club The Great Reading Thread of 2023

[MaeradCase]

On 7/16/2023 at 12:59 PM, KeysMcGee said:

How did I not realize this was a thing until just now?! Shows how much I've been paying attention these days. I've actually been doing my own reading challenge over the past few months and hadn't realized until just recently that this thread was here.

 

Anywho...I intend to invoke Rule Zero and join up now. 

 

So...my ongoing reading challenge has been to read one biography of every US president with one caveat: I do not go in chronological order. Also, thus far, all of them have been audio books (more likely to get them read that way).

 

Thus far, here's what I've knocked out (in order from when I started):

1. Truman by David McCullough.

2. John Adams by David McCullough.

3. Andrew Jackson by H.W. Brands.

4. Being Nixon by Evan Thomas.

5. Man of Iron (Grover Cleveland) by Troy Senik.

 

And I just started book #6 Thomas Jefferson: The Art of Power by Jon Meacham a few days ago.

 

1 hour ago, KeysMcGee said:

 

At first, I wasn't sure, but apparently there are: https://bestpresidentialbios.com/curriculum/

 

Though this list leaves Trump and Biden off the list (probably because it's a little old), but it shouldn't be that difficult to find bios for those two.

I was going to say that I was enjoying Hamilton by Ron Chernow so much that I would bet money his book on George Washington would be worth reading, and I double-checked your reference list, and it recommends it, too. Awesome!

 

(Hamilton is actually the first biography I've ever read, and I can see how his life story as told by Chernow inspired Lin Manuel Miranda so much)

[MaeradCase]

On 1/19/2023 at 8:10 AM, Artemis Prime said:

How is the 2023 reading going for everyone? I finished Thistlefoot, which is a Baba Yaga story I got for Christmas. It was good, but heavier than I expected

I think that's managed to stay in my wish list. I need to remember to read it!

On 1/19/2023 at 8:10 AM, Artemis Prime said:

I meant to start Naomi Novik's The Last Graduate, which I also got for Christmas, but somehow I ended up reading Spinning Silver for about the twenty seventh time (actually, I know exactly how that happened, and it's all @MaeradCase's fault.)

You and Ever got me reading the Scholomance trilogy, so the tables turn both ways. ?

[KeysMcGee]

10 minutes ago, MaeradCase said:

I was going to say that I was enjoying Hamilton by Ron Chernow so much that I would bet money his book on George Washington would be worth reading,

 

That's so funny because both John Adams by McCullough and Thomas Jefferson: Art of Power by Jon Meacham both portray Hamilton as an...ahem...unpleasant person. 

 

'Course, Burr seems to have been even worse. Much more sinister than how he was portrayed in the musical. In the musical, he's all "Ooh look at me, I'm a tortured soul because I shot the lead" whereas in history, he's the dude that, immediately after blasting Hamilton, heads out west to collude with Britain and Spain to basically commit treason by carving out the west right from under the US.

 

[Though he got off on that court case and rumor has it Burr was framed I guess?]

[MaeradCase]

50 minutes ago, KeysMcGee said:

 

That's so funny because both John Adams by McCullough and Thomas Jefferson: Art of Power by Jon Meacham both portray Hamilton as an...ahem...unpleasant person. 

I only know the little from the biography (I think I got about halfway through before getting distracted by other books) and the play, so I'm not versed enough to offer any countering arguments. I'm just gonna say that neither John Adams nor Thomas Jefferson came across as having love for the over-achieving young man who probably rubbed them very much the wrong way, so it makes sense that from their perspective his worse qualities would get the most recognition. ?

 

50 minutes ago, KeysMcGee said:

'Course, Burr seems to have been even worse. Much more sinister than how he was portrayed in the musical. In the musical, he's all "Ooh look at me, I'm a tortured soul because I shot the lead" whereas in history, he's the dude that, immediately after blasting Hamilton, heads out west to collude with Britain and Spain to basically commit treason by carving out the west right from under the US.

 

[Though he got off on that court case and rumor has it Burr was framed I guess?]

As for Burr's part in the play, I believe that was much due to Miranda wanting to emphasize how much backstory the two of them have in common, to compare and contrast their goals, agendas, actions, and such against each other.

[KeysMcGee]

52 minutes ago, MaeradCase said:

I'm just gonna say that neither John Adams nor Thomas Jefferson came across as having love for the over-achieving young man who probably rubbed them very much the wrong way, so it makes sense that from their perspective his worse qualities would get the most recognition.

