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kpopwinemomI already did an early February post because I needed to run my mouth on my opinions, so I'm not gonna talk about them much, but I will mention them here.
This month isn't going to be divided into books I read for work and books I read for fun, because I lost my mind and went on a spiral that I'm still on. If you're on Twitter, you've seen a bit of it! I'm carefully splitting my unhingedness between many people so no one is getting the full brunt but I am. Losing it. Because of that, this is more of a meandering post then previous reading roundups, reflecting on fandom and my own reading history. It's long and off topic and we're gonna roll with it.
So anyway, here is what I read in February!
The Naming of the Beasts by Mike Carey
This is the final full Felix novel. I loved it. The whole series was great, this was the first spiral this year and I talked about my feelings about it in my January wrap-up, and again in my early February post when I talked about
The Ghost In Bone by Mike Carey
This got half a post to itself because I was annoyed at the method of publishing, even though I liked the story itself.
Snowglobe by Soyoung Park translated by Joungmin Lee Comfort
This was really good! It's a Korean YA novel, very YA dystopia. It's the first book in a duology, and as far as I can tell, book 2 hasn't been published in Korean yet. It follows a girl who lives in a frozen world and walks on a treadmill to power the electric grid, while watching 24/7 reality TV of all the people who live under the climate-controlled dome. When the biggest star dies, the main character is cast to take her place - and begins unraveling the mysteries of the Snowglobe. This is fun, perfect for fans of The Hunger Games. I read and reviewed this for work.
The Warm Hands of Ghosts by Katherine Arden
This is the other book I talked about in my early Feb. post. It's perfect to me. If you've read it, please talk to me about it. I love it SO much, and I'm pleased to say it's been selling really well.
Dirt Eaters by Teri Youmans Grimm
This is a local collection of poetry. I read it for the library reading challenge. It's good, I liked it? It left no impression on me. Very Southern. Very local. I do like the titular poem, The Dirt Eaters.
Here is where I LOSE MY MIND.
After I finished The Warm Hands of Ghosts, it was so good I really didn't want to risk reading any of the books I had been anticipating, because I knew that nothing was going to hit the way that one did, and I wanted to be able to give them a fair shake. So I intentionally picked up something different, to mix things up a bit. Merry of Soul had mentioned liking this next book previously, and it had sounded fun and cute, so I hopped in next.
The Sun and the Star by Rick Riordan and Mark Oshiro
I thought this book was OK. It was cute and charming, but I found it VERY clear where Oshiro was writing and where Riordan was writing. I wish they had blended their styles a bit more. Riordan wrote this with Oshiro because he wanted a queer voice involved while writing queer characters due to previous complaints about how his queer characters were treated. I didn't notice this at the time, but now in retrospect: I don't think Oshiro was the best voice for this particular character, who is a weirdo freak (affectionate.) There were a few things that stood out to me (mostly pop culture references) that I felt a bit HUH over.
I also have to admit: I read this with 0 context. It's both a standalone and book 18 in a series...I had not read ANY of the previous books. So reading this was a choice, honestly. I definitely want to revist it when it comes out in paperback, because by then I'll be caught up.
Anyway, I left this book thinking Oshiro wasn't really For Me, but that it might be nice to take a look at Riordan, who I had vague memories of maybe reading one book of.
Friends, I fell off a cliff. I have still not looked up. I am still falling. You know that feeling when you suddenly start getting hooked into a new fandom, and you can feel it? When suddenly your interests just latch on to something and can't let go?
That is what has happened here. A few things happened simultaneously. First, The Sun and the Star. THEN we went to see Hadestown (incredible.)
I have started falling and I cannot look up. My Spotify is: Hadestown, Hercules and Percy Jackson: The Musical. I am aware. I have a problem. But yeah. Here's how the rest of February went.
The Lightning Thief by Rick Riordan
This is the first book in the Percy Jackson and the Olympians series. I had no memory of reading it, but Goodreads told me I had. I loved it. I ate it up. It's cute and charming and well-written. I want to talk about the series as a whole, so I won't say much here or in subsequent books.
The Sea of Monsters by Rick Riordan (PJ #2)
The Titan's Curse by Rick Riordan (PJ #3)
I took a brief break to read Deephaven by Ethan M. Aldridge for a bookclub.
