HUGE BOOK HAUL (20+ BOOKS!) 📚my first arc, gifted books + new out! -fantasy, mystery + contemporary

We've got a lot of yellow books today. I never have yellow books. What the hell is going on? Is it a coincidence? I ask you, is it a coincidence? Hi everyone, welcome back to my channel. I hope you are well. And today, we're doing another book haul. So excited. I'm so excited. Book hauls are one of my favorite videos to film. I love just chatting about the books that I have bought and the books I am most excited for currently. It's really dark outside today, so I've got the lights on me really bright, but everything behind me looks really dark. So, apologies. All of you. But it's not what I paid for. It's not. It sucks. Two quick just reminders slash announcements before we get into it. I'll try and keep it really brief. But two really exciting things I have got coming up in November. Firstly, I'm holding a read-along for the Winter Night Trilogy by Katherine Arden, the first of which is The Bear and the Nightingale. And we start in November. It is my favorite fantasy series ever. It is this magical story set in old Russia, in the snow, with house spirits and a girl trying to figure herself out in the world, and old magic. And it's just brilliant. So if that's something that you would be interested in, please go join the Goodreads group and the Twitter down below. I'm so excited to be reading this with you. I'll also link the announcement video for that. And, if you didn't know already, in November I am co-hosting a read-a-thon. It's called the A Thousand Doors Read-a-thon. And it is a choose-your-own-adventure read-a-thon. It is really unique and really different. On the 1st of November, at the strike of midnight UK time, myself and my two co-hosts, Emma from Drinking By My Shelf and Tasmin from Tea Books and Tasmin, we're each gonna post a reading prompt. And you can choose any of those three as your starting point. And we'll give you a prompt. You go away and read a book. And then based on what you think of that book, you go through the next door to find out what your next prompt is. So you can't plan for it. You have no idea what the prompts are gonna be beforehand. I'm so excited. It's my first big read-a-thon I'm ever co-hosting. It's gonna be so much fun. I just had the unpredictable nature of it. I have no idea what I'm gonna be reading for it. I'm really excited, so I'll link that as well. Right, let's get into the books, shall we? That's what we're all here for. Should we speed it up a little bit? Yeah! So I have, I think, about 18 physical books here. But I'm also gonna show you the books that I have bought on Audible. Because I typically only use Scribd, but I have been buying quite a few books on Audible lately. So I'm gonna show you them, because technically I have bought them. But I have got a lot of physical books to get through as well. So the first one, this is like absolutely crazy. Like this is madness. I fully cannot believe this. I have been sent The Sanatorium by Sarah Pierce. But I have been sent The Ark. I have never been sent an Ark, which if you don't know is an advanced reader's copy. They often get sent out to BookTubers so we can review the books before it comes out. And I've always wanted to receive an Ark. And I never have. No one's ever liked me enough before. But now someone has. This is a story about a girl named Becky. And if you know me, this is exactly the type of thing I enjoy. So we got sent this little invitation to Le Sommet. Le Sommet. The five star luxury hotel situated in the Swiss Alps, renovated from the town's oldest sanatorium. And essentially what this is about, a detective who is staying at the hotel with her brother and his fiance. And they kind of get this uneasy feeling there. Then his fiance disappears. And then it turns out another woman has gone missing. So there's a lot of women going missing in this old strange hotel. And I think it's probably gonna be like a murder mystery. I don't know if anyone's gonna be murdered, but it kind of gives me that vibe. It really reminds me of The Last by Hannah Jameson, which is like, that is like a nuclear apocalypse murder mystery, but it's got that same kind of like old semi-decrepit hotel, really isolated feeling. So I'm so excited to read this. I saw this straight away and I was like, oh my God, that sounds like something I would love. And then I straight away requested the arc and then I got it. What sorcery is this? Thank you so much to Trans World Publishers for sending me this. I feel so lucky and yeah, I'm gonna get to it really, really soon. Another book that arrived yesterday. See, the ones I've bought most recently or received most recently are the ones like, I wanna tell you about straight away. But this finally arrived yesterday and it is Home Before Dark by Riley Sager. This is so hard to get your hands on in the UK. Only one place