That's part of the fun of doing this biography reading challenge is seeing things from different perspectives and coming away realizing that all of them were messed up in a way. Adams gets portrayed as a hothead, and Jefferson to me seems kind of manipulative. 

 

I really enjoyed Burr's character in the play. Hell, the whole play is a lot of fun to watch. The play doesn't give me the chance to follow his character after Hamilton dies, but history does. I came across his story when I did Andrew Jackson. He kind of gets portrayed as a sort of Professor Moriarty in that book where you see him accused manipulating the American political system around when he shot Hamilton, and the next thing that happens is he gets implicated in a plot to break the western territories away from the US and have them join Britain, but some other guy takes the fall. And Andrew Jackson is convinced it's Burr who did it, and so is Jefferson (who is president at the time), but John Marshall (big deal supreme court justice) finds him not guilty or something.

 

Burr is cool because there's a whole 'nother story to that dude and Mr. Miranda, if you are reading this, I'm telling you that on the off chance you want to start Hamilton 2: Rise of Burr, I would be happy to work for you, but I charge by the hour.

[sarakingdom]

I have been informed that I was remiss in not trying to hype books here for all of you to read. Allow me to correct that.

 

The Rivers of London series by Ben Aaronovitch is urban fantasy and police procedural, set between classic British folklore and the modern, bustling international hub of urban London, driven by immigrants and chancers and musicians and dodgy deals.

 

The lead character is Peter Grant, a fresh police constable who grew up poor and a sci-fi geek with an African immigrant mother and a washed-up Cockney jazz musician father. While working crowd control on a murder, he stumbles over a witness who is slightly, um, a ghost, and gets apprenticed to Detective Chief Inspector Thomas Nightingale, the last official wizard in Britain and owner of a both a fancy vintage Jaguar and some mysterious war trauma. Together, they fight crime. And accidentally acquire a small yappy dog. (It was evidence.)

 

Also, Peter tries to shag a river. A minor tributary of the Thames, specifically. Spoiler: he is eventually successful. Oh yeah, there are lots of river gods.

 

Then there's Nightingale's scary supernatural housekeeper, Molly; Dr Abdul Haqq Walid, a Scottish Muslim convert and gastroenterologist who does cryptopathology for fun; Leslie May, Peter's best friend, fellow constable, and a much better cop than him; DCI Seawoll, who runs the murder team and is not a fan of the "weird bollocks"; Inspector Stephanopoulos, a hardened city cop who eats snotty constables alive and is rumored to raise chickens on a farm with her wife; Sahra Guleed, a former Somali refugee who works for Seawoll and is a part-time Muslim ninja; Professor Harold Postmartin, Oxford librarian and archivist for Nightingale's wizard order; Agent Reynolds from the FBI, who is probably too straight-laced for all this shit, but stumbles over it anyway; Abigail, Peter's teenaged cousin; and, like a supporting cast of thousands. (Maxim, a former Russian gangster turned river acolyte? Talking foxes? An amateur jazz band that Peter's parents adopt? Look, London is a big city.)

 

Along the way, they encounter revenant spirits, vampires (both the regular sort and jazz vampires), mysterious things in the subway, Doctor Who jokes, a man without a face, some fairies and unicorns (uh... not as nice as it sounds), a nasty little strip club that Mengele would love, a few more magic users than the "last official wizard in Britain" was previously aware of, Monty Python jokes, some wild conspiracies, magical buildings, Not Elon Musk, some deadly pale women who look really familiar, Tolkien jokes, a few more magic users the so-called last wizard in Britain really should have noticed it's not like he didn't have the time, tons of African food. Plus there is something nasty stored in the basement.

 

 

I consider the series a bit of a slow burn. The individual books are a lot of fun, but the richness of the world-building and characters (and a lot of the warmth and found family aspects) really comes in aggregate, as the books build. This is partly because they're all told from Peter's point of view, so his voice is super strong, and everything else filters through in smaller doses. But it's also just kind of quiet about a lot of what it's doing. (There's a fair amount done in subtext. Like large chunks of certain books where Peter is under some external influence, and it's largely up to the reader to realize he's become an unreliable narrator.) I also think that the first book, while quite good, is not quite the series moving at full steam, so if the first book is good but not quite there for you, it's likely you'd find later books a smoother read.

