December Wrap-Up // ft. disappointments of 2020

And its a wrap! Its officially the end of the year that never was (or was it there too much?) – 2020. Anyway, now we’re welcoming 2021, a new year, with new hopes and new aspirations.

So today I present to you my monthly wrap-up! In December I read, *drumroll* wait, only 4 books?? Yeah *dejected sigh* only four. I triple-checked. What exactly was the reason of this massive downfall (I’d read 7 books last month), you ask? Well, one reason might be that I didn’t participate in any readathon this month. Another would be the huge amount of schoolwork and extra examinations ever middle-school student has in their life. Anyway, since I am not here to express my many woes, let’s start!

Reading (and buddy reading!)

As I mentioned earlier, I did not take part in any readathons this month. I read a total of approximately 1520 pages, which is even less than half of what I read last month😔. Anyway, here are the 4 books I read this month, in the same order as I read them :

Cured by Bethany Wiggins

I had read this book’s prequel “Stung” a year back, and I didn’t remember much about it but still when this book came to my notice I read it. And umm… it was okay-ish, and I think I remember liking “Stung” better. This book seemed a little like a forced sequel. Although, the ending was all “happily ever after” type, and after everything the characters had suffered, I felt they deserved it. 2.5 stars!!⭐⭐.5

Hollowpox : The Hunt for Morrigan Crow

This is the third book in the Nevermoor series (which is my current fav series) and it was as fantastic as I had hoped it would be. 5 stars!! ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐

How To Pack For The End Of The World by Michelle Falkoff

This book was my first ever buddy-read! Yes, you heard right, I finally did a buddy read! My reading buddies were Ashmita @The Fictional Journal , Tiction @Books and Words and Nehal @Fictionally Crazy

Although I didn’t like the book all that much, buddy reading it with them was fun and I had a great time! As for the book, I think I will give it 3 stars! ⭐⭐⭐

Orion Lost by Alastair Chisholm

I finished this book only yesterday, and I have to admit, the end was quite unexpected. The beginning was a little slow, but halfway through, the book picked up pace and a lot of things started happening at once. The plot twists were great, I liked how Vihaan’s character developed throughout the story, but what I felt was that a real interaction with the Videshi could have made things even better.

This book gets 4 stars ⭐⭐⭐⭐!

Blogging

Like November, December was a quite interesting month in terms of blogging too. Since I am a newbie here, I discover some new amazing feature every day, and try to enhance my blog. I also tried some new this month –

• I did my first ever Discussion Post
• I took part in First Line Fridays and Three Line Tales
• I signed up for a writing project called After The Story! (yes you can see the badge on the sidebar of my BLOG page!)

I also read a lot of amazing posts by other book bloggers, but I am not listing them because, first, I don’t really want to go and search for each one of them now, and second, there are just too many.

Now onto the next part of my post!

Disappointments of 2020

So I saw a lot of book bloggers doing a “surprises and disappointments of the year” post which gave me the idea for this. But I am not doing a separate post on this since I don’t think I have any ‘surprises’ as such. I generally only pick up books I think I’ll like, so there are only disappointments. And one more thing is, I really don’t remember many of the books I read in the first half of the year ’cause I have really bad memory, and I didn’t pay as much attention to remembering the books I read as I didn’t have a blog back then and most of the books I read were borrowed from the school library (gosh! that seems an eternity ago when we used to go to the library every week and all my classmates would go and pick up something like Wimpy Kid or Enid Blyton while I’d go straight to Agatha Christie or Divergent series or some other YA. Then everybody would eye me and the hefty book I had picked up, and whisper amongst each other that there was no way I could read that in a week. But I proved them wrong every time. Oh, am I going off-track?). Yeah, so this post is actually more of “Disappointments in the latter half of 2020”, but I will mention a couple of my earlier reads as well.

I am going to start from the bottom, meaning, from the books that disappointed me less, and then move on to those who let me down more. Let’s go!

#5 Heads You Win by Jeffrey Archer

First of all, I gave this book 4 stars. Okay, I know that now most of you’d be yelling and asking me why this is in my ‘disappointments’ list. Here’s the thing. I love Jeffrey Archer novels and they never fail to impress me with the unique writing style, the plot and everything else. So naturally, I had set a very high bar before reading this, and it didn’t live up to that very much (but that could be only because I didn’t understand the ending, and most part of the story was so confusing…if you’ve read it, you’ll understand)

#4 School For Good And Evil by Soman Chainani

The reason why this book disappointed me less was that I never had many expectations from it. I had heard lots of mixed reviews about it so I decided to give it a try. After finishing it I was like, “Seriously?”, and believe me, that was my attitude throughout the novel. Still, before starting I had expected it to be a 3 star, but it turned out to be 1.5, or maybe even 1.

#3 Elementals : Ice Wolves by Amie Kaufman

I had read this in October. It isn’t quite fair to say that it was not a good book, because it was. It was a good 3.5 star middle grade. But I had set my expectations too high, and I was sure this was going to be a 5 star after reading the synopsis and the first few chapters. But unfortunately this book failed to engross me and the middle and the end were not up to the mark.

#2 Black Coffee by Agatha Christie

This was again not that bad of a book, but I had expected a much better ending. This book didn’t seem like it had been written by Agatha Christie, the same person who wrote EPIC novels like And Then There Were None (my fav Christie novel till date). The murderer was one of the suspects only, which was very much unlike other Christie novels. This gets 2.5 stars.

#1 The Unwanteds by Lisa McMann

Yup! This was the biggest disappointment of the year. I did rant all about how high hopes I had for this and how it let me down etc etc in the review I wrote a couple of months back. But let me just tell you in short. The synopsis and the beginning were quite promising and I could foresee an amazing book ahead, but I don’t know what happened and everything came collapsing down after the first few chapters. There was no character-building, no world-building, no unexpected twists. Perhaps others might have liked the simple story line, but I most definitely did not.

All opinions were my own and I do not intend to offend anyone. If any of you have read and enjoyed these books, its totally fine. In fact, I would love to hear your thoughts on these books, maybe you can convince me to give them a reread!

How was your December? What did you read and did you take part in any readathons? As always, I would love to chat with you all!!