This year has been very good to me, reading and book wise. One of the best things has been finding a new favorite author!! Not only that, but an author who has a RIDICULOUS amount of books published already. Sooo many more books to read and look forward to! Seanan McGuire has very very quickly become one of my top five favorite authors.

First encounters:

I read Middlegame in late April, right before it was released. At the time, this was her most recent novel. I am like…still blown away by how fucking GOOD this book is. You can read my full review of it here, but like, it’s probably my favorite read of 2019. I don’t think anything else really comes close. It was so dark and complex and mind blowing, and everything I could possibly want in a book. Middlegame blends science and magic and mystery, and tackles subjects like isolation due to others being unable to understand you, suicide attempts, greed, and attaining the ultimate power. The best part though is that it’s really about a sibling relationship at it’s core, and that drives the novel. It’s brilliant and you all must read it!

I wanted to share with you some of my favorite first lines from various novels. By definition, the first line of a book is the first thing we read. From them we can get a hint about the story and the feeling of the book. They’re the kind of thing that can be SUPER impactful if done well, but never hurts the story if they’re not a “blow-you-away” kind of line.

Some of them I like because they are funny, others because they are jarring, and others because they’re just damn beautiful.

New York Times bestselling and Alex, Nebula, and Hugo-Award-winning author Seanan McGuire introduces readers to a world of amoral alchemy, shadowy organizations, and impossible cities in the standalone fantasy, Middlegame.

Meet Roger. Skilled with words, languages come easily to him. He instinctively understands how the world works through the power of story.

Meet Dodger, his twin. Numbers are her world, her obsession, her everything. All she understands, she does so through the power of math.

Roger and Dodger aren’t exactly human, though they don’t realise it. They aren’t exactly gods, either. Not entirely. Not yet.

Meet Reed, skilled in the alchemical arts like his progenitor before him. Reed created Dodger and her brother. He’s not their father. Not quite. But he has a plan: to raise the twins to the highest power, to ascend with them and claim their authority as his own.

Godhood is attainable. Pray it isn’t attained.

Okay just to start this off, let me show you what I wrote on Goodreads for my review right after I finished this book:

“i don’t have words. oh my god. oh my GOD. help. i haven’t read a book this good in….i don’t know how long. I DON’T HAVE WORDS I JUST WANT TO SCREAM”

This month I managed to read 12 books!! 4867 pages!! I have no idea how that happened. Probably me trying to procrastinate on work or something haha. Did you know that Goodreads has a stats tracking feature where you can see how many books you read over time? It turns out April of last year was also a huge month for me! Maybe there’s just something about April that makes me read more – not sure what that would be though. Let me know if you have theories haha.

Sometimes I feel like I’m going to be CRUSHED by the sheer number of books I have on my TBR. I don’t know if you remember but one of my goals for the year was to read all the books I own that I haven’t read yet, and I’ve been slowly working on that. So these Spring 2019 TBR books are all ones that I already own that I want to get to soon!

And thank you to Jana at That Artsy Reader Girl for hosting/organizing Top Ten Tuesday!