 

The representation in the books is well done. I won't go on about it, but if you're female, ethnic minority, LGBT, an immigrant, lower income, etc., you're in safe hands here. Safer than most - they even avoid the well-meaning token character traps. Even characters that are not especially likeable are handled with a lot of integrity and some nuance.

 

Beyond the books, there are four or five very good novellas, about six graphic novels (the one I've read was very good, though the art style doesn't match my visual imagination), one collection of somewhat meh short stories (I love Ben Aaronovitch, but I think the short story is a new medium for him and IMO it shows), and audiobooks of all the books and novellas. The audiobooks are fantastic. I'm really picky about audiobooks, and this reader is easily in my top two. And I only have two in the top. IMO, these books are boosted by bringing out the regional and class accents, because part of the story is the huge cultural melting pot of urban London, and the characterization work in the audiobooks is pretty sharp. Really, really well done.

 

 

Also, not to be selfish about it, but I'm getting premiums from the central office for the number of new readers I recruit, and I've already won the toaster for three new ones, and I'm nearly at the tea strainer for five. I'm starting to look at the upper tier of prizes, and I've got my eye on a haunted biscuit tin shaped like a London pillar postbox. So if you're looking for a new series to read, my kitchen thanks you.

[sarakingdom]

18 hours ago, MaeradCase said:

I only know the little from the biography (I think I got about halfway through before getting distracted by other books) and the play, so I'm not versed enough to offer any countering arguments. I'm just gonna say that neither John Adams nor Thomas Jefferson came across as having love for the over-achieving young man who probably rubbed them very much the wrong way, so it makes sense that from their perspective his worse qualities would get the most recognition. ?

 

Even the Hamilton musical didn't really whitewash Hamilton's abrasive qualities. He was a bit self-centered, cheated on his wife, was more than a little arrogant, impulsive, and pretty ambitious, cultivated a lot of enemies and rivalries, wasn't above a bit of cruelty to make a point. He was an annoying little shit at the best of times, it's his whole story. The interesting thing was pulling a sympathetic viewpoint out of that and viewing him as an overall admirable figure despite that, and recognizing that his good qualities were not always separate from his bad qualities.

 

And a number of those qualities he likely shared with people like Adams and Jefferson, so they likely would clash. The thing about doing what they did is that it's not really the territory where you find nice men, or particularly humble men, on the whole. Nice men don't stage military revolutions. (Maybe Franklin excepted. Nice, anyway. Definitely not humble.) If you're lucky, you find a few genuinely and even primarily good men. But anyone willing to go to those lengths and take those risks has something divisive and stubbornly resistant to compromise in their character. It's how you get to be in the position where armed conflict is the only way to resolve your objections. That divisive thing is not always a good thing, it is going to draw the hotheads and the ambitious and the hardliners and nature's spymasters. The fairy tale is that the thing is always "noble principle and vision", but I can't tell you how fleeting noble principle and vision is, even among the people who have it. (And probably most of them had it. But it's not really the thing that gets you into that mess, and it's not really the thing that gets you out. It's more the map you check your route on.) That's one of the things the Hamilton musical calls out nicely; very few people involved were measured, thoughtful, calm people. The whole affair attracted certain types of people, who met under conditions likely to spur them on.

 

And it's also clear that there were major political factions clashing with each other over various issues, with Adams and Jefferson on one side and Hamilton on another. It's hard to stay sympathetic to the good qualities of someone you're in daily conflict with, particularly when the stakes are treason-or-legacy high and emotions heightened. So saying that someone found someone else truly unpleasant, well, quite likely true enough as it goes, but mostly something about both pots and kettles being black, and so on.

 

Every one of these dudes is relatively easy to admire in at least some part, from a distance of 200 years, some internal monolog from primary sources, and a lot of hindsight about what they got done. No guarantee we'd like any of them across the dinner table (and even some of the charming ones, we'd probably want arrested for some of their shittier bad habits today), and highly likely we'd dislike all of them across a negotiating table. They might be genial dinner companions, but they were not laid back about politics, any of them**. They all publicly signed their own death warrants in the 1770s, they were all playing to win against high stakes in that arena. At best, they were that philosophy dude in college who would not shut the fuck up about his pet peeve on the rights of man in any discussion that came up, and would not let it rest. Imagine thirty of that dude in a room.

