Smugglivus 2012 Guest Blogger: Raych of Books I Done Read

Welcome to Smugglivus 2012! Throughout this month, we will have daily guests – authors and bloggers alike – looking back at their favorite reads of 2012, and looking forward to events and upcoming books in 2013.

Who: Raych, the hilarious and lovely lady behind Books I Done Read. We have long bowed down to Raych’s snark and wonderful use of the most appropriate gifs in her incisive and insightful reviews, and we are thrilled to have her back over for Smugglivus this year!

Please give it up for Raych, people!

Raych Helps You Achieve Your New Years Resolutions, But With Books, Because Effort Is For Chumps (Alternately: Books I Read This Year That Were Astonishingly Good)

It’s 2013 and we are all feeling fat and petty and MAGNANIMOUS and resolved. It is a confusing time. But I am here to help you make sense of your resolutions and then shirk them with LITERATURE.

You drank a lot of wine over Christmas, right? Me too. Let us all reflect on how filthy our organs are right now. But purges are all the rage, and nothing releases toxins quite like an ugly cry, so pick up Code Name Verity and wait til you get to THAT PART WHERE THE THING HAPPENS, YOU KNOW WHICH THING. See you later, pore-clogging impurities.

Speaking of ugly-cries, wretched, heaving sobs are good for the ABS, as is uncontrollable laughter, so for your one-stop ab-flattening shop, hit up The Fault In Our Stars. You’ll laugh! You’ll cry! You’ll not be able to take your new abs to the beach because Teenage Cancer is a Thing That Exists and how can you sunbathe in such a world?

‘Hem.

If your New Year’s resolution is something more practical than flat abs, like finally paying back Kathy in Sales (that bitch), check out Sea Hearts for sweet, revengey goodness (though you might find that the real lesson is one of Personal Responsibility and Not Laying The Blame At The Feet of Magical Seal-Wives and wont the egg be on YOUR face then).

What other kinds of things do people resolve? To dial back the technology? That’s probably a thing. So you should read Feeling Sorry for Celia, because besides giving you the moral superiority of having been able to craft a better title (anything. Like, This Is A Book About Teenagers Writing Letters would have been a better title. It’s What’s Eating Gilbert Grape all over again) it’ll make you want to write letters! With paper! And envelopes! It’ll also trick you into thinking that teenagers are all WITTY and DROLL and MATURE but also CHARMINGLY CHILDLIKE, which is a mean and dirty trick, because we know what they really are.

Ok and every couple of years I resolve to Be More Creative, because I eat a lot of chicken and potatoes, but this is one of those resolutions you should just chuck over because books like The Rook are running wild, with their many and varied mutants, and all I can think of, superpowers-wise, is flying, being invisible, and, I don’t know, putting the duvet cover back on the duvet with my mind.

Anything else? Drink less wine? I cannot help you with that. If you resolve to drink MORE wine, however, I have just opened a fresh box…

We’ll take you up on that drink…thanks, Raych!