This book was fine, cute middle grade dark academia, vaguely queer but queerness wasn't a plot focus. About four hours to the audiobook, nothing groundbreaking.
The Battle of the Labyrinth by Rick Riordan (PJ #4)
The Last Olympian by Rick Riordan (PJ #5)
This is the "final" PJ book, and the only one I vaguely remembered reading - when I was in Spain as a teenager, I had finished and not liked the books I had brought, so I had snagged this from my brother. But I guess I had only flipped through it, because I remembered the chapter titles were funny, and a few of the characters, and NOTHING ELSE.
Ok. Percy Jackson thoughts time!
I didn't read these books when they first came out. They were a bit young for me - I was in high school by the time they started gaining prominence. My little brother, three years my junior, did, and I did not realize until recently how much he loved them. We sat down for dinner, and I mentioned starting them, and he just. Remembered everything. (His wife kinda looks like Annabeth, too, the main love interest in the books, and this cracks me up.)
Anyway, I picked the series up because I had a few friends mention they were rereading and really liked them, and I fell hard.
I am a FIRM Harry Potter girlie. Dad brought home the first book when I was six. I was in first grade, and his coworker told him about it. He would sit on the couch and read it with us before bedtime. And I was HOOKED. I was reading fine, I could read, but I hadn't realized it was something that was worth doing. In second grade, he must have had a trial or something, and he stopped being able to read it to me at night. So I took the book and finished it, and apparently started issuing corrections to how HE was reading it (as he was trying to make it less scary for his very small children.) I toted those books everywhere. Everywhere. My book 1 is in tatters, and all of them have my little girl handwriting with my name right in the front.
The movies all came out around my birthday, so we did that for birthday parties. My gifts were often Harry Potter themed - I still have a Harry Potter mobile, I have slept with a plush Hedwig backpack since I was ten years old, there is a Harry Potter fleece blanket in my bed.
This was my personality for a huge chunk of my childhood. Harry Potter is so wired into my DNA that it is impossible to remove. I don't engage with much of it now, mostly because it feels like a soulless cash grab, partly because JK is a horrible person. But this is important to know because:
I think Percy Jackson is a better series.
Genuinely. I think it's more consistent in writing style, tone, and level. It's more focused in goal, and takes place over a tighter period of time (about two years) and build up and finale feel balanced. The final book is JUST the final battle - and everyone is there for the full battle. It feels like the earned and cumulative result of the previous four books, and it doesn't feel like a let down, like so many final battles in fantasy do. Furthermore, the main relationship of the book pays off in a great way. Since book 1, we've seen these two characters, Percy and Annabeth, go from enemies, to trusted friends, to having crushes on each other. When they finally get together, it's genuinely thrilling. It's the sort of slowburn that fanfics aim for.
I am more invested in this middle grade romance then half of the romance novels I have read in the last year. They are precious, and I am jealous!
I really, really loved reading these books, and I immediately hopped into the next series, Heroes of Olympus. I finished the first book in March, so I won't talk about it here, but I love them EVEN MORE. They're bigger books, so I'm going a bit slower, but I am LOVING it.
Anyway, if you read all that, thanks for sticking around. If you read any of my bookrecs, let me know what you think!
See you all at the end of this month!
This month isn't going to be divided into books I read for work and books I read for fun, because I lost my mind and went on a spiral that I'm still on. If you're on Twitter, you've seen a bit of it! I'm carefully splitting my unhingedness between many people so no one is getting the full brunt but I am. Losing it. Because of that, this is more of a meandering post then previous reading roundups, reflecting on fandom and my own reading history. It's long and off topic and we're gonna roll with it.
So anyway, here is what I read in February!
The Naming of the Beasts by Mike Carey
This is the final full Felix novel. I loved it. The whole series was great, this was the first spiral this year and I talked about my feelings about it in my January wrap-up, and again in my early February post when I talked about
The Ghost In Bone by Mike Carey
This got half a post to itself because I was annoyed at the method of publishing, even though I liked the story itself.
