Last month, I unfortunately did not get through as many books as I wanted. With summer school, training, work, and recovery I just didn’t have enough time or enough energy in the day to get through the books I had already lined up. Also, after mulling it over for a while, I decided to drop one of the books I was reading which is Great expectations. Unfortunately it wasn’t to my taste or expectations. The main character was rather boring and toward the middle of the book I still did not care very much where he was going or who he wanted to be. The long winded paragraphs of description didn’t quite help it either. You might like it if you give it a try but I did not. Maybe ill give it a try later but for now it just wasn’t up to par with what I expected it to be.

Now for this month, I have a few books lined up from a backlog of books that have been sitting on my shelf waiting to be read. These include Joe Abercrombie’s The blade itself and its series, The Ember Blade, The Stand, The Sword of Kaigen, and the last of the Lord of the rings trilogy.

Right now, I picked up the Sword of Kaigen and I have to say its already got me intrigued. The Japanese inspiration, followed by the use of such a simplistic yet gratifying descriptive writing is making it an easy book to pick up and read for a few minutes at a time.

I’m going to start get into more of the lord of the rings, which reminds me that I want to actually watch the movies. I just want to finish the series before I do that. I just have to say I really enjoyed the first film and for a film made in the 2000’s the effects are pretty good. the cinematography is also beautiful to behold and seeing where all the rights and lefts and norths and souths look like makes reading it all the more interesting.

The next book I really want to sink my teeth into is The Stand by Stephan King. I thought the book Later was quite fascinating last month and I’m sure this book, being an even bigger project, is going to be just as interesting. Also, I didn’t know they made it into a series on paramount plus so I actually started that series and I actually enjoyed the story so far. I’ve stopped watching it for the same reason I didn’t watch the rest of the lord of the rings movies.

Other than that, I am listening to two audible books at the moment, Hail Mary by the same author who wrote the Martian, which if you haven’t read that book then you are missing out on a great sci-fi adventure. Or at least watch the movie. Hail Mary so far is going about a similar structure as the martian but has a bit of a mystery around it considering the main character wakes up with Amnesia on a space ship floating who knows where to do who knows what. All he knows is that it is urgent that he completes the mission. As time passes he starts regaining memories but will it be enough to accomplish what he needs to do? or is it already too late?

The second book is called He Who Fights with Monsters, this one is considered a LitRPG, so if you don’t know what an RPG is, it stands for role playing game. So they took the concept of a role playing game (just think Dungeons and Dragons) and used the game play mechanics which is a bunch of different stats and abilities and put it on a character in a fantasy world. As he goes about in the world he gets strong, gains new abilities, gains experience points and the possibilities are endless. I’ve always like the progression system of games and some of my favorite stories have come from books that use the same concept as video games. It’s a bit of an embarrassing niche I like but I like what I like haha. So anyways those are the books I’ll be tackling this month and I hope to share my take on them pretty soon. God bless