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| Step up your game, Caryn! |
Since my work is changing spaces, I've been working from home, which forces me to get out and explore my community more! I wandered into a used bookstore that's literally across the street from my house! If you follow my personal Facebook or Instagram accounts you might have seen it. Guys!!!!!!!!!!
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Anyway, we're all going to promise each other to read more books in August, right? And I might write a post about how I get a lot of books for free and/or cheap. Aforementioned used bookstore sort of has something to do with it. Out of the 10 books I read last month, I paid for only 3 of them. No intellectual property law-breaking required!
5. Nine Perfect Strangers by Liane Moriarty: I waited FOREVER to get this audiobook from my library because a lot of people wanted to read it. It was very suspenseful! But it was ultimately about a bunch of rich, privileged people voluntarily subjecting themselves to weird stuff and suffering the consequences. Not that there’s anything wrong with that! I always feel like I pick up thrillers/mysteries and the conclusion ends up being more mundane than the plot builds it up to be. “Nine Perfect Strangers” ends for the better, but boy does it get weird!
4. There There by Tommy Orange: This book was about 12 Native Americans, spanning from about the 1970s until now, and everything they suffer because of history! It was miserable in a realistic sense – and you know that there are real people in America suffering the exact same things. I'm not going to spoil anything major from this, but I do ask that you read this book and share in my misery! It's an important work, I think.
3. The Unbeatable Squirrel Girl, Vol. 1: Squirrel Power by Ryan North and Erica Henderson: I was utterly charmed by this uplifting tale of a superhero with the power of squirrels. In Vol. 1, she defeats Galactus by showing him how delicious and filling nuts are so he doesn’t feel the need to eat worlds. The comic has a confident and empowering tone.
2. American Gods by Neil Gaiman: I wanted to read more Neil Gaiman after I read “The Sandman” back in May. This book follows a guy named Shadow who starts working for a guy named Wednesday after getting out of prison. Amid all of the fantastical happenings that are vital for any Gaiman reading experience, the thing that stuck out to me most about this book was the food. People are constantly eating, and the food, like the gods, is a result of immigrants coming to America with beliefs in their heart and recipes in their head. I was surprised to find no one has written an American Gods cookbook yet! Early in the book, Gaiman describes Shadow’s dead wife Laura’s chili recipe, which calls for things like carrots, dill, beer, wine and a bunch of other stuff that you usually don’t find in chili! I really need the recipe for not just the chili, but the Wisconsin pasties from Mabel’s, the chocolate cream pie that Sam Black Crow eats in a diner the first time she meets Shadow, and the borscht and leathery pot roast from Zorya Vechernayaya. I got the sense that Gaiman was just as fascinated with American food as he was with the idea that old gods live in America because immigrants have brought them here.
1. The Unwritten by Mike Carey and Peter Gross: Ok, I tried to explain this graphic novel to a few people and it didn’t end so well. It’s a story about stories, and the stories are a source of world-altering power. And it’s a story about a man who can shape and control the power of stories using a doorknob and… that was the end of the second volume. There are literary allusions galore, so if you’re a book nerd, but not really into graphic novels, read THIS. I really want to read more of it to see what happens!
A/some book(s) I forgot about last month!
Invincible Iron Man: Ironheart, Vol. 1: Riri Williams and Vol. 2: Choices by Brian Michael Bendis: This was recommended to me by Alex, a fellow volunteer at the Humane Society. I knew nothing about Iron Man before I saw the movies, and then I saw the movies and hated him! This iteration of Iron Man is about a young girl who takes up the mantle of Iron Man after Tony Stark dies. Her name is Riri Williams, and she’s so smart her parents need to force her to interact with other children so she doesn’t get lost in her science work and mechanical tinkering and turn into a psychopath! After she puts on the Iron Man suit, she calls herself Ironheart. This is a fresh take on a confident supergenius becoming a superhero. It was one of the best books I read in June, but Goodreads didn’t put it in my “Read in 2019” queue, so I completely forgot about it when it came time to write my June blog post.
Unranked
I picked up plenty of sponsored review books from City Book Review this month. I can’t talk about these because my opinions on them need to be approved by the author first. The only thing I can say so far is that I read them.
Between Wild and Ruin by Jennifer G. Edelson
Moon Over Madness Essential For Love by VW Sheperd
Echoes: Incarnation by Sammie Dhillon
