Wow, it’s been a minute since I posted in here (I always seem to post when I’m done with books rather than when I’m actually reading them). Since my last post, my wife and I finished both the original Percy Jackson and The Hunger Games series and we finished The Lost Hero this morning! I also decided to read Clariel at the beginning of the month (which is Book 4 and a prequel to Sabriel by Garth Nix) and it’s reminded me why I love this world so much. While it isn’t a “return” to a book I’ve already read like many of my other books this year (it only features one character that was in the previous books), it is nice to return to one of, if not my absolute, favorite book series. My next reads will probably be Goldenhand (Book 5 of this series), The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes (a prequel to The Hunger Games that I’ve meant to read since it came out last year), and the rest of The Heroes of Olympus series. I still haven’t finished Voyage of the Dawn Treader, but maybe I’ll find time for that this month, too!
The two other books I read last month were Good Omens (finally, after dropping it during high school) and We Keep the Dead Close which is a True Crime book on the murder of a Harvard PhD student in the 60s. Both of them were really interesting, but I’m the happiest about finally reading Good Omens because it was a light of comedy and fun (despite it being about, you know, the end of the world) that I needed last month. I first tried reading it in my junior year of high school, but I had to stop reading it because of some serious existential dread™ I was facing at the time. The beginning of the book aggravated that, so I had to stop reading to preserve my mental health at the time. I also hadn’t read any of Gaiman’s or Pratchett’s work before reading this book which definitely helped on this read-through. I really enjoyed it and I definitely encourage people who haven’t read it yet to give it a try, especially if you like Neil Gaiman’s other works!