called Blackwell's I could get it from. I couldn't get it from Waterstones. I couldn't get it from Amazon. Well, then I went and tried this and I could get it. It was like 19 pounds. Why did I do that? I've just made a massive mistake and now I'm really annoyed. I really loved Lock Every Door by Riley Sager and I got really excited to try the rest of his stuff. It very much reminds me of Haunting of Hill House or like the premise of it does in the sense that there's this house the family lived in many years ago and they only lasted 20 days before fleeing in the night. And our protagonist's father wrote a very popular like horror ghost book about it, but she doesn't feel like she remembers, if I'm right. I'm completely lying to you, we're not surprised. And she is going back to the house to renovate it and it's spooky, dark, ghostly. I love the cover. I love the kind of like glow in the dark cover of this. I'm so excited to read this. I'm gonna be reading it really soon in a reading vlog. That's why I allowed myself to buy it. Tell me if you've read this because I know a lot of people have and I just can't wait for that spooky ghostly feeling. So very excited. Next, let's talk about a few books that I picked up in my local Waterstones recently. Obviously I hadn't been in Leeds for like six months. So I hadn't got to go to the Waterstones here and I love the Waterstones here. It's a really, really nice one and they have really good selection of books. So I popped in there and I let myself get a few books. The first of which is Nick and Charlie by Alice Oseman. This is a really short novella by Alice Oseman and it's only this and her newest novella, This Winter, that's all I haven't read from Alice Oseman. So I definitely wanna make my way through them too. So this is about Nick and Charlie, some of my favourite characters in literature ever. If you don't know, they are the protagonists in her Heartstopper graphic novel series. And I think this novella is set... Okay, I got it. I don't know how long that's been there, I'm sorry. I think this is set just after Heartstopper 3 maybe or just before Solitaire because they're also in her novel, Solitaire. I'm not entirely sure. I just love these characters. This is like semi-illustrated as well. We've got a few pages that have illustrations on them and I just love these characters. It's a tiny, tiny book. I think it's just over 150 pages, but the font is massive to make it get there. So I think this is gonna be perfect for my read-a-thon coming up. If I can fit this into a prompt, I'm definitely gonna read it then. We just all love Nick and Charlie. Oh, he fills my heart with warmth. Once I saw it, how could I say no to two of my favourite boys? So, God, they just make me so happy. That's very yellow, isn't it? Look at the three we've talked about so far. We're very yellow. Apparently I've got a thing for yellow bits. What the hell? Next was a very spur-of-the-moment decision and it is The Devil in the Dark Water by Stuart Turton. So this is the author of The Seven Deaths of Evelyn Hardcastle, which I haven't read yet. I probably should have read that and seen if I liked this author before buying their new release for a lot of money. I should probably take that money sticker off. However, when I heard the premise of this book, I had no choice. Like, I literally didn't have a decision in the matter. And then when I saw these sprayed edges, ladies. So we all gag nation on this. I really didn't have a choice. Oh my God. So this is like waves of water because this book, I believe, is this murder mystery set on a boat in 1634. On the inside here, we've got a really cool diagram of the ship and it just sounds so mysterious. And I haven't read a murder mystery set on the sea in historical. I just love, I love the vibes of it. I just love what it promises. So yes, I should have read The Seven Deaths of Evelyn Hardcastle, which I owned before this. I am gonna be reading it soon, like within the next month or so. It's a big boy as well, this book. It's like hefty. It could, you could kill someone with this book. That bitch is so ******* evil. Why would she say that? I wanna know. Like the more I think about the bitch, the more I think that she must be straight up evil. I am so excited to get this. And I think if I enjoy The Seven Deaths of Evelyn Hardcastle, this will be one that I pick up ASAP. Okay, so next, a very kind subscriber called Mackenzie sent me Muse of Nightmares by Laini Taylor. She watched my vlog where I read Strange the Dreamer. I cried a lot. So, I just finished it. And it's made me cry quite a bit. I said in the vlog, like I wanna get into this sequence straight away. I haven't read it yet, but I will soon. I'm really excited to finish off this duology. I'm scared. I'm terrified. Like Strange the Dreamer ends in a way that just makes you terrified to start this. Like I actually feel