November and December Reading Wrap up

Hello My Scripturients!
I have not done a reading wrap up in literally forever! I haven't been able to read a ton for the last two months but I did get through 6 books. Though sadly this means I did not catch up and complete my Goodreads reading goal. But going into the last two months I kind of already knew that. One December 20th I still had eleven books to get through. Which I knew wasn't going to happen. But that is okay because I still read a lot this year. I am going to have a video going up that is going to have my favorite books of 2017. As well as my most anticipated releases of 2018 so make sure you are sure you are subscribed to my Youtube channel to get updates whenever I upload.
So lets get to the books.

November Reads

Evelina
Fanny Burney
2 Stars
The novel opens with a distressed letter from Lady Howard to her longtime acquaintance, the Reverend Arthur Villars, in which she reports that Mme. Duval, the grandmother of Villars' ward, Evelina Anville, intends to visit England to renew her acquaintance with her granddaughter Evelina. 18 years earlier, Mme. Duval had broken off her relationship with her daughter Caroline, Evelina's mother, and has never acknowledged Evelina. Reverend Villars fears Mme. Duval's influence could lead Evelina to an untimely, shameful death similar to that of her mother Caroline. To keep Evelina from Mme. Duval, the Reverend lets her visit Howard Grove, Lady Howard's home, on an extended holiday. While she is there, the family learns that Lady Howard's son-in-law, naval officer Captain Mirvan, is returning to England after a 7-year absence. Desperate to join the Mirvans on their trip to London, Evelina entreats her guardian to let her attend them, promising that the visit will last only a few weeks. The Reverend reluctantly consents.
In London, Evelina's beauty and ambiguous social status attract unwanted attention and unkind speculation. Ignorant of the conventions and behaviors of 18th-century London society, she makes a series of humiliating (but humorous) faux pas that further expose her to societal ridicule. She soon earns the attentions of 2 gentlemen: Lord Orville, a handsome and extremely eligible peer and pattern-card of modest, becoming behavior; and Sir Clement Willoughby, a baronet with duplicitous intentions. Evelina's untimely reunion with her grandmother and the Branghtons, her long-unknown extended family, along with the embarrassment their boorish, social-climbing antics cause, soon convince her that Lord Orville is completely out-of-reach.
The Mirvans finally return to the country, taking Evelina and Mme. Duval with them. Spurred by Evelina's greedy cousins, Mme. Duval concocts a plan to sue Sir John Belmont, Evelina's father, and force him to recognize his daughter's claim in court. The Reverend is furious. Lady Howard intervenes and manages to elicit a compromise that sees her write to Sir John, but he responds unfavorably.
Mme. Duval is furious and threatens to rush Evelina back to Paris to pursue the lawsuit. A second compromise sees Evelina return to London with her grandmother, where she is forced to spend time with her ill-bred Branghton cousins and their rowdy friends, but she is distracted by Mr. Macartney, a melancholy and direly-poor Scottish poet. At one point, she misinterprets his acquisition of pistols as a suicide attempt and bids him to look to his salvation; later she learns he had been premeditating armed robbery to change his financial status while tracing his own obscure parentage, as well as recovering from his mother's sudden death and the discovery that his beloved is actually his sister. Evelina charitably gives him her purse. Otherwise, her time with the Branghtons is uniformly mortifying: during her visit to Marylebone pleasure garden, for instance, she's attacked by a drunken sailor and rescued by prostitutes--and in this humiliating company she meets Lord Orville again! Sure that he can never respect her now, she is stunned when he seeks her out in London's unfashionable section and seems interested in renewing their acquaintance. When an insulting letter supposedly from Lord Orville devastates her and makes her believe she misperceived him, she returns home to Berry Hill and falls ill.
Slowly recuperating from her illness, Evelina agrees to accompany her neighbor, a sarcastic widow named Mrs. Selwyn, to the resort town of Clifton Heights, where she unwillingly attracts the attention of womanizer Lord Merton, on the eve of his marriage to Lord Orville's sister, Lady Louisa Larpent. ​

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Rainbow Six 
Tom Clancy
4 Stars
​At its heart is ex-Navy SEAL John Clark, now the newly named head of Rainbow, an international task force dedicated to combating terrorism. In a trial by fire, Clark is confronted with a violent chain of seemingly separate international incidents. But there is no way to predict the real threat: a group of terrorists like none the world has ever encountered, a band of men and women so extreme that their success could literally mean the end of life on earth as we know it ...

