• Books

    The Garden of Forking Paths

    One of the most thought-provoking short stories I have ever read Over the summer, I went down a large number of rabbit holes, including, and one of them happened to be a series of video game playthroughs on Youtube. The video game was called Who’s Lila, and I knew nothing about the game other than the fact that the thumbnail image was pretty scary. I watched the entire series, probably around 6 hours worth of content, and I can safely say that was the scariest video game I have ever encountered. The story has the typical small-town-girl-goes-missing, but the trope goes crazy as the game progresses. But, this video game…

  • Books

    The Epic of Gilgamesh

    The oldest epic we know of which happens to be a story about a freaky, freaky, guy. In school right now, I am taking a class called Ancient World Religions and Philosophies. It is my favorite class so far because the texts we are reading are just so interesting! However, our first assigned reading was the Epic of Gilgamesh. The experience as a whole was… unique to say the least. And as my subheading warns you, Gilgamesh was a freaky, freaky, guy, and this book made me wonder if the Ancient Mesopotamians were ok.  The story begins in the town? Village? Settlement of Uruk, where Gilgamesh happens to be king.…

  • Books

    Summer Reading!

    All of the books I finally had a chance to catch up on over the summer. For reading, this certainly was a crazy summer. I made a list of books I wanted to read throughout last school year, and the entire summer was spent reading as many as I could. Because school just started back up again, (yay Junior year!), I figured it was time to share an overview of what I read! One note, a lot of the books I am going to be talking about are by Neil Gaiman. While I really like his writing, the allegations about him that recently came out are very disturbing to me.…

  • Books

    The Lost Hero

    An adventure that is just as fun as when I read it years ago! Summer break is finally here, and I decided to kick it off with rereading one of the greatest epics of my childhood. I have always thought of The Lost Hero as the most tedious book to get through in the series because the characters I got to know and love in the previous five books were not there at all, but this time around, these new heroes were actually pretty interesting to me! After the conclusion of the Titan War in Percy Jackson and the Olympians, Camp Half-Blood, a home for Greek demigods, is in desperate…

  • Books

    Speak

    An amazing read composed of intricate storylines by Louisa Hall This school year has been really great in terms of the books we have been reading in class. For English, we recently read the Crucible which was a lot more interesting than expected. But now, we have just finished reading Speak by Louisa Hall and it is one of the strangest books I have ever read. This story takes place throughout various time periods and is told by different characters. Starting from the oldest, Mary Bradford is a Puritan girl who is traveling to America in the 1600s. She wants to be an adventurer, but feels trapped by her marriage.…

  • TV

    Dead Boy Detectives

    An unhinged yet bingeable spinoff from the Sandman Universe that is so absurd that it’s entertaining I am always on the hunt for new Netflix shows to binge-watch, and I was pretty excited for “Dead Boy Detectives” to arrive! I haven’t watched the Sandman series yet, though I have read the comics and absolutely love them. This show follows the ghosts of two dead teens, Charles Rowland and Edwin Payne who run a detective agency to help other ghosts get closure and move on to their afterlives. They are in hiding and constantly on the run from Death, and a strange case leads them to meet Crystal, psychic who lost…

  • Books

    Born on a Blue Day

    One of my unexpectedly favorite books of all time. I am taking the AP Psychology test in a couple of weeks, it studying for it has introduced to me to so many fascinating ideas and concepts, but above everything else, I am so happy this course lead me to find this book. After a Wikipedia dive about Savant Syndrome, I found myself on a page about the author of this book, Daniel Tammet, and made the spontaneous decision to walk to the library and check it out immediately. That was one of the best decisions I have ever made this school year. ‘Born on a Blue Day’ is the autobiography…

  • Books

    The Crucible

    The absolute train wreck that was the Salem Witch Trials Now, I am not really the type of person to read classical literature unless it is for school assignments, and that is predictably because of the language. What’s the point of making what you’re trying to say sound more confusing and incomprehensible? Other than a couple novels here and there, I never really understood the point. Recently in class, we just started reading The Crucible by Arthur Miller, and I enjoyed it more than I expected I would have, considering I initially thought it would be a 600 page compendium of Shakespearean text. But seriously, this book was a wild…

  • Books

    Six of Crows

    A maniacal, surprising, and enjoyable adventure by Leigh Bardugo! I am a firm believer that books are almost always better than movies and should always be experienced first. It has been that way for most of the books I have read, like Harry Potter, His Dark Materials, and so much more. However, when it came to Shadow and Bone on Netflix, I didn’t even know it was based off a book series! When I watched it sometime after the pandemic not knowing it was an adaptation, I was pretty happy with it because it was entertaining enough and more complex than the average teen fantasy show. But one thing I…

  • Movies

    Dune: Part Two

    My first blog! The two and a half hour fever dream I don’t regret watching. Welcome! My name is Nithya, and this is my first ever blog. I just happened to watch Dune: Part Two last weekend after many months of waiting, and I have a lot to say about it! This blog does have some spoilers for the movie, so if you haven’t watched it and are interested in doing so, I do go into a lot of specifics. So besides that, let’s get started! As a sequel, Dune: Part Two is a very different experience when compared to the first part. Personally, I thought Dune was amazing! The…