Einer meiner Blog-Vorsätze für 2017: Ich möchte den Fokus etwas weniger auf Rezensionen und etwas mehr auf andere Beitragsformate legen und habe mir deshalb u.a. vorgenommen, wieder regelmäßiger einen Ausblick auf interessante Buch-Neuerscheinungen zu werfen. Geplant is ein monatlicher Vorschau-Post, bei dem der Schwerpunkt (wenig überraschend) natürlich in erster Linie auf neuen Krimis und Thrillern liegen wird, wobei mit der Zeit aber auch sicherlich das ein oder andere Buch außerhalb dieser Genres hier Erwähnung finden wird. Los geht es mit zehn interessanten Highlights, die im Januar ganz weit oben auf meiner Wunschliste stehen. (mehr …)

Being a fan of horror stories isn’t easy. On the one hand there are so many horror movies and novels that I’m never running out of stuff to watch or to read but on the other hand it feels like 90% of those films and books are crap and it’s quite a challenge to find the few good ones that come up with fresh ideas and still manage to scare me. While even bad horror movies have the advantage that they can always just use cheap jump scares to give you a heart attack it’s immensely more difficult for books to frighten its readers because they can’t use visual means but have to address their readers‘ imagination and create the horror in their heads. Personally I feel like having read lots of horror novels already but if you’d ask me to list the good ones I could count them on the fingers of just one hand: My all-time favorite will probably forever be Yrsa Sigurdardottir’s Icelandic ghost story „I Remember You“, followed by Josh Malerman’s post-apocalyptic „Bird Box“ and of course you can never go wrong with a Stephen King classic such as „The Shining“, „Carrie“ or „It“. (mehr …)

Es gibt Buchreihen – gerade im Krimi- und Thriller-Genre mit den vielen Endlos-Serien –, die brauchen eine kleine Anlaufphase, um ein Alleinstellungsmerkmal zu finden und sich auf dem Markt zu etablieren, und die Reihe um die junge schwedische Polizistin Olivia Rönning und den erfahrenen Ex-Kommissar Tom Stilton aus der Feder des Autoren-Ehepaares Cilla und Rolf Börjlind scheint in diese Kategorie zu fallen. So ließen sich deren ersten beiden Kriminalromane „Die Springflut“ und „Die dritte Stimme“ zwar recht locker lesen und boten durchaus Kurzweil, beide Bücher krankten aber vor allem an der (zu) hohen Anzahl an Charakteren. Die Krimireihe der Börjlinds als „Rönning/Stilton“-Serie zu bezeichnen, würde die Bücher nämlich streng genommen eher ungenau beschreiben, war es in den ersten beiden Bänden doch gleich eine ganze Handvoll an Figuren, welche bei den damaligen Ermittlungen die Zügel in der Hand hatten. (mehr …)

“Top 10 Tuesday” is a weekly meme by The Broke and the Bookish

I’m starting the new year with lots of new motivation and new ideas for the blog and one of the things I want to do in 2017 is to participate even more in the „Top 10 Tuesday“ feature by The Broke and the Bookish. (mehr …)

Es ist eine lieb gewonnene Tradition zum Jahreswechsel: Die „BuchSaiten Blogparade“ mit positiven Überraschungen, Enttäuschungen und Entdeckungen des vergangenen Lesejahres sowie einem kleinen Ausblick auf das kommende Jahr. In diesem Jahr hat sich Katrin zwar entschlossen, die Parade nicht mehr selbst zu veranstalten und „nur“ noch als Teilnehmerin mitzumachen, allerdings war die gute Petzi von „Die Liebe zu den Büchern“ so nett, die Aktion weiterzuführen, sodass die Blogparade in diesem Jahr dennoch in ihre inzwischen 8. Auflage gehen kann. (mehr …)

This is a guest post by the lovely and amazing Maraia. Make sure to follow her on Twitter (@maraiazoo) or Instagram (@lettuce_read) for more bookish (and non-bookish) content! +++ “Top 10 Tuesday” is a weekly meme by The Broke and the Bookish

Thank you, Sebastian, for letting me post this on your blog! I’ve been wanting to write one of these posts for ages. 2016 was a pretty mediocre reading year, so I was surprised that I actually found enough 5-star reads for the list. I even had to cut out a few. (I was going to list these in the order I read them, but a certain someone is cruel and requested that I rank them. ;P) (mehr …)

“Top 10 Tuesday” is a weekly meme by The Broke and the Bookish

Usually I’ve always been looking forward to the „Best of the year“ Top 10 Tuesday list but to be honest this year I’ve been dreading this topic a little bit because I had the feeling that I hadn’t really read a lot of overwhelming books in 2016 – and sadly I was right.

When I went through my Goodreads shelf to gather all the 5-star books of 2016 I had to realize that I didn’t even have enough to fill a Top 10 list with them since I only counted eight books that had gotten the highest rating – not counting my re-reads because then my list would have consisted mostly of Harry Potter and the Red Rising series… (mehr …)

“Top 10 Tuesday” is a weekly meme by The Broke and the Bookish

Just a few more days until Christmas and as usual I couldn’t (and didn’t want to) avoid adding books to my wishlist because what could a bookworm want more under the Christmas tree than new reading material? (mehr …)

When I had finished „Pines“, the first book in Blake Crouch’s „Wayward Pines“ trilogy, it left me with mixed feelings: I had enjoyed all these mysteries about this odd little town in the middle of nowhere in Idaho and loved the „Twin Peaks“-like atmosphere that came with it but the conclusion felt a bit absurd. While I usually love mind-blowing plot twists I didn’t really know what to think about the one that ended „Pines“ because at first it felt way over the top and a bit like a cheap way out of all those inexplicable circumstances, but after reading a bit more of Crouch’s works and now knowing that he writes thrillers of the rather unusual kind (see his latest novel „Dark Matter“ for example) I grew much fonder of the actual background story of Wayward Pines – also because the author provided an even better follow-up with the sequel „Wayward“ that didn’t have quite the „what the fuck“ moments as the first book but managed to make this extraordinary setting appear more realistic and thus even intensified the very special atmosphere.

(mehr …)

I have to admit that I’m not really a reader who pays a lot of attention to diversity when it comes to picking books and this is not because I don’t find the representation of people with different ethnical backgrounds, sexual orientations, religious beliefs or whatever not important but rather because it doesn’t really matter to me if a book character is white, black, straight, gay, Christian, Muslim or else as long as the story of a book is good and manages to captivate me. So the fact alone that Becky Albertalli’s YA coming-of-age novel „Simon vs. the Homo Sapiens Agenda“ features a gay protagonist didn’t make it special and a must-read for me but after all this hype I just had to give in eventually and find out by myself what the buzz is all about. (mehr …)