TEA & BOOKS Reading Challenge 2013 Finished

TEA & BOOKS Reading Challenge 2013 hosted by The Book Garden.

Here goes ...

You may pick both fiction and non fiction books!
Contrary to last year short story collections, anthologies or collected works in one volume are now allowed!
Re-reads will now also be ok (though preferably you should read one of those unread tomes that have been collecting dust on your shelves)!
Last year you had to read 700+ pages but I reduced this to 650+ for 2013 (and no, this is not further negotiable)!
And as a little incentive - books with more than 1.200 pages will count for two books (so theoretically you can read four such super-chunksters to reach the Sencha Connoisseur level)!
Last but not least - no large print editions of a book, please!

 

Are you ready? Go ahead and pick your level!

2 Books - Chamomile Lover
4 Books - Berry Tea Devotee
6 Books - Earl Grey Aficionado
8 or more Books - Sencha Connoisseur

I went for the level of Berry Tea Devotee: read 4 books and I completed this challenge the 11th of October. In my sign up post I thought I might be able to go a level up later but that has not been possible as I have only read 4 books that were long enough.

My list of books:

1. Wild Swans: Three Daughters of China by Jung Chang (660 pages)
2. The Well of Ascension by Brandon Sanderson (765 pages)
3. Ship of Magic by Robin Hobb (834pages)
4. The Witching Hour by Anne Rice (1058pages) 

HERE are all the posts for this challenge

The Witching Hour by Anne Rice

In this engrossing and hypnotic tale of witchcraft and the occult spanning four centuries, we meet a great dynasty of witches--a family given to poetry and incest, to murder and philosophy, a family that over the ages is haunted by a powerful, dangerous and seductive being. From Goodreads.

Anne Rice is one of my favourite authors and I have read some of her books but as it is over the last twenty years I can't always remember which I have read. This one I read about 6 years ago.
It is a very worthy reread. It is an epic family saga which doesn't end after this book. Be prepared for dark magic, it is no light humorous witchy read.

This book qualifies for:
Goodreads 2013 Reading Challenge
Serious Readers 2013
Tower Teams Read 2013-2
2013 Paranormal Reading Challenge (witch)
2013 Ebook Challenge
2013 Anne Rice Challenge
2013 Witches & Witchcraft Reading Challenge
TEA & BOOKS Reading Challenge 2013
2013 Mammoth Book Challenge
A Book A Day Keeps the Boredom at Bay Reading Challenge

Ship of Magic by Robin Hobb

Bingtown is a hub of exotic trade and home to a merchant nobility famed for its liveships —rare vessels carved from wizardwood, which ripens magically into sentient awareness. The fortunes of one of Bingtown's oldest families rest on the newly awakened liveship Vivacia.
For Althea Vestrit, the ship is her rightful legacy unjustly denied her—a legacy she will risk anything to reclaim. For Althea's young nephew Wintrow, wrenched from his religious studies and forced to serve aboard ship, Vivacia is a life sentence.
But the fate of the Vestrit family—and the ship—may ultimately lie in the hands of an outsider. The ruthless pirate Kennit seeks a way to seize power over all the denizens of the Pirate Isles...and the first step of his plan requires him to capture his own liveship and bend it to his will.... From Goodreads.




This was a really good book with a lot going on. We are following the liveship Vivacia and all that is happening on her, the girl Althea, the pirate Kinnit, the family Vestrit back in Bingtown and also a tangle of serpents.
This book is the first of a trilogy and I will definitely be reading the next two book at some point in the future and I will look into her other fantasy series.

This book qualifies for:
Goodreads 2013 Reading Challenge
Serious Readers 2013
Tower Teams Read 2013-2
2013 Ebook Challenge
NBRC Stuck in a Rut
TEA & BOOKS Reading Challenge 2013
2013 Mammoth Book Challenge

The Well of Ascension by Brandon Sanderson

The impossible has been accomplished. The Lord Ruler - the man who claimed to be God incarnate and brutally ruled the world for a thousand years - has been vanquished. But Kelsier, the hero who masterminded that triumph, is dead too, and now the awesome task of building a new world has been left to his young protégé, Vin, the former street urchin who is now the most powerful Mistborn in the land, and to the idealistic young nobleman she loves.
As Kelsier's protégé and slayer of the Lord Ruler she is now venerated by a budding new religion, a distinction that makes her intensely uncomfortable. Even more worrying, the mists have begun behaving strangely since the Lord Ruler died, and seem to harbor a strange vaporous entity that haunts her.
Stopping assassins may keep Vin's Mistborn skills sharp, but it's the least of her problems. Luthadel, the largest city of the former empire, doesn't run itself, and Vin and the other members of Kelsier's crew, who lead the revolution, must learn a whole new set of practical and political skills to help. It certainly won't get easier with three armies - one of them composed of ferocious giants - now vying to conquer the city, and no sign of the Lord Ruler's hidden cache of atium, the rarest and most powerful allomantic metal.
As the siege of Luthadel tightens, an ancient legend seems to offer a glimmer of hope. But even if it really exists, no one knows where to find the Well of Ascension or what manner of power it bestows. From Goodreads.

