Inside Out Book Tag

Inside Out is my favourite movie of 2015 so far and even though the hype has kind of died down, I’m still not over how good it was yet. Today I’m going to do the Inside Out Book Tag, which Joey @ Thoughts and Afterthoughts tagged me to do ages ago. The tag is simple – name a book that corresponds with the five characters in Inside out! Interpret it however you want.

So I think Joy is supposed to come first because she’s kinda the main character in the movie, but I like Sadness the most so she comes first!

There are many books that make me sad and there are also many books that make me cry but only a few books have made me ugly-cry for hours. I think the one that made me the saddest and cry the most was A Little Life by Hanya Yanagihara. My heart received such a bashing that I’m still not sure that it’s completely healed.

This is the answer I give in pretty much every tag, but I just love this book so much! Simon vs The Homo Sapiens Agenda by Becky Albertalli puts a smile on my face every time I think about it. It’s cute. It’s adorable. It’s got Oreos. There’s really nothing that could make me happier.

99 Days by Katie Cotugno made me really angry. I felt like there was so much potential in the idea behind the book but it was so poorly executed. The main character, Molly, was driven out of town by bullies when it’s revealed (through a novel that her own mother wrote!) that she cheated on her boyfriend with his brother. The book begins when Molly comes back for the summer. So you’d think that this book would be a coming-of-age or redemption story… NOPE. She just makes one bad decision after another and repeats her mistakes over and over again. There’s zero character development and she doesn’t learn anything in the end.

A book that brought me fear or scared me was The Strange Library by Haruki Murakami. I read this at the beginning of the year so the details are a little bit fuzzy. The main character is a boy who visits a weird library. A strange man leads him to a room deep under the library and he’s trapped there for days and days. There are other creepy things that happen but I don’t want to spoil it for anyone. If you haven’t read it, I highly recommend this book. It’s really, really short – I read it in about 30 minutes – and it’s got some cool formatting and illustrations.

I’m going to interpret this as a book that I hated and felt like I wasted my time and money on. For me, this book is Love Hurts by Malorie Blackman. This is a collection of short stories by 20+ YA authors about the different sides of love… at least that’s how it was marketed. This caught my attention because a lot of my favourite authors contributed to this anthology (e.g. Gayle Forman, Markus Zusak). And I had a really good experience with the short story collection that Stephanie Perkins’ edited, so I thought this would be just as good.

It turned out that only 7 of the 24 ‘short stories’ in Love Hurts were original short stories. The rest were excerpts taken from already published books. I felt completely cheated and angry that I wasted $20 on a book that I had pretty much already read half of. I thought it was a really poorly curated collection too. A lot of the excerpts made no sense because we only got a couple pages and there was just no context.

This book just made me so angry and disgusted that I didn’t even care when I accidentally dropped it and left a huge crease on the cover. The front cover literally folded in half and I DIDN’T CARE.

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I TAG: everyone!

I have no idea who has or hasn’t done this tag because I was kind of late to the Inside Out bandwagon… and this tag was popular such a long time ago that I’m probably the only one who hasn’t done it. So, link me yours if you’ve already done this tag!