Top Ten Tuesday | It's Not Me, It's You

Top Ten Tuesday is a weekly feature created at The Broke and the Bookish. Each week you compile a list of ten books which coincide with that week's theme. You can find everything you need to know about joining in here!

I've returned from my hiatus, so it's time to jump back into Top Ten Tuesday!

This week's theme is 'Ten Characters You Just Didn't Click With'. Thankfully this doesn't happen to me too often, but there's nothing worse than reading a book in which you don't give a diddly-squat what happens to the protagonist.

Tris from Divergent by Veronica Roth: I ended up DNFing Divergent when I tried to read it. I didn't believe the world and, more importantly, I just didn't care about Tris at all. I felt like she had zero personality and I didn't care what happened to her.

Lincoln from Attachments by Rainbow Rowell: Eh... I just thought Lincoln was a little weird. I enjoyed the sections between Beth and Jennifer for the most part, but I thought Lincoln was a pretty boring guy in dire need of a bit of a gumption.

June and Day from Legend by Marie Lu: Okay so technically this is two, but actually June and Day are basically the same person, only one of them's a girl and the other's a boy. I really, really didn't like Legend (check out my review here), and June and Day were such boring protagonists. I don't care about people who can do everything perfectly. Give me characters with flaws.

Snow White from Fables by Bill Willingham and Various Artists: I love Snow in The Wolf Among Us - in fact I love all the characters in that game - but in the graphic novels? Not so much. Snow in particular, however, grated on me. She was so self-righteous, and perhaps that might have worked with another writer, but I really wasn't a fan of how Willingham wrote any of the characters. You can check out my review of Fables, Vol.1: Legends in Exile here if you like!

Jocelyn, Allegra, Prudie, Grigg, Bernadette and Sylvia from The Jane Austen Book Club by Karen Joy Fowler: I know, I'm cheating again, but this is another instance in which I found it very difficult to differentiate one character from another. I did like this book, but not enough to keep it once I'd finished it. You can check out my review here if you like!

Ayla from Darkhaven by A.F.E. Smith: I liked Myrren and I liked Elisse, but I just didn't get along with Ayla. She spent the entire book as a damsel in distress when she had the potential to look after herself. You can check out my review here if you like!

Stargirl from Stargirl by Jerry Spinelli: She was a Manic Pixie Dream Girl, and, as such, I found her impossible to relate to.

Tana from The Coldest Girl in Coldtown by Holly Black: This was another book I didn't really like, you can check out my review here if you'd like to know why, and the characters were a large part of my dislike. I didn't really care what happened to any of them.

Jonas from The Giver by Lois Lowry: I wanted to love this book and I was disappointed, again you can check out my review here to find out why. I just couldn't connect to Jonas at all, and because of that I found it impossible to worry about what would happen to him. Like so many of the characters on this list, I just didn't care.

Ellen Laidlaw from Blood Sinister by Celia Rees: Ellen should have been very cool. She's a young lady in 19th century England who wants to study medicine, but unfortunately she fell into the poisonous 'I'm not like other girls' way of thinking and thought her dreams and ambitions were better than everyone else's; particularly the women who wanted to get married and have children. Feminism is all about choice, and if a woman chooses to be a wife and mother, and enjoys it, she has every right to be as proud of her choice as any other woman, and she shouldn't be criticised for it.

Who made your list?

Review | The Jane Austen Book Club by Karen Joy Fowler

The Jane Austen Book Club

by Karen Joy Fowler

My Rating:

Six people - five women and a man - meet once a month in California's Central Valley to discuss Jane Austen's novels. They are ordinary people, neither happy nor unhappy, but each of them is wounded in different ways, they are all mixed up about their lives and relationships. Over the six months they meet, marriages are tested, affairs begin, unsuitable arrangements become suitable - under the guiding eye of Jane Austen a couple of them even fall in love...

The Jane Austen Book Club was the very first read for the book club a friend of mine set up, and I'm glad it was; I've owned my copy for a while now after finding it on a secondhand book stall, and I was glad to finally get the kick up the arse I needed to read it.

Before I say anything I think it's worth mentioning that I'm not the biggest fan of Austen. HOWEVER, I didn't let that affect how I felt about this book.

As you can probably tell from my rating I wasn't the biggest fan of this one, and to be honest that was mainly because, more than anything, it frustrated me. While I was reading it I was enjoying it; it's a very easy read, it didn't take me a long time to finish at all, and I did find myself wanting to get to the end. But I had a lot of problems with it, too, one of them being that I initially found it very difficult to tell the six main characters apart, which is bizarre given how different they are and how none of them have names that sound even remotely similar. I kept having to check the blurb to figure out which character was which, and that's not something I want to be doing when I'm trying to become engrossed in a story.

My biggest problem with the book, however, was that it was told, and never really shown. 'Show, don't tell' is one of the earliest lessons hammered into a writer's brain, but evidently Karen Joy Fowler was absent from school that day. Because of this constant telling - by a narrator, a seventh character, who is never revealed but who I assumed was Austen herself - there was also a constant distance between myself and the characters. I didn't feel particularly close to any of them, not even when they were revealing some of their deepest, darkest secrets.

I didn't completely hate the story, though. Parts of it were charming, and there were times when the narration was quite funny, but for the most part I was rather disappointed in it because I felt as though the story had so much potential. If it had just been fleshed out a little more, if the characters had been treated more importantly than the narration, then I think I'd be giving this book a much higher rating. The only real positive is that I wasn't really expecting much from it in the first place, if I were a huge Austen fan I have a feeling my rating would be even lower.

