I can’t find who started the Friday Five book blog meme. It seems to crop up in many different style such as “Five for Friday”, “Five on Friday” , “FridayFive Challenge”. I also can’t find a topic list like you would have for the Six on Sunday meme. Therefore I am just doing my own thing and setting my own topics just so I can chat books with you.
This weeks Topic is:
Five Books that ‘destroyed’ me emotionally
I admit I am not one to cry at books. While I get invested I rarely get to the point where I have emotional reations to books so when books does hit me they hit me hard. This means they stick around in my mind and I wanted to share a few of them with you.
This is How You Loose The Time War
Amal El-Mohtar and Max Gladstone
About the book:
Among the ashes of a dying world, an agent of the Commandant finds a letter. It reads: Burn before reading. Thus begins an unlikely correspondence between two rival agents hellbent on securing the best possible future for their warring factions. Now, what began as a taunt, a battlefield boast, grows into something more. Something epic. Something romantic. Something that could change the past and the future.
Except the discovery of their bond would mean death for each of them. There’s still a war going on, after all. And someone has to win that war.
I was inspired to do this topic by the resurgence in popularity of This is How you loose the Time War. This book is just gorgeous. The lanugage is poetic and lyrical, while it also takes on an epistolary element. There is just so much worldbuilding and emotion packed into so few pages it is just beautiful and worth all the hype it was getting in the last few days
And the Rest is History
Jodi Taylor
Chronicles of St Mary’s #8
About the book:
No one knows quite how, but Max and her baby are safe at last.
No one knows quite how, but Peterson has persuaded Dr Foster to marry him.No one knows quite how, but Markham’s marital status remains unknown.
Certainly no one knows quite how a twelve-foot-high teapot could mysteriously materialise on the South Lawn, but it does.
But they do know that Clive Ronan is back.
They do know that he hates them and that this time he has good cause. And they do know that he will bring death and destruction in his wake.
Follow the disaster magnets of St Mary’s from the Egyptian desert to the Battle of Stamford Bridge, from Hastings to the Sack of Constantinople, and from tragedy to triumph and back again, in this, the eighth book in The Chronicles of St Mary’s.
Over eight books I had fallen in love with Max and her fellow disaster magnets and while in every book Jodi Taylor makes them run a gamut of trials and tribulations in this book she just rips everything to peices. she utterly destories her characters in this one and it left me a complete emotional wreck, i was so worried going into book 9 as this left me raw.
Before the Coffee Gets Cold
Toshikazu kawaguchi
Before the Coffee Gets Cold #1
About the book:
In a small back alley in Tokyo, there is a café which has been serving carefully brewed coffee for more than one hundred years. But this coffee shop offers its customers a unique experience: the chance to travel back in time.
In Before the Coffee Gets Cold, we meet four visitors, each of whom is hoping to make use of the café’s time-travelling offer, in order to: confront the man who left them, receive a letter from their husband whose memory has been taken by early onset Alzheimer’s, to see their sister one last time, and to meet the daughter they never got the chance to know.
But the journey into the past does not come without risks: customers must sit in a particular seat, they cannot leave the café, and finally, they must return to the present before the coffee gets cold . . .
Toshikazu Kawaguchi’s beautiful, moving story explores the age-old question: what would you change if you could travel back in time? More importantly, who would you want to meet, maybe for one last time?
Another time travel book, but this one focuses purely on the human stories. This one got me as one of the stories focuses on early onset Alzheimers, i have worked for an Alzheimers charity but I have also worked in Alzheimers and dimentia research and it is a topic that is very close to my heart and this story was so recognisable but so beautifully handled.
Tales from the Cafe
Toshikazu kawaguchi
Before the Coffee Gets Cold #2
About the book:
In a small back alley in Tokyo, there is a café which has been serving carefully brewed coffee for more than one hundred years. But this coffee shop offers its customers a unique experience: the chance to travel back in time…
From the author of Before the Coffee Gets Cold comes a story of four new customers each of whom is hoping to take advantage of Cafe Funiculi Funicula’s time-travelling offer.
Among some faces that will be familiar to readers of Kawaguchi’s previous novel, we will be introduced to:
The man who goes back to see his best friend who died 22 years ago
The son who was unable to attend his own mother’s funeral
The man who travelled to see the girl who he could not marry
The old detective who never gave his wife that gift…
This beautiful, simple tale tells the story of people who must face up to their past, in order to move on with their lives. Kawaguchi once again invites the reader to ask themselves: what would you change if you could travel back in time?
This one was even more emotional than book 1. The stories are so intricately human, everyone could recognise the characters and their stories either from their own lives or others around them. It captures all the emotions around each scenario and it just really pulls you in. This really is a beautiful series and I am very interested, yet scared of book 3.
The Paper Menagerie and other stories
Ken Liu
About the book:
With his debut novel, The Grace of Kings, taking the literary world by storm, Ken Liu now shares his finest short fiction in The Paper Menagerie. This mesmerizing collection features all of Ken’s award-winning and award-finalist stories, including: “The Man Who Ended History: A Documentary” (Finalist for the Hugo, Nebula, and Theodore Sturgeon Awards), “Mono No Aware” (Hugo Award winner), “The Waves” (Nebula Award finalist), “The Bookmaking Habits of Select Species” (Nebula and Sturgeon award finalists), “All the Flavors” (Nebula award finalist), “The Litigation Master and the Monkey King” (Nebula Award finalist), and the most awarded story in the genre’s history, “The Paper Menagerie” (The only story to win the Hugo, Nebula, and World Fantasy awards).
My thoughts
This short story is indiscribable. its no wonder so many of them are awrd winning or nominated as eah story is just mind blowing. It took me ages to read because I found that I just had to stop and collect my thoughts after every single story. They pack so much punch. I need to go back and re-read these.
What book ripped you to peices?
I would love to chat all things bookish with you! You can comment down below or find me on Twitter or Goodreads!
Happy Reading!
Fi's Bibliofiles 