Snowglobe by Soyoung Park translated by Joungmin Lee Comfort
This was really good! It's a Korean YA novel, very YA dystopia. It's the first book in a duology, and as far as I can tell, book 2 hasn't been published in Korean yet. It follows a girl who lives in a frozen world and walks on a treadmill to power the electric grid, while watching 24/7 reality TV of all the people who live under the climate-controlled dome. When the biggest star dies, the main character is cast to take her place - and begins unraveling the mysteries of the Snowglobe. This is fun, perfect for fans of The Hunger Games. I read and reviewed this for work.
The Warm Hands of Ghosts by Katherine Arden
This is the other book I talked about in my early Feb. post. It's perfect to me. If you've read it, please talk to me about it. I love it SO much, and I'm pleased to say it's been selling really well.
Dirt Eaters by Teri Youmans Grimm
This is a local collection of poetry. I read it for the library reading challenge. It's good, I liked it? It left no impression on me. Very Southern. Very local. I do like the titular poem, The Dirt Eaters.
Here is where I LOSE MY MIND.
After I finished The Warm Hands of Ghosts, it was so good I really didn't want to risk reading any of the books I had been anticipating, because I knew that nothing was going to hit the way that one did, and I wanted to be able to give them a fair shake. So I intentionally picked up something different, to mix things up a bit. Merry of Soul had mentioned liking this next book previously, and it had sounded fun and cute, so I hopped in next.
The Sun and the Star by Rick Riordan and Mark Oshiro
I thought this book was OK. It was cute and charming, but I found it VERY clear where Oshiro was writing and where Riordan was writing. I wish they had blended their styles a bit more. Riordan wrote this with Oshiro because he wanted a queer voice involved while writing queer characters due to previous complaints about how his queer characters were treated. I didn't notice this at the time, but now in retrospect: I don't think Oshiro was the best voice for this particular character, who is a weirdo freak (affectionate.) There were a few things that stood out to me (mostly pop culture references) that I felt a bit HUH over.
I also have to admit: I read this with 0 context. It's both a standalone and book 18 in a series...I had not read ANY of the previous books. So reading this was a choice, honestly. I definitely want to revist it when it comes out in paperback, because by then I'll be caught up.
Anyway, I left this book thinking Oshiro wasn't really For Me, but that it might be nice to take a look at Riordan, who I had vague memories of maybe reading one book of.
Friends, I fell off a cliff. I have still not looked up. I am still falling. You know that feeling when you suddenly start getting hooked into a new fandom, and you can feel it? When suddenly your interests just latch on to something and can't let go?
That is what has happened here. A few things happened simultaneously. First, The Sun and the Star. THEN we went to see Hadestown (incredible.)
I have started falling and I cannot look up. My Spotify is: Hadestown, Hercules and Percy Jackson: The Musical. I am aware. I have a problem. But yeah. Here's how the rest of February went.
The Lightning Thief by Rick Riordan
This is the first book in the Percy Jackson and the Olympians series. I had no memory of reading it, but Goodreads told me I had. I loved it. I ate it up. It's cute and charming and well-written. I want to talk about the series as a whole, so I won't say much here or in subsequent books.
The Sea of Monsters by Rick Riordan (PJ #2)
The Titan's Curse by Rick Riordan (PJ #3)
I took a brief break to read Deephaven by Ethan M. Aldridge for a bookclub.
This book was fine, cute middle grade dark academia, vaguely queer but queerness wasn't a plot focus. About four hours to the audiobook, nothing groundbreaking.
The Battle of the Labyrinth by Rick Riordan (PJ #4)
The Last Olympian by Rick Riordan (PJ #5)
This is the "final" PJ book, and the only one I vaguely remembered reading - when I was in Spain as a teenager, I had finished and not liked the books I had brought, so I had snagged this from my brother. But I guess I had only flipped through it, because I remembered the chapter titles were funny, and a few of the characters, and NOTHING ELSE.
Ok. Percy Jackson thoughts time!
I didn't read these books when they first came out. They were a bit young for me - I was in high school by the time they started gaining prominence. My little brother, three years my junior, did, and I did not realize until recently how much he loved them. We sat down for dinner, and I mentioned starting them, and he just. Remembered everything. (His wife kinda looks like Annabeth, too, the main love interest in the books, and this cracks me up.)