dread. I can't even really explain the plot of Strange the Dreamer to you because stuff gets explained at quite late stages. But essentially we follow Laszlo Strange as he is obsessed with a lost city of Weep when he's younger, but then he finds out that he actually has an opportunity to travel there and to work for the people there and to uncover the mystery of why it's forgotten and what the city has suffered. But it's so much more than that. Like it's so much, I can't tell you the plot because I would spoil it. Laini Taylor's writing does something to me, like viscerally. Like it's my perfect writing style. I love the kind of purple prose. I hate that, I hate that term though, purple prose. I hate all the P's. It's like overly, too many P's. And that feeling is mutual! But it's just the most beautiful, magical, whimsical, fairytale-like writing. And I think it's not something a lot of people can pull off. Thank you very much, Mackenzie. I can't wait to get to this. I'm also terrified and dreading it at the same time. Next we have two amazing books that a lovely subscriber, Alison, sent me completely out the blue off my wishlist. Like I was not expecting it. This parcel arrived. I was like, what is this? What is this? And then I opened these two books and I like, right! So the first is Felix Ever After by Kacen Callender. I love the cover for this. I think it's such a beautiful cover. One of my favorite kind of like young adult contemporary covers ever. So this is about our character named Felix, who is trans. Kind of his struggles being black, queer, and transgender. Having so many marginalizations to his name and how difficult that is for a person to get through life in this kind of like shitty society we live in. But then a anonymous student starts posting pictures of Felix before he transitioned, dead naming him. And it's kind of just Felix dealing with that situation. I know that his friends play a really big role in this. I have heard so many wonderful things about Kacen Callender's writing. And I just had so many people say so many good things about this book that I had to pick it up. I'm so excited to read this. I think this would be another great option for a read-a-thon or something as well because it is a YA contemporary. Thank you so much, Alison. I'm very excited. And guess what I've just noticed? It's yellow! I didn't even plan this. I didn't wear yellow because I have a lot of yellow books. But we've got a lot of yellow books today. I never have yellow books. What the hell is going on? Is it a coincidence? I ask you. Is it a coincidence? Very excited to read that. And then Alison also got me A Song of Race and Ruin by Roseanne A. Brown. This is a fantasy. And like, I'm not gonna lie to you, I don't know too much about the plot. I saw the cover and I was sold. I've seen a lot of people give it really good ratings. And so that was enough for me to put it on my wishlist. The cover is beautiful. I feel like the vibes of this are gonna be like immaculate. And I'm trying to read more diverse fantasy. I feel like our fantasy can often be so white. Like so white. And I often really enjoy diverse fantasy worlds. They're often my favourite fantasy. You know, I really love Girls with Paper and Fire. That for me is one of the best YA fantasies I have ever read. I think it's incredible. And so yeah, as soon as I saw this had so many good reviews, a lot of people were reading it for their book club, I knew I wanted it. So thank you very much, Alison. I feel very lucky. Next, I have two more books that I bought when I shouldn't have, because I don't have the money to buy these books. So like, why did I do this? Now I am on a book buying ban until after my birthday. My birthday's at the end of January. So I'm going to receive books for Christmas. I'm going to receive books for my birthday. This is the last book haul until after my birth. Well, no, I'll do a book haul for Christmas and a book haul for my birthday. But like, I'm not buying anything. I'm not allowing myself to buy anything. That's not happening. So this was the last hurrah. I picked up When No One Is Watching by Alyssa Cole. Alyssa Cole has traditionally been published as a romance author. This is her first thriller and it excites me so much. It is a thriller about gentrification in Brooklyn. Our protagonist noticed that all of her black neighbors are kind of moving out and white neighbors moving in. And there's something more sinister at play. And I've just heard so many good things about this. I know Riley really enjoyed it. I think I saw Mina had read it quite highly the other day. And I'm just so excited to get into this. I think that a thriller with a really different topic, I get so bored of hearing about all those thrillers that are like a crazy woman or woman hates woman or whatever. Like, I just hate that. I can't read that anymore. Like, I just can't do it. So