July Favourites

Hey everyone!

As we are approaching the end of yet another month, it’s time for another edition of a monthly favourites! This month has brought me back to uni, had 18^th birthdays galore (two of my friends have birthdays in July and mine is coming up very soon), and a heck of a lot of (mandatory, but relatively enjoyable) reading. I’m doing a unit of Youth and Children’s writing at uni this semester and have to read nine books for it, all varying in length, age, and complexity. So far, I’ve read six of the nine in total. I borrowed them from the library a bit over a month ago, so they’re all due back very soon. Anyway, on with the favourites!

The first thing I have been loving this month is the reading I was talking about above. Of the six books, my favourites were The Book Thief by Markus Zusak, How I Live Now by Meg Rosoff, and Seven Little Australians by Ethel Turner. The Book Thief, in brief, is a story about a girl living in Nazi Germany who falls in love with reading and steals books to read them at home. Her foster family takes in a Jew, letting him live in their basement. Not to spoil the ending or anything, but I cried for a good five minutes after finishing it.

How I Live Now is a story about war as well, but it appears to be set in recent past or near future. A girl is sent from her home in New York to live with her cousins in England. The family gets broken apart by the army, sending them to live in separate places as the army are using their house as a kind of base. It is predominantly a story of the girl and one of her cousins fighting to get back to the rest of their family, surviving in the wilderness and hiding from The Enemy, which is never referred to as anything other than that. It didn’t make me cry, but I did enjoy reading it.

Seven Little Australians is a story published in 1894 about seven Australian children living with their father and 20-year-old step mother in rural New South Wales in the 1800’s. Their names, in ascending order of age, are the General (the baby), Baby (4), Bunty (6), Nell (10), Judy (13) Pip (14), and Meg (16). They get up to a lot of hijinks in the book, including interrupting their parents entertaining guests, stealing food from the pantry, and hiding in the barn. Not quite the same kind of things Australian kids do nowadays, but I can definitely see why this story is called timeless and has transcended generations of children all over the world.

I haven’t really had any beauty favourites this month, but I have discovered new music that I love. I purchased Katy Perry’s Witness album about a month ago but got so distracted by reading that I didn’t have time to listen to it. It’s quite different to her previous albums, a bit less ‘poppy’ I feel, but I like it. My favourite songs off it are Bon Appetit, Hey Hey Hey, and Swish Swish. There are other songs I like from it but I like to keep it to a top 3.

Another album I’ve purchased recently was Hey Violet’s From the Outside. My friends introduced me to it a little while ago through the song Hoodie, which I loved. It’s got kind of a synth-rock feel to it, but again it is quite poppy. If you couldn’t tell, pop music is my fave. My top 3 songs of the album are Hoodie, Fuqboi, and Break My Heart. In fact, I’m listening to Hoodie right now!

That’s all of my favourites for this month. I hope you enjoyed!

What are your favourite things from the past month? Do you like mine?

Love, Nicky x