4 bloggers whose content I've been loving this month

I *think* it's been a couple of months since I've done one of these. But, I'm back. I love how passionate they make me feel about reading other blogs, and that you guys can go away and find some fab new bloggers to read and interact with. 

October Book Haul

I'm finally starting to catch up on my blog schedule, so this isn't halfway through the month like my last few 'end of the month' book hauls have been. It feels hella strange, but I'm here and ready to chat books. I've forced myself way out of my comfort zone this month: I mean, there's not even any YA fiction on here. A whole load of these are books that I've been meaning to read for years, so I was beyond happy when they cropped up in my local British Heart Foundation charity book shop.

The Red-House Mystery by A. A. Milne. I had NO idea that the author of Winnie-the-Pooh wrote a detective novel. How epic is that?! It's a pretty short book, but I'm looking forward to seeing how Milne wrote with adults as his intended audience.
What Was Lost by Catherine O'Flynn. This debut novel is a mystery one. It's all about a little girl who goes missing in a shopping centre, and how empty consumerism is. Flash forward twenty years, and a security guard in the shopping centre is convinced he sees a little girl wandering around at night ... This sounds a little creepy, but it's the social commentary that I'm really intrigued by.
Northanger Abbey by Jane Austen. I'm not an Austen fan. There, I said it. I am however a massive fan of classic Gothic texts. In Northanger Abbey, Austen subverts her normal narrative style to expose the darker side of life.
Confessions of a Shopaholic by Sophie Kinsella. This is going to be such a light-hearted read, which we definitely all need every so often. The film is one of my sister's favourite films in the world, and I really wanted to give the book a go to see if I enjoy Kinsella's writing enough to go after another of her books. 

The Essex Serpent by Sarah Perry is a book that everyone seemed to be talking about last year, so I'm a little late to the party on this one. It's a modern Gothic text set in the Victorian era. It has everything you want in a Gothic book in it: suspicious characters, the supernatural, a questioning of what really *is* good or bad and a widow. 
The Handmaid's Tale by Margaret Atwood. I held off of watching the recent series of this on TV because I wanted to read the book first, but I've heard incredible things about both. It's been a long time since I've read a dystopian novel, but one with a feminist twist seems like the perfect book to reintroduce me to the genre.
The Teacher by Katerina Diamond. I picked up The Secret by the same author a few months ago and read it in October. It was everything a crime thriller should be: gripping, gruesome and with a hint of mistrust at the UK's police force. The Teacher sounds as though it's going to be just as shocking and disturbing, and forms an earlier part of the series that both books are in.

A Thousand Splendid Suns by Khaled Hosseini. A few months ago I also picked up The Kite Runner. At the time it was a close call between the two books, so this month I grabbed A Thousand Splendid Suns off the shelf too. It focuses on two women from different generations: Mariam and Laila. Mariam comes from an unfavourable family and is forced into a marriage she doesn't want to commit to. Things only get worse when Mariam's husband makes a marriage proposal to Laila ... I haven't read many (if any) books by an Afghan-born author, so I'm excited to expand my reading horizons with this and The Kite Runner.
Memoirs of a Geisha by Arthur Golden. This is a book that I've heard so much about (probably because it was made into a film in 2005). Golden explores the world of a geisha working in Kyoto before, during and after World War II. I'll be the first to admit that I don't know masses about this aspect of Japanese culture, so it'll be interesting to discover more about it, albeit through the lens of an American author.
Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro. Just after I bought this, I found out that my work's book club is reading another of Ishiguro's novels, The Buried Giant, so I actually picked that up too. This is a dystopian novel in which the children at a boarding school are there to develop in a healthy way so that their organs can be donated. It sounds hella creepy, but also super interesting. 
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Book of the Month - The Hate U Give (THUG)

I just don't even know where to start with this post other than YOU ALL NEED TO GO BUY THIS BOOK AND READ IT. RIGHT NOW.
I've fallen out of the habit of picking my favourite book of the month recently - mostly because I'm re-reading the Harry Potter series in between other books and it's hard to compete with that. BUT, this is the most important and powerful book I've read in 2017. By a long shot. 
I *think* I first heard Hannah Witton talking about how incredible this debut novel is, and ever since the title seems to have been cropping up everywhere. It did not disappoint. This is the book that 2017 needed, and I honestly can't wait to see if Angie Thomas brings out any more in the future.
The book's protagonist Starr is a 16-year-old living in the rough side of the neighborhood. She goes to an almost all-white school and likes to keep 'school Starr' and 'home Starr' separate. She almost whitewashes herself in an attempt to not seem 'ghetto' at school.

Things are going pretty well until Starr and her friend Khalil are pulled over by a cop one night. The officer forces Khalil out of the car and shoots him when Khalil leans back in to see if Starr is okay. As Starr lays holding her friend whilst he dies, the cop turns his gun on her, threatening her to stay where she is. 

This isn't the first time Starr has seen a friend die. As a kid she saw her best friend get shot too, and the image has never left her. She didn't want to be 'poor Starr who saw her friend get shot' again, so she tells no one at her white school. 
But it's hard to keep things separate, especially when you're the witness in the investigation into the cop. An investigation that shouldn't even exist. As the novel progresses, Starr gets more and more angry about it: this man murdered her friend, and she watched him do it: why isn't he being arrested?
The book is dedicated to an upsetting number of young black people who have been murdered by cops in the states. It highlights how the media twists our perspective of what happens: Khalil is labelled a thug, a drug dealer and a gang member. One of Starr's closest white friends even sympathises with the cop. What a whole tonne of people miss is that even if Khalil did do these things, he does not deserve to die.
Starr's family are political activists who end up involved in the riots that result from Khalil's death. Starr begins to question whether having a white boyfriend means that she's betraying her own blackness, and everything is politically charged. 

This book was almost painful to read because of how emotionally charged it was. But painful in a good way. Painful in an 'oh my fuck we need to change the system' kinda way. And that's why I think we all should read it.

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