this sounds like it has a really interesting and niche topic. So I'm really excited to get into this. Then I also picked up, I realize I've done this in the wrong order because I'm about to show number three after this, but I picked up the fourth in her Kuporo series. I picked it up in the special edition because I really liked like the way it looked. I thought it looked really cool rather than just like the normal editions. As someone who wants to write murder mystery and who really likes reading murder mystery, I'm trying to make my way through all of the her Kuporo series. Whenever I talk about Agatha Christie, I feel a requirement, like I feel a duty to talk about how some of her books are racist and like explain why I'm still reading her stuff. And I think it's different. Like people be like, oh Megan, you said The Help was racist and you don't want to read that. Well, that was published more recently. I think that there's certain authors that we can't blame for being products of their time. Their time was wrong and abhorrent. But as someone who wants to write murder mystery, I feel like Agatha Christie is someone that I need to read to really learn from in terms of the craft. It is a difficult one for me and like sometimes it doesn't sit right. But then I remember every other time I see someone else reading Agatha Christie and they never talk about it. Like no one ever discusses the original name for And There Were None. Like no one ever talks about this. And I always feel like I have to and then I feel bad. But I'm not gonna be the type of person who just like pretends these issues aren't there. Like that is an issue with Agatha Christie's stuff. But I think as long as you read it through that lens, like I think sometimes the issue with modern literature that is racist is that people don't know it's racist. Do you know what I mean? Like people read that and absorb the ideas and take them on as their own. Like take racist ideals on as their own without knowing that it's racist. Whereas I think as long as I read her stuff, on the lookout for that, like trying to make myself aware and be really aware of when something is racist, I think that is the best I can do. I think this is one of her most popular ones. I hear a lot about The Big Four. So I'm very intrigued to read it. But I need to read the next, I'm gonna show you number three in a second. I can't get to this until I've read that. Nextly Wonderful Molly sent me The Midnight Library by Matt Haig. I feel so lucky to have received this. She got me it like as soon as it came out. Molly always sends me far too many books. This has been getting so much hype. Like so many people have been loving this. It sounds so magical. I love a magical library. Like that is a sub genre of my favorite things in books. I love it. Magical libraries, just give them all to me. Any book with that, I'm instantly sold. The only book I've ever read by Matt Haig was The Humans. And I don't think I loved it. I didn't love it. But hopefully, I think it was just not my kind of book. But this sounds more like my kind of book. So hopefully, I will love this. So next, my grandparents just sent me loads of books out of the blue. Thank you, Ann and Ken. I know you're watching this. Let's talk about how iconic they are for a second. Like they love Ruth Ware. They've read loads of Riley Sager. Like they're thriller icons, my grandparents. They listen to all my recommendations when it comes to thrillers, anyway. So yeah, they sent me four books. The first of which is The Murder of Roger Ackroyd by Agatha Christie, which is number three. So yeah, I need to get to this one first. Again, this is one that I hear a lot of good things about. I really hope I'm gonna get to this soon. I really like listening to the audio books for the Agatha Christie books alongside reading the physical books. I think it's such a nice way to enjoy them. They've often got like unique like sound effects and like sounds like we're in the 1920s, 1930s. And I just love that. I like to stand it. So when was this published even? 1926. Oh my God, that's so long ago. This is another one I'm thinking I'm eyeing up for the A Thousand Doors readathon. I might pick this if it fits a prompt because it's something I think I can get through really quick. They also sent me a book I've already read. I read it for my Bacopoly blog, which I will link. And that is Silver in the Wood by Emily Tesh. This is this woodland, dark, magical story. It's super short. It's only like a hundred pages. So I read it really fast in like an hour or two. And I really, really recommend it. It has this such unique vibe to it. I want more kind of like fairy, woodish, magical stories. The woods are such a cool setting. I feel like they're not explored enough. Don't be shy, put some more. Put some more. Next, they bought me Uprooted by Naomi Novik. Now, if you watch all my videos, you