Books I’m Taking to University with Me

Hey guys!

I’m currently packing to go back up to University. I’m starting my third year of an English Literature and Creative Writing degree and I’m very excited. I have also gotten myself my own flat for the first time! But with the moving from my home town back up to my Uni city comes with an issue…I can’t take my bookcase. AHHHH! I know…the horror. I cry.
BUT! I thought I would try to take a positive look on it and make a blog post about which ones I have chosen to take with me so at least I am getting something about leaving so many of my babies behind.

Please first let’s just bask in the joy that is my physical book collection…because I adore it and it’s beautiful and stunning and I’ve not even left yet and I miss it!

I have two categories today – books I have to take for my course (I’ve not gotten most of them yet, I only have a few which I just happened to already own by chance). And then books I want to take for my own enjoyment. I also have very limited space in my car to move all of this so I have had to be good. Enough rambling, I’ll get on with it!

Books For My Course

I’m not really going to talk about these much because it’s obvious why I’m taking them…because I have to.

The Complete Maus by Art Spiegelman. (My Review)
Combined for the first time here are Maus I: A Survivor’s Tale and Maus II – the complete story of Vladek Spiegelman and his wife, living and surviving in Hitler’s Europe. By addressing the horror of the Holocaust through cartoons, the author captures the everyday reality of fear and is able to explore the guilt, relief and extraordinary sensation of survival – and how the children of survivors are in their own way affected by the trials of their parents. A contemporary classic of immeasurable significance.

Renaissance Woman Poets by Isabella Whitney, Mary Sidney and Aemilia Lanyer
Social convention may have prevented Renaissance women writers from openly taking part in the political and religious debates of their day, but they found varied and innovative ways to intervene. Collecting the work of three great poets-Isabella Whitney, Mary Sidney, and Aemilia Lanyer-this volume repositions women writers of the Renaissance by presenting their poems in the context of their history and culture. Whitney’s poems offer the only glimpse into her life, express a concern for women’s lack of social and economic power, and powerfully evoke sixteenth-century London. Sidney produced potent translations of Petrarch’s works and the Psalms, as well as original verse. Lanyer wrote poems that advocate and praise female virtue and Christian piety, but reflect a desire for an idealized, classless world. The strong and original voices of these three women-each from different social, cultural, and historical strata-demonstrate the emergence of a new female identity during the Renaissance and broaden the common notions of English Literature’s golden age.

The Norton Shakespeare by Stephen Greenblatt
The attractive print and digital bundle offers students a great reading experience at an affordable price in two ways a hardcover volume for their dorm shelf and lifetime library, and a digital edition ideal for in-class use. Students can access the ebook from their computer, tablet, or smartphone via the registration code included in the print volume at no additional charge. As one instructor summed it up, It s a long overdue step forward in the way Shakespeare is taught

Books For My Enjoyment

Theatrical by Maggie Harcourt. I’m taking this because it’s on my TBR and I really want to get to it this month. This is the only YA romance I am taking so it better be good!

Hope dreams of working backstage in a theatre, and she’s determined to make it without the help of her famous costume designer mum. So when she lands an internship on a major production, she tells no one. But with a stroppy Hollywood star and his hot young understudy upstaging Hope’s focus, she’s soon struggling to keep her cool… and her secret.

For Once In My Life by Mariana Kavanagh. This is actually a reread. I bought it in an airport on my way to France for a holiday in 2015. I read it but it dealt with a lot of relationship things that 14 year old me wasn’t really interested in or didn’t understand. I definitely only picked it up for the stunning cover. But now, this kind of book is far more my speed and I want to pick it up again and see if it’s better than I remember.

Tess and George are soul mates. They’ve just never met each other. They both live in London. They went to the same university. But throughout their twenties, despite their shared friends’ best efforts, they never come face to face. And now they’re stuck with partners who don’t understand them and jobs that make them unhappy, always settling for second best. Finally they meet at a friend’s thirtieth birthday party. Can they disentangle themselves from their former lives and grab hold of their one chance to be together? Or is it too late? For Once in My Life is a love story that teeters on the edge of disaster. It’s about whether it’s better to compromise, or to wait for your soul mate.

The Flat Share by Beth O’Leary. I have been 10 chapters into this book for over a year. Every time I go to pick it up again something else cuts in front of it so if it’s one of my only options hopefully I’ll grab it.