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All the Light We Cannot See
Anthony Deorr
3 Stars
From the highly acclaimed, multiple award-winning Anthony Doerr, the stunningly beautiful instant New York Times bestseller about a blind French girl and a German boy whose paths collide in occupied France as both try to survive the devastation of World War II.

Marie-Laure lives in Paris near the Museum of Natural History, where her father works. When she is twelve, the Nazis occupy Paris and father and daughter flee to the walled citadel of Saint-Malo, where Marie-Laure’s reclusive great uncle lives in a tall house by the sea. With them they carry what might be the museum’s most valuable and dangerous jewel.

In a mining town in Germany, Werner Pfennig, an orphan, grows up with his younger sister, enchanted by a crude radio they find that brings them news and stories from places they have never seen or imagined. Werner becomes an expert at building and fixing these crucial new instruments and is enlisted to use his talent to track down the resistance. Deftly interweaving the lives of Marie-Laure and Werner, Doerr illuminates the ways, against all odds, people try to be good to one another.

Doerr’s “stunning sense of physical detail and gorgeous metaphors” (San Francisco Chronicle) are dazzling. Ten years in the writing, a National Book Award finalist, All the Light We Cannot See is a magnificent, deeply moving novel from a writer “whose sentences never fail to thrill” (Los Angeles Times)

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The Emperor's Revenge
Clive Cussler
4 stars
​Juan Cabrillo and the crew of the Oregon face their toughest challenge yet when a violent bank heist during the Monaco Grand Prix decimates the Corporation’s accounts. To get the money back, Juan joins forces with an old friend from his days in the CIA so they can track down a rogue hacker and a ruthless former Ukrainian naval officer. It is only after the hunt begins that the enormity of the plan comes into focus: the bank theft is just the first step in a plot that will result in the deaths of millions and bring the world’s economies to a standstill. The catalyst for the scheme? A stunning document stolen during Napoleon’s disastrous invasion of Russia. But two hundred years later, it may be the thing that brings Europe to its knees.
​

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December Reads

Dracula 
Bram Stoker
5 Stars
​Jonathan Harker is travelling to Castle Dracula to see the Transylvanian noble, Count Dracula. He is begged by locals not to go there, because on the eve of St George's Day, when the clock strikes midnight, all the evil things in the world will come full sway. But business must be done, so Jonathan makes his way to the Castle - and then his nightmare begins. His beloved wife Mina and other lost souls have fallen under the Count's horrifying spell. Dracula must be destroyed . . .

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The Princess Diarist
Carrie Fisher
5 Stars
The Princess Diarist is Carrie Fisher’s intimate, hilarious and revealing recollection of what happened behind the scenes on one of the most famous film sets of all time, the first Star Warsmovie. 

When Carrie Fisher recently discovered the journals she kept during the filming of the first Star Wars movie, she was astonished to see what they had preserved—plaintive love poems, unbridled musings with youthful naiveté, and a vulnerability that she barely recognized. Today, her fame as an author, actress, and pop-culture icon is indisputable, but in 1977, Carrie Fisher was just a (sort-of) regular teenager. 

With these excerpts from her handwritten notebooks, The Princess Diarist is Fisher’s intimate and revealing recollection of what happened on one of the most famous film sets of all time—and what developed behind the scenes. And today, as she reprises her most iconic role for the latest Star Wars trilogy, Fisher also ponders the joys and insanity of celebrity, and the absurdity of a life spawned by Hollywood royalty, only to be surpassed by her own outer-space royalty. Laugh-out-loud hilarious and endlessly quotable, The Princess Diarist brims with the candor and introspection of a diary while offering shrewd insight into the type of stardom that few will ever experience.

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 Katelyn 
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