 

 

**I mean, maybe except for the guy in the 1776 musical who always abstains courteously. But on the whole.

[MaeradCase]

2 hours ago, sarakingdom said:

 

Even the Hamilton musical didn't really whitewash Hamilton's abrasive qualities. He was a bit self-centered, cheated on his wife, was more than a little arrogant, impulsive, and pretty ambitious, cultivated a lot of enemies and rivalries, wasn't above a bit of cruelty to make a point. He was an annoying little shit at the best of times, it's his whole story. The interesting thing was pulling a sympathetic viewpoint out of that and viewing him as an overall admirable figure despite that, and recognizing that his good qualities were not always separate from his bad qualities.

100% couldn't put it any better! ?

 

2 hours ago, sarakingdom said:

Imagine thirty of that dude in a room.

???

[juliebarkley]

12 hours ago, sarakingdom said:

Also, not to be selfish about it, but I'm getting premiums from the central office for the number of new readers I recruit, and I've already won the toaster for three new ones, and I'm nearly at the tea strainer for five. I'm starting to look at the upper tier of prizes, and I've got my eye on a haunted biscuit tin shaped like a London pillar postbox. So if you're looking for a new series to read, my kitchen thanks you.

Sigh. This sounds very much like the kind of thing I would like, so now I have to order it in. But it may be while until it actually gets read. Does acquiring a copy win you a tick towards your tea strainer, or does it not count until the reading begins?

[juliebarkley]

Ran across the book Killer Underwear Invasion!: How to Spot Fake News, Disinformation & Conspiracy Theories today. This may be the best, and certainly most entertaining, treatment of this topic I have ever read. (Yes, it is for children. Yes, adults should read it too.)

 

Seriously, if you have children (and even if you don't), and you haven't read anything by Elise Gravel, do. Literally anything. She writes consistently wonderful stuff.

[sarakingdom]

1 hour ago, juliebarkley said:

Sigh. This sounds very much like the kind of thing I would like, so now I have to order it in. But it may be while until it actually gets read. Does acquiring a copy win you a tick towards your tea strainer, or does it not count until the reading begins?

 

The latter, unfortunately. They're wise to that trick. They don't send out prizes till you've hit page 50. Which I guess is fair enough; it's a very nice tea strainer, with tentacles.

[Everstorm]

On 7/29/2023 at 12:57 PM, sarakingdom said:

Also, not to be selfish about it, but I'm getting premiums from the central office for the number of new readers I recruit, and I've already won the toaster for three new ones, and I'm nearly at the tea strainer for five. I'm starting to look at the upper tier of prizes, and I've got my eye on a haunted biscuit tin shaped like a London pillar postbox. So if you're looking for a new series to read, my kitchen thanks you.

Do you get any credit if I continue on to book two after reading the first?  I'm almost done....

[KeysMcGee]

On 7/29/2023 at 3:04 PM, sarakingdom said:

Maybe Franklin excepted. Nice, anyway. Definitely not humble.

I loved how John Adams by Truman basically portrayed him as the Gilderoy Lockhart of the founding fathers.

"Don't you know who I am? I'm Ben Franklin!"

"Yes, but you slept through the last continental congress."

[sarakingdom]

8 hours ago, Everstorm said:

Do you get any credit if I continue on to book two after reading the first?  I'm almost done....

 

I'm gonna say... yes? But I'm  mostly saying it to trick you into reading the next book, because I suspect I only get the credit for totally new readers.

 

(Except for the golden bookmark. To win that, I need three new readers who read the entire series. Sort of a long term goal. Would be nice, but I don't really need a bookmark as bad as a haunted biscuit tin. I have have app for that.)

[Artemis Prime]

On 7/28/2023 at 6:39 PM, MaeradCase said:

You and Ever got me reading the Scholomance trilogy

 

Just finished Tress of the Emerald Sea. Spoilering because Sanderson called it a spoiler, but I don't really agree which is actually my question:

Spoiler

So he was partially inspired by The Princess Bride, right?  I knew that going in and so kind of saw the parallels but didn't really think it was overly overt about it. And I was surprised in the author's note at the beginning when he said there was an inspiration for the story that he wasn't going to share until the end because it was too much of a spoiler to know that going in. I knew it, and I don't think it spoiled anything. Although it did affect my sister's reading of it because she kept thinking Huck was an R.O.U.S. and wondering how he kept hiding so easily. So thoughts? Did you know or not know going in and do you think it affected your reading experience at all?