This is a brilliant second book in a series. There are still lots of things happening and surprises around every corner. Nothing is as it seems. I am looking forward to reading the last book in this trilogy. I know there are now more books in this series but the newer books take place 300 years later.

This book qualifies for:
Goodreads 2013 Reading Challenge
Tower Teams Read 2013
Serious Readers 2013
2013 Sequel Reading Challenge
2013 Ebook Challenge
TEA & BOOKS Reading Challenge 2013 (765 pages)
2013 Paranormal Reading Challenge (magic)
2013 Mammoth Book Challenge (765 pages)
Let Me Count the Ways Reading Challenge 2013 (765 pages)

Wild Swans: Three Daughters of China by Jung Chang

In Wild Swans Jung Chang recounts the evocative, unsettling, and insistently gripping story of how three generations of women in her family fared in the political maelstrom of China during the 20th century. Chang's grandmother was a warlord's concubine. Her gently raised mother struggled with hardships in the early days of Mao's revolution and rose, like her husband, to a prominent position in the Communist Party before being denounced during the Cultural Revolution. Chang herself marched, worked, and breathed for Mao until doubt crept in over the excesses of his policies and purges. Born just a few decades apart, their lives overlap with the end of the warlords' regime and overthrow of the Japanese occupation, violent struggles between the Kuomintang and the Communists to carve up China, and, most poignant for the author, the vicious cycle of purges orchestrated by Chairman Mao that discredited and crushed millions of people, including her parents. From Goodreads.


This is a hard book to read as it is quite depressing. Jung Chang is telling the story of  the life of her grandmother, her mother and herself from 1909 to 1977 in a ever changing China. It seems a lot of changes happened all the time and even under Mao's regime people could be privileged one day and  beaten, tortured and shunned the next. Both her grandmother and mother were very strong and courageous women and there were probably a lot like them. This is still the story from a somewhat privileged point of view and we get glimpses of how much worse life is like for the peasants and farmers.
A very personal and strong book.

This book qualifies for:
2013 A-Z Reading Challenge
2013 Ebook Challenge
2013 Women Challenge
TEA & BOOKS Reading Challenge 2013 (660 pages)
Goodreads 2013 Reading Challenge
Tower Teams Read 2013 
2013 Mammoth Book Challenge (660 pages)
2013 Literary Exploration Reading Challenge (Non Fiction)
Let Me Count the Ways Reading Challenge 2013 (660 pages)
Serious Readers 2013

TEA & BOOKS Reading Challenge 2013 Sign up

TEA & BOOKS Reading Challenge 2013 hosted by The Book Garden.

Here goes ...

You may pick both fiction and non fiction books!

Contrary to last year short story collections, anthologies or collected works in one volume are now allowed!

Re-reads will now also be ok (though preferably you should read one of those unread tomes that have been collecting dust on your shelves)!

Last year you had to read 700+ pages but I reduced this to 650+ for 2013 (and no, this is not further negotiable)!

And as a little incentive - books with more than 1.200 pages will count for two books (so theoretically you can read four such super-chunksters to reach the Sencha Connoisseur level)!

Last but not least - no large print editions of a book, please!

Are you ready? Go ahead and pick your level!

2 Books - Chamomile Lover
4 Books - Berry Tea Devotee
6 Books - Earl Grey Aficionado
8 or more Books - Sencha Connoisseur

This challenge is a bit tricky as the count of pages is very different depending on which format is read. Because of this I am going for a lower Level. I can always "upgrade" to a higher level later.

My goal will be 4 Books - Berry Tea Devotee.

Posts for this challenge will be HERE.

Lists of books:

1. Wild Swans: Three Daughters of China by Jung Chang (660 pages)
2. The Well of Ascension by Brandon Sanderson (765 pages)
3. Ship of Magic by Robin Hobb (834pages)
4. The Witching Hour by Anne Rice (1058pages)