What I Read: May 2018

Hello everybody! Here we are with another month of 2018 down. It's now summer time for me, so I've got loads more free time to do whatever I'd like. I'm still keeping up with my crazy reading pace. I finished 29 books this month, so my total for 2018 is 132. My big goal for the rest of the summer is to finish all the books I physically own. I need to make that a bigger priority instead of checking out more books from the library. I'm now checking out books physically and digitally from the library and found that I have a little bit of a problem checking out more than I intended too. I'll see something that I've been wanting to check out forever, and just snatch it up so I don't have to wait until someone else returns it later. Anyways, that's beside the point of this post. I'm going to talk about some of the cooler graphic novels I've read first.

I read 15 graphic novels this month, with a lot of those being new series I've wanted to check out. I didn't enjoy a lot of the ones I read, but there were some gems. Runaways continues to be great. I finished volumes 2 and 3 this month (both got 4/5 star ratings). I thought that was the end of the series for some reason, but it turns out they continued the series a year or two after the third volume came out. I didn't like the twist in the third volume, though it does make sense. I'm interested to see the aftermath of this big reveal. I'm a big fan of Daredevil and saw that there was a Daredevil: Yellow graphic novel recommended to me. I loved that one. It also got a 4/5 star rating. I had some minor problems with it, but overall, the art was fantastic, and it was cool to see Daredevil in action. I'm a big fan of true crime and was surprised to see one about Jeffrey Dahmer. My Friend Dahmer is written by a high school friend of Dahmer. It details how different the guy that the author knew was from the serial killer he became. I also rated it 4/5 stars. Some of the 3/5 star ones I read are: Giant Days Vol. 1, Spider-Man: Miles Morales Vol. 2, Vision Vol. 1, The Best We Could Do, and SuperMutant Magic Academy.

Book wise, I've read some interesting stuff. I still haven't found many new favorites, but I am crossing books off my list that I've been wanting to check out. My most recent read is Killers of the Flower Moon by David Grann (2/5 stars). It follows the events that happened in the 1920s where many members of this wealthy Osage native American family keep turning up dead. It's gotten some very high acclaim, and I believe it's even won quite a few awards. I wanted to like it, but I found it insanely boring. It's not the gripping, suspenseful true crime that I crave. It's more of an information overload. I'm not sure if it's the author's writing style, or the fact that it happened so long ago that most of the evidence/people involved are long gone. It just wasn't my cup of tea. I also recently finished Too Fat, Too Slutty, Too Loud by Anna Helen Petersen (3/5 stars). I really enjoyed the front half of the book, but the author seemed to ramble on towards the end. It mostly touches on the double standards that women face in today's society. Men's perceptions of women need to change now. This isn't the 1800s anymore. It also made me realize that I read way more male authors than women. I went through my spreadsheet that I use to track my reading and found that my reading isn't as evenly split between male/female authors as I once thought. For the rest of the year, one of my newer goals is to read more women authors and feminist books. I did read some more true crime, like American Kingpin by Nick Bilton and A Mother's Reckoning by Sue Klebold. Both were 3 star reads, which were enjoyable to read yet not new favorites. I love reading celebrity memoirs and checked out Where Am I Now? by Mara Wilson (3/5 stars). She was the child actress that played Matilda and was also in Mrs. Doubtfire. I thought it'd be mostly about her life after her acting days were over. That wasn't really the case. It was more so essays about different times in her life. I didn't enjoy it as much as I thought, though she did bring up some good points. I'm also getting into YA again to lighten up what I'm reading. I read quite a few, but most of them didn't blow me away. The 57 Bus by Dashka Slater (4/5) was a good true crime about a teenage girl that got set on fire by another teenager. It got way deeper than I expected. I surprisingly still haven't rated any books 5 stars this year, so we'll see if that changes throughout the summer. That's about it for now. Thanks for looking!