or seeking reviews. In the case of City of A Thousand Dolls by Miriam Forster, one of my acquaintances heard about my blog and put me in contact with her friend, an indie author. I reached out, received my copy... then promptly fell into the habit of just shifting it down the TBR list as other books crossed my path. I swear it got on the list in like 2013 when there were like only 10 books on my TBR... But I didn't actually get around to reading it until 2020.
By the time I finished reading it, I was very excited about it, and after reading the sequel, Empire of Shadows, I would definitely recommend these books to anyone who likes magical stories and amazing world-building and stalwart, sympathetic heroines.

“The Little Mermaid” – A book that took you on a magical journey 

Definitely The Invisible Library by Genevieve Cogman. After a friend started raving about it and sharing pictures of the covers on social media, I decided that I really wanted to seek out this series because holy moly, a multiverse in which one world's fictional stories is another world's "historical account" and each reality possesses an altered version of similar stories and a secret library-based organization dedicated to making sure the "characters" stay in their own realities and the "altered" manuscripts are collected and catalogued is wonderful enough. Add to it the dynamics of Dragons who walk among us in human form seeking to maintain order (often with themselves coming on top) battling with Fae who also wear human disguises but are definitely more inclined to stir up chaos whenever possible... it's pretty much the best series for anyone looking for a magical adventure!

“The Frog Prince” – A book that you’d like to turn into a frog because you hated it so much

Two books immediately come to mind as "books I read all the way through because I had high hopes for them but ended up hating because they were such disappointments": The first one is The Map of Time by Felix J. Palma, and the second is Leviathan by Scott Westerfield. For Map of Time, I found it on my library's shelf of recommendations and when it mentioned Jack the Ripper, Sherlock Holmes, Dracula, and "featuring" H. G. Wells as the main character, all at once, I really wanted it to be amazing. (Remember what I just said about Invisible Library?) But as it turned out, everything fell flat and the story was so garbled that at first I wondered if things were just lost in translation (since the author is not an English-speaker), and yet as I kept reading, things still didn't make any sense at all. I was so mad because all the potential for a great story was right there in front of us, but it never materialized.

Same thing goes for Leviathan. Granted, I'd read Uglies just before that as my introduction to Westerfield, and although I didn't enjoy it much, I figured that Leviathan was a neat application of steampunk, and how could somebody mess up a good steampunk? Here's how: make it about "science vs. religion." One side, the Darwinists, chose to invest their scientific studies in breeding animals to suit their transportation and communication needs. They use whales for shipping, lizards for communication, jellyfish hot air balloons, and the like. Then there are the "Clankers", who just went ahead and developed machines of metal, steel, steam, and cogs to suit their needs. Both sides are at war--and guess which side the author is subtly pushing as the "protagonists" in his narrative? And that's even supposed to be the "subplot", while the main plot between a high-ranking "Clanker" exiled prince and a young "Darwinist" heroine masquerading as a boy because no one lets a girl do all the amazing things she is naturally good at left much to be desired!

“Peter Pan” – A book that reminds you of your childhood 

I grew up reading a lot of classics: Chronicles of Narnia, Anne of Green Gables, Pollyanna, and LOTS of Puffin Classics! One in particular was Eight Cousins by Louisa May Alcott. Sure, I read Little Women and even Little Men as well--but this one appealed to me because it had the whole "girl surrounded by lots of boys who take a shine to her" that Little Men had, but on a more peer-to-peer basis, since they were all cousins of the same generation, instead of Jo March leading a boys' school. It's quaint, it's cute, it has lots of middle-grade-level drama, and I remember that book in particular being one that I reread over and over again... At one point I even entertained the notion of adapting it into a radio drama! But yes, it's just obscure enough that if I ever see it, I'm immediately taken back to those early, idyllic years.

“The Goose Girl” – A book you had low expectations for, but ended up loving 

The two books that came to mind were almost on the same level. I'd just read a rash of teen YA
dystopian books, starting with Hunger Games and moving through Divergent to the likes of The Selection and Matched. The latter two were ones that had great premises and intriguing covers, but ended up hugely disappointing because it was a lot of useless angst ("I'm falling in love with HIM ONE like everyone expects me to, but HIM TWO is my best friend and I've struggled with feelings for him my whole life! WHAT TO DO???") and an overly-capable Mary Sue heroine (Cue the "She's Not Like Other Girls" Theme Song Break) and not much in the way of plot substance outside of Unique Girl Bucking The System To Save The World While Her Two Guy Friends Either Join Her Or Betray Her... 

So when I saw books like Ruby Red by Kerstin Gier, with it's glitzy cover and fancy ballgowns like The Selection, and Cinder by Marissa Meyer featuring only a single motif from famous fairytales (a slipper, a braid of hair, a gleaming apple, and the like), I seriously thought they'd end up more like what I'd already read.
Boy was I wrong! In the Ruby Red trilogy, I found likable side characters, intriguing subplots, and very well-plotted time travel twists! In Cinder and the rest of the Lunar Chronicles, I found fairy tale retelling perfection, with lots of fantasypunk twists and a great series arc to boot! 

To date, those two are among my favorite series ever!

“Hansel and Gretel” – A book that made you hungry

Without a doubt, the Goode-Grace Mysteries by Cyn Mackley! Her main character, Trinity Grace, a Goth girl from the big city is a bit out-of-place in a quiet rural town. She moves into her grandfather's place when he dies suddenly, and Trinity finds evidence of foul play. Over the course of the investigation, Trinity works to win the other residents over with her affinity for baking. Muffins, cakes, pies, breads--Mackley describes the pastries in such detail that it makes my mouth water! I am fairly certain she has made it her "author's signature" of sorts, to mention as many delicious and unique dishes as she can in all her books, but this series in particular made me crave whatever Trinity made!

How about you? Comment below with any book titles you'd recommend with any of the above prompts! 

Happy reading, and Catch You Further Upstream!