Libby's Lit

Trope (noun): a recurring theme or motif.  This is the first in a series of posts I'm going to do entitled "Book Tropes" where I discuss my favorite and least favorite tropes from books. I’ll talk about what they are, why I love/hate them, and recommend some books that contain the tropes. Hopefully by the end of this, we’ll have ourselves our own little Book Trope Dictionary! Today I will be discussing one of my absolute favorite tropes which I’ve coined “The Crew” (you’ll see why later). “The Crew” occurs when a book pulls together a diverse cast of unlikely heroes who (mostly) equally share the weight of “main character”. The best way to identify a crew is to ask yourself “Who is the main character?” If you have more than one answer, most likely, you’ve found yourself a crew. Crew books often have more than one narrator or an omniscient narrator.  Crew books are some of my favorite books to read. There’s usually multiple s...

Tis the season for the annual book awards! In honor of the end of 2016 (good riddance), I am going to be counting down the top 16 books I read this year. All the excerpts are taken from GoodReads, and books that are part of a series have the excerpts of the first book included. This year was an amazing year for me books-wise, so it was incredibly difficult to rank these books. They were all truly stunning and amazing books. It took me forever to come up with this ranking, and I'm still not entirely happy with the order because I really couldn't decide! I loved all of them and there are so many more I loved that didn't make it onto the list.   Without further ado, let's put up our dukes and get down to it! 16 . Me Before You by Jojo Moyes "Louisa Clark is an ordinary girl living an exceedingly ordinary life—steady boyfriend, close family—who has barely been farther afield than their tiny village. She takes a badly needed job working for ex–Master of the Un...

"This morning, Kady thought breaking up with Ezra was the hardest thing she’d have to do. This afternoon, her planet was invaded. The year is 2575, and two rival megacorporations are at war over a planet that’s little more than an ice-covered speck at the edge of the universe. Too bad nobody thought to warn the people living on it. With enemy fire raining down on them, Kady and Ezra—who are barely even talking to each other—are forced to fight their way onto an evacuating fleet, with an enemy warship in hot pursuit. But their problems are just getting started. A deadly plague has broken out and is mutating, with terrifying results; the fleet's AI, which should be protecting them, may actually be their enemy; and nobody in charge will say what’s really going on. As Kady hacks into a tangled web of data to find the truth, it's clear only one person can help her bring it all to light: the ex-boyfriend she swore she'd never speak to again. Told through a fascinating dossie...

The year is 1926, and Newt Scamander (Eddie Redmayne) has just completed a global excursion to find and document an extraordinary array of magical creatures. Arriving in New York for a brief stopover, he might have come and gone without incident, were it not for a No-Maj (American for Muggle) named Jacob, a misplaced magical case, and the escape of some of Newt's fantastic beasts, which could spell trouble for both the wizarding and No-Maj worlds. I absolutely adored this movie! It was everything I wanted and more. Since the release of the Ilvermorny stories, I have been looking forward to learning more about magic in America. This movie answered all of my questions and posed so many more. The experience of going to the theater for a new Harry Potter movie was so magical. I was a little late to the Harry Potter game so I never got to experience going to the midnight premier of the new movie, but this made me feel like I was finally getting the Harry Potter movie experience. ...

"It was always difficult being Harry Potter and it isn’t much easier now that he is an overworked employee of the Ministry of Magic, a husband and father of three school-age children. While Harry grapples with a past that refuses to stay where it belongs, his youngest son Albus must struggle with the weight of a family legacy he never wanted. As past and present fuse ominously, both father and son learn the uncomfortable truth: sometimes, darkness comes from unexpected places."     THE EGHTH STORY HAS ARRIVED AND BOY DO I NEED TO TALK ABOUT IT. I have a great many feelings about this book and I really don't know how to discuss them all.     I breezed through this book in a few hours on Tuesday. This book is the script of a play in London of the same name so it doesn't take as long to read. This unfamiliar form also contributed to the scenes being hard to visualize, especially the ones with magic. We don't have JK's amazing descriptive writing t...