The Feelings Book Tag

“Twenty miles from here, twenty miles north, the funeral mass was starting.”

First line in The Great Believers by Rebecca Makkai

It’s time for a tag and one I was actually tagged for this time: The Feelings Book Tag. I was tagged by Hundreds and Thousands of Books so thank you very much for that! The tag was originally created by Krisha’s Cozy Corner.

Rules:

• Thank the blogger who nominated you and give a link to the blog. 
• Answer the 5 feelings given to you.
• Write the reason in 5 to 6 lines of why does that particular book come under that feeling. 
• Nominate between 5-12 other bloggers.
• Give your nominees 5 feelings too.
• Notify your nominees once you’ve uploaded your post.

The saddest book you’ve ever read

Well, there’s only really one answer here, isn’t there? A Little Life by Hanya Yanagihara. This book is just out to hurt you and it’s amazing and beautiful and so profound. I love it so much but I doubt I’ll ever reread it because I don’t think I could go through that twice.

A character that made you really angry

Oh, there are so many to choose from! A recent one has been Parisa from The Atlas Six by Olivie Blake. Parisa is generally horrible but it wasn’t so much that as a very specific thing she did that made me so angry. She has the ability to read minds and she had no qualms about using that ability in a way that can only be described as assault. Reading someone’s mind is such an invasion of privacy and she would just do it constantly with remorse. I usually don’t mind when characters have negative qualities but Parisa crossed a line.

A hopeful book

I don’t usually enjoy books that can be described as ‘hopeful’ so it was a little hard for me to find one I wanted to talk about. I’ve gone with The Great Believers by Rebecca Makkai because the main reason I didn’t completely love that one is that it put a very hopeful spin on everything. It’s about the AIDS epidemic and had all the opportunities to be very, very sad, but I didn’t love that I wasn’t allowed to have those depressing feelings for very long because the book wanted to give hope. It works for some readers, just not me.

A book coming out soon you’re excited for

I don’t have that many unreleased books on my TBR actually so I hope it’s okay that I stretch that “soon” to January when we’ll finally be able to read Chain of Thorns by Cassandra Clare. It’s the final book in The Last Hours trilogy, and even though I didn’t like the second one very much, I need to know what happens to Thomas!

A book that made you feel clever

This was super difficult! A lot of books make me feel dumb but clever? Well, I’ve picked Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë. I don’t read a lot of classics and the language in those can feel very unfamiliar, and then when my first language isn’t English, I guess I did feel clever for making it through that tome while understanding what I read.

I’m skipping the tagging part but if you want to give your answers to some of these feelings, I’d love to hear them. Especially if there is a book that has made you feel smart because I’m still thinking about that one.