Happy August! Today is my three year wedding anniversary! So that’s pretty neat. We’re gonna order steak or something for dinner, I think.
Anyways, I read five books this month – I didn’t pick up a manga all month which was weird. It’s been literal years since I’ve done that. Who knows why.
Books
That Time I Got Reincarnated as a Slime vol 1 by Fuze – This was a 10 in 2020 book, so progress, yay! This is the light novel the anime was based on and while I thought the anime, particularly the beginning, was decent, my feelings unfortunately didn’t transfer to this novel. I didn’t enjoy being in the main character’s head – he’s a bit of a skeeve and after getting more than fifty percent through the book he showed no signs of improvement. In fact he got worse, and the things he thought and did were written as if to be funny instead of a problem. So I dumped it. The anime, while having hints of this, didn’t really get into as much detail, which is why I was able to finish it. But this man, no thanks. DNF at 58%. – 1 star
Catching Fire by Suzanne Collins – This was a reread for me, which I’m doing in prep of picking up the sequel. I wrote a coffee time post about it, along with one for The Hunger Games if you’re interested. But overall, I enjoyed this book just as much as I did the first time I read it in 2011. 4.5 stars
Shaman’s Crossing by Robin Hobb – This is the first book in Hobb’s Soldier Son trilogy and I ended up really enjoying this. This series follows a young man, Nevare, born to be a soldier and living on the frontier of his country. The empire he lives in is trying to expand east, into lands inhabited by the Plainspeople, various groups of people with various shamanic-like magical abilities. Nevare himself is destined to be a soldier in this expansion and is sent to a military academy for training. This book tackles a lot of topics such as an over-bearing patriarchy, prejudice, sexism, fatphobia, spiritualism, and learning to admit to oneself when one is being an asshole. I really like the characterization in this book and the more that I think about it I think I want to write a full review for this. So, that’ll be to come, I guess. 4.25 stars
Inspection by Josh Malerman – This is probably my favorite read of the month, just beating out the Hobb book but a little, itty bitty bit. This book is by the same author that wrote Bird Box, which I read a couple years ago and loved. This one follows a young boy named J, who lives in a tower with 23 other boys, all named B through Y. The tower they live in is surrounded by pines, and none of them have ever left. None of them know what the outside world is like, and none of them have ever met a woman, let alone know that they exist. This book was really good. 4.5 stars
Pestilence by Laura Thalassa – This was a 10 in 2020 book, so progress, yay! This book is a romance and follows a woman named Sara after she tries to kill Pestilence, one of the four horsemen in the flesh who appeared on Earth to end the world. Obviously this book is apocalyptic, as there’s a plague sweeping the land (sound familiar) and has a 100% kill rate.
I had… a love hate relationship with this book. I liked the premise and some of the execution, but it kinda fell flat at the end and honestly made me kinda peeved. I’m tempted to do a spoilerly blabber on this one to get my points out, because it’s rare I read a book that gets a middle of the road rating and makes me so happy and mad at the same time. We’ll see we’ll see. 2.5 stars
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And that’s it! I really need to hop back into manga, I miss it! I made a big manga order for my coming bday (the 7th), which should ship soon-ish I hope, so I’m hoping to read most of not all of that order this coming month.
If you’ve read any of the above, lemme know! Happy reading!
This is my latest obsession. This series is fantastic. It follows two working adults, both rather nerdy, who decide to date each other, because they feel they’ll be able to understand each other’s obsessions better than people who aren’t as nerdy. It’s simple, it’s fluffy, it’s about adults instead of teenagers. I loved it.
I did not like this one. At all. I thought it was poorly written, the characters were awful, the plot was… okay. It was just all around not a good time for me. I wrote a 
Rereading this series is so much fun. This is the fourth book in Novik’s Temeraire series, and officially the point of no return: When I first read this series as a teenager, this is the last book I finished. I got part way through Victory of Eagles, but only about a hundred pages. So now that I’m listening to that one, I’m in all new content territory.
Anticipated release date: July 10th
Anticipated Release Date: October something-th
Anticipated Release Date: October 23rd
Anticipated Release Date: October 30th
I picked this book up while on honeymoon and was very excited for it: It’s Patrick Ness, man. I love his Chaos Walking trilogy – it was my favorite of his writings. And after reading this book, I’d have to say that Chaos Walking still holds that title. After that great trilogy and the wonderfulness of A Monster Calls, this book kinda fell flat for me. I mean, it’s not bad by any means, it’s pretty much exactly what I expected going into the book. I just didn’t like it because I hated all the characters. I’m not talking a passionate hate or anything, it’s just they were all annoyingly one-dimensional, I guess. I don’t know. This book didn’t do anything for me.
I finally read this, after pre-ordering it when it came out two years ago. I did so both because it’s on my 
This is definitely the weirdest book I read this month. Well, this year. 14 is one of those books you pick up knowing ahead of time that it’s supposed to be bizarre but then it still blows away your expectations with how incredibly odd it is. I really liked it! I wrote a 
Okay, I’m on this bandwagon now. I see why there’s so much hype about this series. It was really good! But, it wasn’t quite a five star read for me – that might change in the second book, we’ll see.
I finally did it, I finally read this book… and honestly I was very underwhelmed. I’m going to commit treason here and say the movies are far far superior to the books. I’m going to forgive the fact that there are zero female characters by falling back on the ‘it’s a dated book’ excuse… but yeesh, for all the talk I’ve heard about Tolkien’s detail and flowery writing, I didn’t see any of that, man. If anything, I feel like there wasn’t enough detail. Events went way too fast, there was a lot of hand-waving… it was really disappointing.
This one, unlike the previous book I just mentioned, was a pleasant surprise. I picked this up on a whim because I had been seeing it around and found myself rather enjoying it. Aside from the goofy naming convention (The Complete Collection vol 1, what?) this manga was a breath of fresh air! It was cute and fluffy and light-hearted… and kinda grim at the same time. It was a weird combination and I really dug it.
This one… was an interesting read. Some parts of I really really liked. Other parts I didn’t. I think my main biff with this story was the whole ten-minute explanation of all the magical realism elements at the very end. It was like ‘Wow wow wow all this neat stuff happened! I wonder how it was possible!” “Oh, it was totes this”. The End.
This book, this book killed me. I adored this book, mostly because it was a wonderful ending to a three-book series. Endings are make or break and this book made it so, so bad. It was wonderful!
Embuhleeliest 
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