know, recently I bought and unfolded A Deadly Indication by Naomi Novik for the kind of microaggressions that a lot of people say was in it. I haven't heard anything negative about this series. And so, so many people who I have very similar taste to have loved this. And so I still think it's something that I really want to get to. It reminds me, it sounds a lot like The Baron and the Nightingale in the kind of vibes of it. I don't know if it is. It just sounds like it has that kind of whimsical, old, magical, fairy tale setting. It's something that a lot of people recommend to me that they think I'd like. So I'm hoping for good things from it. Next, we have Sorcery of Thorns by Margaret Rogerson. So this is a standalone fantasy. And that is one of the main reasons that I wanted to read this because when you get into a fantasy series, like you're there for a long time and sometimes it's nice to just pick up a singular fantasy book that doesn't have a sequel to it. So this is again about libraries, I think. I think that our protagonist has always known that she was gonna be a kind of keeper of the libraries in some way, but then something terrible happens and she has to go on this magical, fantastical adventure from what I know about it. And this is one that like I heard a lot about in one little time period from BookTube and everyone kind of talked about it, I feel like. No one's really talked about it since. But I love the cover of it. I think the cover of it is so cool with like this lettering. I love the lettering on it. I just think that this is, oh my God, Katherine Arden blurbed it. It's meant to be. No, I don't think you understand. I'm obsessed. If Katherine Arden blurbed it, that is just another thing in its favor. That is just another positive. So excited to get to this. I think it's just the perfect thing to like, I don't have to commit to another fantasy series. I can just read this and then I'm done. That's all it is. These next few books I'm only gonna talk about quickly because you have seen them in videos already. The first of which is The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue by V.E. Schwab. Look at the edges, gold glittery edges. We stand. She's strong. She's powerful. She knows what she wants. When you walk into the room, you know she's there. She's a blessing and a curse. She's wild. She's free. I read this in a dedicated reading vlog and cried a lot. It was emotional. And I gave this about four stars. I did really, really enjoy it. It's this really gorgeous slow book and this look at these characters, but I didn't feel attached to Addie that much, which is very strange. I felt more attached to another character we meet in the story called Henry. But the ending of this is just genius. Like the way it all ties together at the end is so clever. It was just a beautiful, haunting story. So I would really recommend it. I know a lot of people will have been speaking about it lately. I just think it's a really fun read. Not fun. It's actually kind of sad. Like it's not fun at any point. The whole thing is sad. What am I talking about? A very special, unique, imaginative story. So definitely recommend. Next, I have got two of the most beautiful books ever. I received both of these in my Fairyloot boxes. So I have Star Daughter by Shveta Thakkar and I have Fable by Adrienne Young. These have glittery sprayed edges also. I think these are like slightly better. They're really well done. Like they're so gorgeous. I will link in the description both. Let me put them both here. Both of my Fairyloot unboxings where I unbox these two. I am so excited to get to both of these. They are both young adult. They both don't feel very scary. So hopefully I'll get to them soon. This is about a girl who has some kind of affinity with the stars and she gets called up into the stars to have some kind of duel or battle, I think to save her father or something. I don't know, but it's a gorgeous cover. Like it's so beautiful. And then this cover was actually a redesign by Fairyloot, which I love. And this is just like a mermaid story, which I'm very intrigued by because I haven't read mermaid stories that often. So obviously these aren't books I picked out myself, but I'm so happy that I own them. I'm so excited to read them both. Again, I feel like these would both be great picks for a read-a-thon. That's obviously all I'm thinking about right now is what I'm gonna read in my read-a-thon. They're just so beautiful. I think that Fairyloot is such an amazing company. I've loved all of the boxes I've received so far from them. I luckily have been being sent them. Their quality of the objects that you get in the boxes are like crazy. Like they're absolutely amazing. I was so shocked when I opened my first box and got my items because they were just like such high quality and the books are just beautiful and amazing. And I love