Monthly Wrap-Up | April 2015

Is it just me or did April fly by? It went so quickly! It's actually a little scary how quickly 2015 seems to be going, so I try not to think about it too much. Things at work got a lot busier last month, but I still managed to read quite a bit and have a pretty good month!

Ms. Marvel, Vol.2: Generation Why by G. Willow Wilson, Adrian Alphona and Jacob Wyatt (4 Stars)

Reviewed here!

Copperhead, Vol.1: A New A Sheriff in Town by Jay Faerber, Scott Godlewski and Ron Riley (4 Stars)

Reviewed here!

Well-Read Women by Samantha Hahn (5 Stars)

Fables, Vol.1: Legends in Exile by Bill Willingham, Lan Medina, Steve Leialoha, Craig Hamilton and James Jean (2 Stars)

Reviewed here!

Little Beach Street Bakery by Jenny Colgan (3.5 Stars)

Reviewed here!

American Vampire, Vol.2 by Scott Snyder, Rafael Albuquerque and Mateus Santolouco (4 Stars)

Reviewed here!

We Have Always Lived in the Castle by Shirley Jackson (4 Stars)

American Vampire, Vol.3 by Scott Snyder, Rafael Albuquerque and Sean Murphy (4.5 Stars)

Reviewed here!

The Jane Austen Book Club by Karen Joy Fowler (2 Stars)

As you can see I'm still loving graphic novels - in fact I enjoyed all the ones I read bar one - and I was able to read a bit more work from Shirley Jackson and Jenny Colgan. Very, very different authors, but I enjoy both of their books!

GAME OF THRONES IS BACK AND I AM VERY NERVOUS.

I'm very, very, very worried about Sansa and I want to take her away from all of the creepy men in her life. I want her and Arya to let Brienne take them to Dorne, and then I want the three of them to stay there in the land where they don't hurt little girls.

STOP HURTING HER!

As always I'm tired of the constant female full-frontal nudity. Do we get to see any dicks? Nope. Now I'm not saying I want to see a dick because, sorry boys, they're not particularly attractive, but I think it's only fair we get male full-frontal nudity, too. I'm sick of the way women are treated in this show, and I know a lot of people wonder why I watch it if there are so many issues with it, but the truth is none of these issues are going to be solved if we all just turn a blind eye. If something's wrong we have to acknowledge it and try our hardest to fix it, not just pretend it isn't there.

On the completely opposite end of the scale, I also watched the 1995 adaptation of Sense and Sensibility last month. I'm probably never going to get around to reading all of Jane Austen's books because unfortunately I've never really enjoyed her books that much, but I do enjoy the storylines whenever I've watched an adaptation in the past. I love Emma Thompson and Kate Winslet, and it was certainly a nice film to sit back and watch, but honestly I found it a little boring and I didn't particularly like the ending. I feel like both Marianne and Elinor deserved better.

I bought myself the season 2 boxset of Orphan Black and I've been watching that again, along with my Dad, in preparation for season 3 which isn't in the UK yet. Boo! It's such a good show, and so far my Dad seems to be enjoying it, too, which is quite something! I think I get my fussiness about TV shows from him...

This has nothing to do with watching Season 2, this is just one of my favourite Felix quotes.

Oh, and my brother-in-law went to see The Avengers: Age of Ultron. I thought it was alright. It was entertaining enough to watch but I'm not a massive superhero fan, although I do love the new Ms. Marvel comics. I'm more of an X-Men girl than an Avenger girl.

I had a great blogging month in April. I took part in the A-Z Blogging Challenge for the very first time and I did it! I was really proud that I actually managed to schedule my posts so I was never typing something up at the last minute, and though I missed a few days (three, I think - I couldn't think of any authors whose surname began with Q, U or X) I wrote something for the majority of them. The only thing I really failed at was regularly looking at other people's posts, which is very naughty of me, but to be honest I just wanted to take part in the challenge to see if I could do it, and I could!

Because I was on such a blogging high I wrote a bunch of other blog posts, too; not only for April, but for this month, too. I have a lot of posts scheduled already, which is good because May's going to be a very busy month at work.

It was Easter last month - hooray! I had a pretty quiet Easter, not that it's a holiday I've ever done anything special for, it was nice to get a few days off work. My sister and her family came to visit and on Easter Sunday we all went to Folly Farm, which is a diabetes-inducing name of a local zoo/farm. There's everything there from pigs to giraffes to lions to owls, and it was a really nice day weather-wise, too!

I found myself in Swansea a couple of times last month, too. For any of you who might not know I live in south Wales, and one of my friends from my MA course recently moved back to Swansea (she did her BA there, but her MA in Lancaster like me!) so it's been nice to have a friend nearby. The two of us went to a book launch together - the launch of New Welsh Short Stories, published by Seren Books where I work! - and then on the last Sunday of the month I travelled through to Swansea to go to a new book club that my friend has started.

There were six of us in total who turned up - which actually worked out really well because we read The Jane Austen Book Club by Karen Joy Fowler, which just so happens to have six main characters! - and while I knew two of the ladies already, one of them being my aforementioned friend, I also met some really lovely new people. It was a lot of fun, and I'm looking forward to the next meeting where we'll be discussing Terry Pratchett's Monstrous Regiment!

The book club doesn't have a theme exactly, but those of us who attended the first meeting are all really interested in gender, feminism and sexuality, so if that sounds like your kind of thing and you happen to live in the south Wales area why not join us? You'd be more than welcome! Check out the Facebook and the Twitter.

How was your April?