Horror is not a genre that I usually read, but Junji Ito’s graphic novels never disappoint. This time, I randomly picked up Uzumaki from the library, and it was certainly a peculiar read. Each chapter is set in the same town with the same characters, but with a different horrific twist on the same motif: a spiral. The town and its residents undergo a slow descent into madness over the course of the volume.  The part I personally found scary was the very beginning. Something about the ceramics dude becoming obsessed with spirals and then becoming one was so unsettling, especially because this was the first strange thing to happen…

This book by R.F. Kuang was a wild ride. I know that most of the internet loved Babel, but I definitely had some problems with it. This was not my first book by R.F. Kuang; I have read Yellowface, and I thought that was great! It was the perfect amount of uncomfortable truth and funny. But Babel was something else entirely. First, let me talk about the good things.  I love reading about translating. Translation is an art: bringing the original meaning across the barrier of language without polluting it with your own biases. Unfortunately, humans are inherently biased, and every translation is bound to have it’s meaning influenced by the translator. When…

It has been a long time since I have started a fantasy series. I decided to pick up Brandon Sanderson’s The Way of Kings because I heard from a Youtube book review that it was unlike anything written before. I read it, and thought it was a mostly alright read.  Kaladin’s story was by far the most interesting out of the three different characters the story follows. It took some time to perceive him as an interesting character, because there were so many changing perspectives at the beginning that were difficult to follow. But once I understood who Kaladin was, I was invested in his struggles and goal to keep his…

It has been some time since I have written. I have contemplated what this blog is supposed to be, and I how I should express my ideas. I have this thing I do where I am not completely speaking my honest thoughts in a review of a book. So I decided I should keep my reviews short while also accurately saying what I think about them. Over the next couple days, I will be updating a lot of the books I have read in the past year. Be prepared to see a new me! Ovid’s Metamorphoses was fascinating. I realized I have to stop trusting anthologies of Greek and Roman…

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…

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.…

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.…