 

Reading Jurassic Park now. It started out grimmer than I was prepared for, but I'm getting into it now. So far, most impressed with how faithful the movie has been.

[Elastigirl]

10 minutes ago, Artemis Prime said:

Just finished Tress of the Emerald Sea. Spoilering because Sanderson called it a spoiler, but I don't really agree which is actually my question:

Spoiler

I read it before. I was thinking he meant more in style (adventure, pirates, true love, rescue) than looking for actual one to one comparisons  between the two.

 

[Artemis Prime]

2 minutes ago, Elastigirl said:

  Hide contents

I read it before. I was thinking he meant more in style (adventure, pirates, true love, rescue) than looking for actual one to one comparisons  between the two.

 

Yes, I agree it's more heavily influenced in style than substance, although it does supply the initial "what if" that leads to the premise of the book. But that's kind of my point. He says he can't tell you what the inspiration was because that would be too much of a spoiler, and I just don't see how it spoils anything. If anything, it helps set expectations which is always a boost to reader engagement.

[MaeradCase]

4 hours ago, Artemis Prime said:

???

4 hours ago, Artemis Prime said:

Just finished Tress of the Emerald Sea. Spoilering because Sanderson called it a spoiler, but I don't really agree which is actually my question:

  Hide contents

So he was partially inspired by The Princess Bride, right?  I knew that going in and so kind of saw the parallels but didn't really think it was overly overt about it. And I was surprised in the author's note at the beginning when he said there was an inspiration for the story that he wasn't going to share until the end because it was too much of a spoiler to know that going in. I knew it, and I don't think it spoiled anything. Although it did affect my sister's reading of it because she kept thinking Huck was an R.O.U.S. and wondering how he kept hiding so easily. So thoughts? Did you know or not know going in and do you think it affected your reading experience at all?

I mean... In a way there was a bit of Dread Pirate Robert's backstory going on... As well as Buttercup if she had the nerve to go pursue her true love. I reread the first half after finishing the book to pick up all the little clues. ???

I still haven't finished The Frugal Wizard's Handbook to Surviving Medieval England, though I am enjoying it when I sit down with it. ?

 

4 hours ago, Artemis Prime said:

Reading Jurassic Park now. It started out grimmer than I was prepared for, but I'm getting into it now. So far, most impressed with how faithful the movie has been.

Oh man, that was a fun read! ??? I can only imagine how much even more unexpected and fascinating it was before the movies ingrained the images in my mind... But I loved Jurassic Park so much I tried to read Andromeda Strain, and he lost me. ? Didn't have the same sticking power.

[KeysMcGee]

Oh, speaking of finishing books, I forgot to mention that I finished my Thomas Jefferson book last weekend and have now jumped ahead a hundred years or so to Lyndon Johnson. When I read the Richard Nixon book, there was a lot said about how Johnson's use of government resources to monitor his fellow candidates influenced Nixon's behavior, so it'll be neat to see this same narrative from his perspective. Plus, the first book (I chose the Path to Power trilogy by Robert Caro since that got the highest ratings) picks up with his ancestor's settlement in the Texas hill country, which touches on Sam Houston's narrative that I heard about in the Andrew Jackson book. 

[Everstorm]

On 7/1/2023 at 9:33 AM, ninestoried said:

Has anyone read "Fourth Wing" by Rebeca Yarros? I am 3/4 through the audiobook and I am OBSESSED. 

I just got my copy yesterday.   I'm not going to get any sleep this week it's soooo good.

[Scaly Freak]

I feel safe in assuming that someone here is behind this... but who...?

 

[Gemma]

On 7/29/2023 at 12:57 PM, sarakingdom said:

I have been informed that I was remiss in not trying to hype books here for all of you to read. Allow me to correct that.

 

The Rivers of London series by Ben Aaronovitch is urban fantasy and police procedural, set between classic British folklore and the modern, bustling international hub of urban London, driven by immigrants and chancers and musicians and dodgy deals.

-

-

I consider the series a bit of a slow burn. The individual books are a lot of fun, but the richness of the world-building and characters (and a lot of the warmth and found family aspects) really comes in aggregate, as the books build. This is partly because they're all told from Peter's point of view, so his voice is super strong, and everything else filters through in smaller doses. But it's also just kind of quiet about a lot of what it's doing. (There's a fair amount done in subtext. Like large chunks of certain books where Peter is under some external influence, and it's largely up to the reader to realize he's become an unreliable narrator.) I also think that the first book, while quite good, is not quite the series moving at full steam, so if the first book is good but not quite there for you, it's likely you'd find later books a smoother read.

