I told myself that I wasn’t going to push to hard to break any reading records this year. I did finish Caliban’s War, the second book in The Expanse series. I haven’t picked up book 3 just yet, wanted to give myself a little brain break.

I listened to Caitlin Doughty’s first book, Smoke Gets in Your Eyes and other lessons from the crematory. I’ve been enjoying her YouTube channel for awhile and realized that I hadn’t read all her books (she has three right now). I prefer the audiobook versions because she reads them and she has a very unique voice. I really think everyone should read her books and think about death and death culture. Humans are weird and we make up lots of arbitrary rules about “normal” based on where we live and how we grew up, and her movement to change death culture and death industry (the fact that there IS an entire industry based on you dying is creepy enough to think about) in the United States is an important one.

I had a copy of Paul Tremblay’s The Cabin at the End of the World sitting by my desk for ages, it was a library discard that I had brought home for Halloween reading and never got around to. I read Tremblay’s Head Full of Ghosts ages ago and had wanted to try another of his books. I decided to pick it up one night, thinking I was in the mood for some horror. It starts out as an intense home invasion story and it was INTENSE AF. I was immediately sucked in and on edge the entire time…and then, about 3/4 of the way through, I could feel it wasn’t going to have an ending that would satisfy me…and then a big [spoiler] happened and I was just hate-reading at that point, skimming to see how it ended so I could be upset and complain about it in an informed way. It just wasn’t my kind of horror.

And to finish things off, I picked up Unicorn Playlist, part of the children’s comic book series Phoebe and her Unicorn by Dana Simpson. Always reliable, it was nice to escape into the happy, colorful world of Phoebe and Heavenly Nostrils again.