Finding new favourite books has been hard for me lately, so when I love a book…I really really love it.
It’s like my brain has bypasses “ooh this book was fun we should like it” and just goes to “THIS BOOK WILL DEVOUR A PIECE OF YOUR SOUL AND LIVE THERE INSTEAD.” All casually stuff. I like to be lowkey, not dramatic, in everything I do.
So this year I’ve liked quite a few books (though not as many as I hoped?!) but I’ve gotten seriously obsessed with some and am still thinking about them. Bookhangovers? I’ve been having them. 😂 Either I feel nothing or everything.
[Top Ten Tuesday | The Last Ten Books That Gave Me a Book Hangover]
- You can’t stop thinking about the book.
- You don’t want to read a new book because you cAn’T focus on it.
- Several times in your day, you suddenly look up from your task at hand, your eyes glaze over, and you say, “BOOK” in a way similar to a chicken.
- You want to read the book you’re obsessing over again, for the first time.
- Or you feel like the book is one room in a huge house and you would like to see into the other 57 rooms — oh did you say FANFIC, WELL OKAY THEN–
- You’re trying to decide if you want everyone to read it. Or do you want to protect it? It is yours. It belongs only to you.
- The next book you read tastes of ash.😪
It’s all very dramatic and sad and difficult to live like this but you press on like a true and valiant warrior.
So let me tell you about the last 10 books I’ve read that have given me book hangovers.
also I want to admit that a book doesn’t have to be perfect for me to be obsessed with it. It just has to click with something deep deep in my soul. I don’t even know what that thing is!!! Just SOME specific thing!!
1. The Ruin of Kings
I’ve been talking about this one a lot recently, so you know!! The obsession is strong!!! My favourite part of my sudden intense love for this is…I wasn’t sure I was deeply in love with it to start with?! I was a bit “eh I love it but it could be better.” But now I find myself just obsessing about the world and characters and “what if this” and “what if that” — my eyeballs GLOW into LOVE HEARTS with how much I enjoyed this book.
2. The King’s Men
I sneakily put this on here because while this list is supposed to be about recent reads (and I read this for the first time in 2018), I just reread the trilogy in January, 2020. Which COUNTS as a recent obsession. I’m still so wholly obsessed. 🥺It’s the characters for me here. The plot? The sports? Eh. Sometimes I think about sports and also sometimes I think about near death experiences. Same difference. But these broken, messy, adorable dumbasses!? I just love them. I love how Neil went from being so abused he couldn’t look at people, to nesting in burrito blanket pile with his team because they are there for each other. 🥺💛💛💛
3. One Of Us Is Next
Okay, admittedly, I didn’t even think I’d like this because I didn’t love the first book. And then — ooomf — there I went, slightly obsessing and also deciding I desperately need to write a thriller?! I think that’s why this one lit up my eyes. It inspired me for writing! And I just really liked the characters and how real they felt. I keep thinking about it!! Especially those last pages!! OH. THAT. TWIST.
4. Only Mostly Devastated
This is part romcom, part family drama. And it managed to make me laugh and get all squashed and choked up at the same time. You know that moment when a book winds up and punches you in the throat and while you’re gasping on the ground for air, it tells a lot of cute jokes to make up for it?? THIS ONE. I loved it. 😌 I also felt it dealt well with the way people can be problematic when they’re hiding themselves, how fear is valid, how being closeted is so awful for your mental health, how no one deserves to be hurt for love. gAH FEELS.
5. Gideon The Ninth
This one is also odd, because I spent so long, so so lost. After about 100pgs, I was sure all my intelligence had just fallen out my ears and pooled muddily on the ground because I DIDN’T GET IT. But that’s the beauty of a lot of this book? It doesn’t guide you through the world. You get hurled in and you keep up or die. Plus it is scifi and full of lesbians and murder and necromancy and complex history that is interwoven to bring out deliciously dark reveals at the end. Good stuff. I can’t stop thinking about it.
6. Queen of Nothing
I mean HELLOOOOOO OF COURSE!!!! Gah, I was so so freaking out about this book. I was in the bookstore at 9am, scouring the shelves, having a silent meltdown once I had it in my clammy paws. I devoured it. And it was so so good. It was fast-paced, taunt, emotional and vulnerable, as well as full of tricky twists that made my heart leap. It was JUST what I wanted!!!! (And okay, small rant moment: I don’t get why so many people hate it and call it disappointing or reads like fanfic or whatnot or wasn’t sexy enough. I mean!! Hello it’s actually YA! It’s not an SJM book. It was backstabby but hopeful and I think more books should be like that.)
7. Call Down The Hawk
Oh you know. YOU KNOW how much I love Stiefvater books. 2019 was basically me counting down till November so I could have this precious novel I’d ached over for so so long. 😭It was perfect: complex, peculiar, aching, vulnerable and dangerous. I hold so much awe for Maggie Stiefvater’s prose too?! Sometimes you feel caught in a loop of lucid mad dreaming — and the next you’re laughing softly at the everyday domestic shenanigans. I just !!!! Love it so much. It took me AGES to stop thinking about it.
8. Sick Kids In Love
So I knew I’d love this one because I really liked Moskowitz’s other books — but GAH this one was so amazing?! Like I still think about it now and smile sappily.😍🥰It BROKE ME in the best possible way. And the dialogue was just perfect? I wanted to be absorbed into this book forever and not let go. And tbh, it just raised the bar for contemporaries so high. I need more books like this!!!!
9. Can You See Me
I loved this one so so much I even got my mum to read it!!! Which is such a score for me because she usually only reads historical romances — my recommendation skills are unstoppable. 😌This is a middle-grade novel about autism, but it’s written so accurately that I ached while I read. It’s relatable but also explains things really well from an autistic perspective. (As an autistic, I found myself going: “ohhh sot hat’s why I do that.”) READ IT. I still think about it.
10. Wayward Son
I am hungover from this one because of that cliffhanger!!!! YOU KNOW THE ONE. Omg. Rainbow Rowell likes to gently torture us all forever. But this whole book was soft. It really captured how hard it is to be mentally ill but unwilling to tell anyone what’s going on with you. I just wanted the boys to TALK and work things out but, gah, they are self-sabotaging hard. But all the domestic scenes made my day, so basically 10/10, the worst part of this book was that it ended and I didn’t have anymore pages.
what was the last book you were super obsessed with?! and do you get book hangovers often?