Reading Rambo

It's almost October! The month almost everything amazing gets published! Also the month right before NaNoWriMo and right near the end of the year when some of us are panicking about finishing other books we've put off all year to hit those sweet sweet reading stats no one else cares about, so there is a lot going on . I picked up a lot of October releases at BookExpo back in May, and I'm still psyched about most of them. Most excited about:   From Here to Eternity : Traveling the World to Find the Good Death  by Caitlin Doughty (Oct 3, 2017) I didn't read her first book, but this one looks super fun! And the cover's so good! Maybe I'll read her first book. Someday. Eventually. But for now, here's this book about how people deal with death around the world by a lady mortician who is very good at marketing. Code Girls: The Untold Story of the Women Code Breakers of World War II   by Liza Mundy (Oct 10, 2017) The hidden army of World War II women cryp

Dr Samuel Johnson, writer of A Dictionary of the English Language  and frequent contributor to Familiar Quotations , has a home in London that is still standing .  This is italicized because after watching numerous videos of the Blitz while walking through the Museum of London, I'm shocked any building survived (aside from St Paul's, which anytime they talked about its symbolizing the indomitable British spirit, I immediately cried). I didn't know anything about Johnson, but I love a good house museum, so off I trotted to right near Fleet Street, through some alleyways and up to this fun entrance: There an old man buzzed me in, and when he asked what I knew about Dr Johnson and I said "Didn't he do the dictionary or something," he immediately launched into how totally awesome Johnson was, and when I said I was mainly interested in women's history, he was like "AH-HA! Did you know Samuel Johnson was a huge supporter of women writers?" NO

Everyone was reading it. So I decided to read it. It didn't pan out well for The Help , but it was perfectly fine for Girl on the Train . But When Dimple Met Rishi ? For those unaware, When Dimple Met Rishi  is a YA novel about an 18-year-old Indian-American girl named Dimple who's just graduated, is going to Stanford in the fall, and really wants to go to a summer coding program called Insomnia Con so she can create an app, meet her idol and BEGIN HER LIFE OF CODING. I was super on board at this point. She also has an overbearing mother who she thinks wants to see her married and with a family immediately. Dimple never wears makeup, is very open about her opinions, has wild hair (the book keeps coming back to these points), and is very anti-the marriage thing. What she does NOT know is her parents are letting her go to Insomnia Con because they have set her up with Rishi, the son of their friends. Rishi knows this, though, and boy, do hijinks ensue. HERE I

OKAY. I love the Inhumans. For those unaware, they're a part of Marvel's ever-expanding universe of ridiculous proportions. They live on an island called Attilan where EVERYTHING IS COOL except they maybe have a slave race? Unclear. I was introduced to Medusa in Ms Marvel where I was like who is this lady with amazing hair and why does she live on a separate island with this giant dog . So I checked this out. The ISSUE with Inhumans by Paul Jenkins is it kind of assumes you already know a lot of shit about the Inhumans. Here's what I learned from this book: 1. Black Bolt is the shit. He also can't speak, FOR THIS SMALLEST WHISPER WOULD CLEAVE WORLDS IN TWAIN. 2. Medusa is his wife. Her hair has the strength of steel? And she can manipulate it psychically to like...ensnare people. I don't get why this makes her queen of the Inhumans, but her hair does  look pretty great. 3. Kid Inhumans wait for their powers to go through some metamorphosis thing, and t

I talked about this book for a WEEK after I read it. Slider  called to me from the floor of BookExpo back in June. The cover's eye-catchingly great and 100% the reason I stuffed it in my overly-full tote. Once BookExpo is over, I usually go through and see what I just grabbed in a frenzy of bookmadness and what I genuinely want. After reading the first couple pages and checking out the excellent writing, Slider  stayed in the keep pile. It's about a high school freshman named David who's really really good at eating. Eating contests are his passion. He has heroes in that community, and one of those heroes just lost a contest by half a hot dog. Someone's selling it on BuyBuy (basically eBay) for 50 cents, so David "borrows" his mom's credit card and bids on it with a max bid of 20 dollars. Only he accidentally put $2,000  and now he's a 14-year-old with no job who has to find $2,000. To pay for half a hot dog. I don't know about you guys