Tiffy and Leon share a flat
Tiffy and Leon share a bed
Tiffy and Leon have never met…
Tiffy Moore needs a cheap flat, and fast. Leon Twomey works nights and needs cash. Their friends think they’re crazy, but it’s the perfect solution: Leon occupies the one-bed flat while Tiffy’s at work in the day, and she has the run of the place the rest of the time. But with obsessive ex-boyfriends, demanding clients at work, wrongly imprisoned brothers and, of course, the fact that they still haven’t met yet, they’re about to discover that if you want the perfect home you need to throw the rulebook out the window…

Eve of Man by Giovanna and Tom Fletcher. When I was picking books to take I was trying to cover a lot of bases and genres and I didn’t have anything like this, plus this has a romance in it so I thought it would be a good one to take. Also I’ve just heard such amazing things I really want to give it a chance when it has less books to win out over.

AGAINST ALL ODDS, SHE SURVIVED.
THE FIRST GIRL BORN IN FIFTY YEARS.
THEY CALLED HER EVE . . .
All her life Eve has been kept away from the opposite sex. Kept from the truth of her past. But at sixteen it’s time for Eve to face her destiny. Three potential males have been selected for her. The future of humanity is in her hands. She’s always accepted her fate. Until she meets Bram. Eve wants control over her life. She wants freedom. But how do you choose between love and the future of the human race?

One of Us is Lying by Karen M. McManus. My friends have been saying I need to read this for ages now, and again with trying to cover lots of genre bases I thought it would be good to add this to the pile.

The Breakfast Club meets Pretty Little Liars, One of Us Is Lying is the story of what happens when five strangers walk into detention and only four walk out alive. Everyone is a suspect, and everyone has something to hide.
Pay close attention and you might solve this.
On Monday afternoon, five students at Bayview High walk into detention.
Bronwyn, the brain, is Yale-bound and never breaks a rule.
Addy, the beauty, is the picture-perfect homecoming princess.
Nate, the criminal, is already on probation for dealing.
Cooper, the athlete, is the all-star baseball pitcher.
AndSimon, the outcast, is the creator of Bayview High’s notorious gossip app.
Only, Simon never makes it out of that classroom. Before the end of detention, Simon’s dead. And according to investigators, his death wasn’t an accident. On Monday, he died. But on Tuesday, he’d planned to post juicy reveals about all four of his high-profile classmates, which makes all four of them suspects in his murder. Or are they the perfect patsies for a killer who’s still on the loose?
Everyone has secrets, right? What really matters is how far you would go to protect them.

Finding Sky by Joss Stirling. If you know my blog then you know I adore the Struck Series by Joss Stirling. I recommend it to everyone! And I have wanted to pick up one of her other series so hence why it’s on this list.

You have half our gifts, I have the other . . . When English girl Sky, catches a glimpse of bad boy Zed in her new American high school, she can’t get him out of her head. He talks to her with his thoughts. He reads her mind. He is the boy she will love for ever. Dark shadows stalk her past but a new evil threatens her future. Sky must face the dark even if it means losing her heart.

Aurora Rising by Amie Kaufman and Jay Kristoff. This one is on the list because I had a sudden craving for some Sci-Fi when I was packing despite the fact it’s not a genre I typically gravitate towards.

The year is 2380, and the graduating cadets of Aurora Academy are being assigned their first missions. Star pupil Tyler Jones is ready to recruit the squad of his dreams, but his own boneheaded heroism sees him stuck with the dregs nobody else in the Academy would touch…
A cocky diplomat with a black belt in sarcasm
A sociopath scientist with a fondness for shooting her bunkmates
A smart-ass techwiz with the galaxy’s biggest chip on his shoulder
An alien warrior with anger management issues
A tomboy pilot who’s totally not into him, in case you were wondering
And Ty’s squad isn’t even his biggest problem—that’d be Aurora Jie-Lin O’Malley, the girl he’s just rescued from interdimensional space. Trapped in cryo-sleep for two centuries, Auri is a girl out of time and out of her depth. But she could be the catalyst that starts a war millions of years in the making, and Tyler’s squad of losers, discipline-cases and misfits might just be the last hope for the entire galaxy.
They’re not the heroes we deserve. They’re just the ones we could find. Nobody panic.

So that’s all the books I am taking to Uni. Luckily I have my Kindle app on my phone so I will at least have a little more option if none of them are calling to me, and once I finish one I will swap it out with one of my others from home. I hope you enjoyed this and I will see you again tomorrow ❤

Are you heading off to University/College soon?
Have you read any of these books and do you recommend them?
What 6 books would you pick to take if you had to?