-

-

Also, not to be selfish about it, but I'm getting premiums from the central office for the number of new readers I recruit, and I've already won the toaster for three new ones, and I'm nearly at the tea strainer for five. I'm starting to look at the upper tier of prizes, and I've got my eye on a haunted biscuit tin shaped like a London pillar postbox. So if you're looking for a new series to read, my kitchen thanks you.

 

In the interest of Sara's acquisition of haunted biscuit tins (a cause I fully support!), I just finished the first book and was happy to find that Hoopla has Moon Over Soho available for me to dive into starting tomorrow. Particiularly if you thought the first book was not the best of the lot, I can't wait to meet the others. I quite loved it. Got the audio version and 100% concur with your assessment, the reader is top notch. 

 

***

 

In other bookish news, I've just placed a library hold for Glass Town: The Imaginary World of the Brontës by Isabel Greenburg. It's a graphic novel based on the juvenalia of the Brontë kids in the imaginary world that they made up for themselves.

[sarakingdom]

1 hour ago, Gemma said:

In the interest of Sara's acquisition of haunted biscuit tins (a cause I fully support!), I just finished the first book and was happy to find that Hoopla has Moon Over Soho available for me to dive into starting tomorrow.

 

Woo-hoo! I think now I have to enchant a biscuit tin.

 

1 hour ago, Gemma said:

Particiularly if you thought the first book was not the best of the lot, I can't wait to meet the others. I quite loved it.

 

Yay! It was a very good book, I thought, but it all gets richer and more interesting the deeper you go, somehow. The first book sort of... felt smaller, more tightly packaged. Not bad. But smaller. It's sort of first episode/season syndrome, if it makes sense. It just doesn't totally feel settled into itself yet. But it's a subtle impression, so maybe it's me. (A friend of mine picked up on something like that in the first book, but called it something else, so I think there's something a little unpolished about that first book, but it's really hard to put your finger on it. So I'll just call it first season syndrome. It is doing a lot of heavy lifting setting up the running premise of the series, which they didn't know would take off at the time, and it might be as simple as that.) 

 

Ben Aaronovitch is a very solid writer. I've never heard of him ever writing something bad, and at times he's pretty amazing. He was a total legend in Doctor Who fandom for decades. So his "not the best of the lot" is pretty high quality.

 

(I was almost sort of relieved to read his collection of short stories and realize they were his first attempts at the form, and he was not a wunderkind at them and they were not that good. It really humanized the guy.)

 

1 hour ago, Gemma said:

Got the audio version and 100% concur with your assessment, the reader is top notch. 

 

He is so good. I think he really brings out the best in the prose. It's easy to lose dry tones on the page and to lose personality in very spare, realistic dialog, and the reader really draws it out again. He gets those  books, and is doing much more than just Beautiful Reading Voice; it's a ten hour performance, and it's on point. And these are good books to have realistic accent and dialect for, because it's using them heavily, including a lot of African dialects that I suspect don't come naturally to a lot of readers. Every single character is from a different class and culture, and there's a lot of characterization information in the way they speak.

 

I'm really picky about audiobook readers. I have a high rate of returning books to the library unfinished because of readers who don't work for me. He is one of the very best I've ever heard, one of two who basically do a perfect book every time.

[MaeradCase]

 

The last time I wanted stamps this badly was because they were dragons (I bought a lot of those for my wedding invites and thank you cards), or Bugs Bunny (because obviously), or the foiled Halloween ones I still have a few of to use for my rare  personal mail. But these aren't even from my postage system! ? And I wants them, precious! ?

[Snarkyfishguts]

I started reading the Throne of Glass series by Sarah J Maas. I really like it bunches. My mom is reading it with me, and we're on the second book. I have added the Rivers of London series to my TBR list! and have learned this week that Kazu Kibuishi has finished the 9th of the Amulet graphic novel series, and that's going to be published February 2024. I don't know if anyone is familiar with this series, but it's fantastic fantasy and I stopped reading after book 5 because I realized that I was going to read the whole thing over by the time he got the final book out which is....COMING SOON!!! SQUEEEEEEEEE

 

 

What's everyone reading this month?