them. So I cannot wait to receive my next Fairyloot box this month. The last physical book I have to tell you about, I left to last. It's also yellow. I left this to last because I didn't actually purchase it. It is my mum's, but I kind of like absorbed it into my collection. And it is Q by Christina Dauka. So this is the author of Vox, which is I think her more like well-known book. But I think I read that and like DNF'd it years and years and years ago. I just didn't like it. I'm more intrigued in this because what I've heard in reviews is that you basically either like one or the other. The description says, in this world, perfection is everything. And so it's again this kind of dystopian look at where society could possibly go if we follow down the routes that we are or looking at certain aspects of our society and kind of like magnifying them, I guess. I'm really intrigued by this. It's not one I think I'm gonna get to ASAP just because it wasn't one that I bought, but it's nice having it here. And I may read it at some point. That's never gonna happen. Ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, Tiffany. Ever, ever, ever in a million years. And then quickly I'm just gonna chat to you about the audio books, which I have bought recently on Audible. The first is one I'm actually listening to right now and loving, and it is Sleeping Giants by Sylvain Nouvelle. So this, oh my God, I cannot wait to finish this and speak to you about it in my October wrap up. It is so good. This audio book is so good. So this is about a statue of a sleeping giant that is being retrieved and rebuilt by this kind of secret, weird organization. We still don't know what's going on with that at the point I'm at in the book. The lead scientist on the case actually stumbled across the first piece when she was a child, the hand. And since then, we found a forearm and a leg and stuff. And the brilliant thing about this audio book is that it's told through these files with interviews with our different characters and diary entries that they have recorded. It's a full cast, so we have different narrators for each of the characters. And it's just so goddamn cool. I'm loving it so much. Obviously, I love sci-fi when it has some kind of added cool element to it, but it reminds me of a lot of Illuminae in a kind of unique way that it's told. I'm just absolutely obsessed with it. I'm loving it. So, so far, I really recommend that. I also got Daisy Jones and the Six audio book. I have read this already. I gave it a 4.5 stars, probably basically a five. And I wanted to reread it via the audio book because I've heard so many good things about the audio book. People will love it. Because again, this has a full cast for all of our different characters. I bought the audio book for How To Be Anti-Racist by Ibram X. Kennedy. I've heard so many good things about this. It is a non-fiction book about being anti-racist. Reading non-fiction is something that I really, really love to do, particularly on topics such as race and gender and class. I've heard a lot of people say the audio book is really good. I believe that it is narrated by him, I'm pretty sure. And I've just heard so many wonderful things about it. Next, I also got The Deep by Rivers Solomon and Daveed Diggs. I think the book is by Rivers Solomon, but it's based on a song by Daveed Diggs, I'm pretty sure. I asked on Twitter, what books will I wish this? Should I buy an audio book for? And I heard so many good things about The Deep. It just feels like a really special book. I've heard that it's haunting and kind of heartbreaking and just this like wonderful, impactful story. And then the last audio book I got was The Spy and the Traitor by Ben McIntyre. Now this is completely out of the blue. Like this isn't the kind of thing I would usually get, but I heard Emma from Drinking By My Shelf talk about this a ton and about how she didn't think she'd enjoy it, but then loved it. And it's basically a story about this double agent in the Cold War. Like it's nonfiction about this guy. And it's just so different than anything I would usually read. But when she spoke about it, I was just sold. Like she sold it to me, absolutely. That is all the books I have bought lately. I'm not allowed to buy anymore until like February next year. Like it's banned. I'm not allowed to do it. I've got more than enough here. I've got my lovely little collection. Brrr. Wow. Okay. I hope you enjoyed this book haul. Let me know down below if you've read any of these. If you've waited till the end, comment a yellow emoji, any emoji that's yellow, just so I know you stayed here till the end just to celebrate all the yellow books we seem to have in this. And yeah, let me know if you've read any of these, if you've enjoyed them, if you've got your eye on any of them, let a gal know. And yeah, I will see you very, very soon in another video. Bye.