Anyway, I picked the series up because I had a few friends mention they were rereading and really liked them, and I fell hard.
I am a FIRM Harry Potter girlie. Dad brought home the first book when I was six. I was in first grade, and his coworker told him about it. He would sit on the couch and read it with us before bedtime. And I was HOOKED. I was reading fine, I could read, but I hadn't realized it was something that was worth doing. In second grade, he must have had a trial or something, and he stopped being able to read it to me at night. So I took the book and finished it, and apparently started issuing corrections to how HE was reading it (as he was trying to make it less scary for his very small children.) I toted those books everywhere. Everywhere. My book 1 is in tatters, and all of them have my little girl handwriting with my name right in the front.
The movies all came out around my birthday, so we did that for birthday parties. My gifts were often Harry Potter themed - I still have a Harry Potter mobile, I have slept with a plush Hedwig backpack since I was ten years old, there is a Harry Potter fleece blanket in my bed.
This was my personality for a huge chunk of my childhood. Harry Potter is so wired into my DNA that it is impossible to remove. I don't engage with much of it now, mostly because it feels like a soulless cash grab, partly because JK is a horrible person. But this is important to know because:
I think Percy Jackson is a better series.
Genuinely. I think it's more consistent in writing style, tone, and level. It's more focused in goal, and takes place over a tighter period of time (about two years) and build up and finale feel balanced. The final book is JUST the final battle - and everyone is there for the full battle. It feels like the earned and cumulative result of the previous four books, and it doesn't feel like a let down, like so many final battles in fantasy do. Furthermore, the main relationship of the book pays off in a great way. Since book 1, we've seen these two characters, Percy and Annabeth, go from enemies, to trusted friends, to having crushes on each other. When they finally get together, it's genuinely thrilling. It's the sort of slowburn that fanfics aim for.
I am more invested in this middle grade romance then half of the romance novels I have read in the last year. They are precious, and I am jealous!
I really, really loved reading these books, and I immediately hopped into the next series, Heroes of Olympus. I finished the first book in March, so I won't talk about it here, but I love them EVEN MORE. They're bigger books, so I'm going a bit slower, but I am LOVING it.
Anyway, if you read all that, thanks for sticking around. If you read any of my bookrecs, let me know what you think!
See you all at the end of this month!
no subject
Date: 2024-03-13 09:51 am (UTC)I also just saw Snowglobe in my local bookstore this week and was sceptical but I’ll add it to my tbr after your positive review. The cover is very…. 2012 though 😂
no subject
Date: 2024-03-14 10:16 am (UTC)Snowglobe is good! It's not groundbreaking, it's very YA dystopia, but if you like that sort of thing you'll like this.
no subject
Date: 2024-03-13 12:25 pm (UTC)I haven't read Percy Jackson but your enthusiasm makes me want to give it a try (eventually - when my TBR list is less dire).
no subject
Date: 2024-03-14 10:22 am (UTC)I was pleasantly surprised by how well PJ stood up. Everyone I knew who was reading it as an adult was rereading. I didn't know anyone who picked them up for the first time as an adult, but they really are worth it and very good.
Good luck with you TBR!
no subject
Date: 2024-03-13 03:01 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2024-03-14 10:20 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2024-03-13 10:00 pm (UTC)but also, so happy to hear about your pjo spiral! I wasn't a huuuge fan and I don't remember much of the story now, but I DO agree that it's so well written. and just overall enjoyable! good to know you're liking the next series too, as someone who never read those - makes me curious to give it a try someday!!
no subject
Date: 2024-03-14 10:19 am (UTC)OMG I am loving it. I was not expecting to! You def should read the second series - I love it MORE. By a LOT. It introduces more characters, and it has a heavier weight to it. I have been screaming and kicking my legs the whole time I have been reading HOO. It seems like it's less popular though, which is sad.
no subject
Date: 2024-03-18 09:15 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2024-03-18 10:00 pm (UTC)The new TV show is objectively good except for how I didn't like it because they changed too many plot elements and also removed all the suspense? IDK. Everyone BUT me liked it. I found it to be aggravating.
My fav adaptation is the musical...It's so fun...the whole thing is on Youtube...
I could talk nonstop about this, but I'm going to be chill. But if you read it, please let me know your thoughts!