This month I managed to read a lot of books that I've wanted to check out for a while and went on a mini success/self-help book kick. I feel like all books of that nature parrot the same advice that is kind of self-explanatory. Without further ado, let's get into it.
Starting out with the success/self-help books, I read Barking Up the Wrong Tree by Eric Barker (3/5), The Happiness Equation by Neil Pasricha (2/5), The Little Book of Hygge by Meik Wiking (3/5) and Make Time by Jake Knapp (3/5). Nothing major stood out about the ones that I gave 3 star ratings, but I will say The Happiness Equation barely talked about happiness, and the author had such a pretentious, know-it-all tone. The Little Book of Hygge had a lot of cool illustrations and was a short and sweet read. I think Make Time was the most useful of the bunch.
Speaking of quick reads, I always read some graphic novels to take a break from regular novels. My two favorites this month were Lord of the Fleas by Dav Pilkey (4/5) and Crowded Vol. 1 (4/5). Lord of the Fleas was the fourth book in the Dog-Man series. Just like all the others, this was cute and fun to read. Crowded Vol. 1 was about an app that is used to crowdfund hits on people where the bounty grows as more people contribute. The main character hires one of the worst rated bodyguards on a separate app to protect her for a month until the hit expires. It was an interesting plot and was full of all sorts of action and drama. I hope volume two is in the works. Two of the average (3/5) ones I read were Lazaretto and Keep Going by Austin Kleon. Keep Going isn't really a graphic novel but more so a book about creativity that has a lot of art throughout. This one fell flat compared to the two other books he's written. Lazaretto is about a quarantine that happens at a college where the seniors take over the dorm and crazy stuff goes down. I thought the ending was lackluster though the art was very well-done. I was excited to read Spider-Verse since Spider-Man is my favorite superhero. Unfortunately, I ended up rating it 2/5 stars due to it being all over the place. It was a mishmash of various issues that didn't flow well together. It ended up being over 600 pages long which was too drawn out for me. I liked certain aspects of it, like hearing about Punk Spider-Man briefly. The last one I'll mention here is The Walking Dead Vol. 31 (2/5). I quit watching the TV show a long time ago yet still read the newest volumes when they come out. The author, Robert Kirkman, just needs to end the series. Nothing interesting has happened in these latest volumes. You can tell he's just dragging it out for the money.
Moving along to novels, my two favorites in April were Every Heart a Doorway by Seanan McGuire (4/5) and Daisy Jones & the Six by Taylor Jenkins Reid (4/5). The first one is a YA novel about teens that visit fairyland type worlds but then are forced to come back to the real world. It's all about them adjusting back to their surroundings and desperately hoping the doors to these worlds will open for them again. I normally love shorter books (this one was about 150 pages), yet it really would have benefited from additional information about the plot, world, and characters. I managed to finish the rest of the series, Down Among the Sticks and Bones (3/5), Beneath the Sugar Sky (3/5), and In An Absent Dream (2/5), this month as well and thought the first one was the best. The others don't continue the same plot but instead are basically prequels for some of the side characters. Daisy Jones & the Six is about a fictional rock band that's told in the form of interviews with the band members and others associated with them. The format wasn't something I liked much at first, but it definitely grew on me as I read it more. Each character was different, so it was cool to see how they all meshed together.
I believe I've mentioned I enjoy celebrity memoirs, and my latest one was Sorry Not Sorry by Naya Rivera (3/5), who's an actress that was on the TV show Glee. She gave a somewhat interesting story of her life as an actress. I did find her writing to be annoying at times. I read You last month and finished the sequel, Hidden Bodies by Caroline Kepnes (2/5). This one follows the main character as he heads to LA to start over his life. I think I liked it slightly better than You; however, the ending was a huge letdown to me. I saw the movie adaptation of Crazy Rich Asians by Kevin Kwan within the past few months and finally found the book available from my library. It didn't come anywhere close to how good the movie was, with my rating being 2/5 stars. It was a lot longer than it should've been, plus all it seemed to do was go into all this detail/name drop all the material things the rich people enjoyed. It switched perspectives every chapter or so to some of the side characters that weren't relevant to the plot at all. The ending turned out to be the most interesting part of the whole book and sort of redeemed the book for me. There's at least two other books in the series that I may try to read if I have absolutely nothing else to read.
Lastly, I heard so many great things about John Dies At The End by David Wong and The Seven and a Half Deaths of Everlyn Hardcastle by Stuart Turton but both got 1/5 stars from me. They were absolutely unbearable to read. The first one sounded like it was written by some immature teenage boy, and the other was one of the least intriguing murder mysteries I've ever read. The whole gimmick was that the main character kept switching bodies to try to investigate this murder from different perspectives, with each perspective being more and more boring than the last.
All in all, I'm still enjoying all the reading I'm doing and am up to 132 for the year with 35 read this month. My priority for May is to read The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants series and finish more of my physical books before I leave school for the summer. Thanks for looking!
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