summer round-up (1 star rant, netgalley ARCs, translated lit, danmei, non-fiction)

And I think it's such a fantastic non-fiction book because you're just sitting there getting tea about a production that is crazy. And also, it has like interview snippets from people. So, highly recommend, especially on audio.

I just did the audiobooks for Captive Prince recently, which was life-changing

I read it. It was fine. Like I think I gave it three stars on good readads. It wasn't bad.

they are the person who wrote Don't Let the Forest In, which is another one of my favorite books.

But it's not great literature. I'm not going to lie. However, the characters are so compelling. The romance is really, really good.

The beginning is slow. The second half, I read the entire second half in one sitting on a flight back from Washington and I was in the middle seat of a plane losing my mind. could not do anything about it and I was trying not to scream because the second half is just a straight downhill roller coaster.

I cried. It's super emotional. It's super beautiful. , and it is 600 pages. So, I listened to it on audio and it was just life-changing, honestly.

and if you know If We Were Villains, arguably my favorite book of all time.

I'm really enjoying it. , it's it's an anticipated read, if only because one of my favorite tropes of all time is When People Go to Hell physically.

I loved reading Lay Miz and I love Victor Hugo.

There are a lot of things I think it did really well, but for the most part I wanted to connect to it more than I did.

It made me feel so deeply inspired and it was incredibly relatable in a lot of ways. but mostly it just made me think about a lot of things differently and I think it's just it's truly his magnumopus.

when I listened to the very end of it, I just sat there and stared into the distance and was very upset. , but it I mean it's a classic. It's really good. , you should definitely read it.

Right now, it is in contention with My Friends by Frederick Bachman. If you remember from my last wrap-up, I claimed that was my favorite book of the year.

his memoir is called Never Silent and I listened to it on audio and it's just wonderful. I love him so much.

This is a book that changed my life. You know, it is actually probably the first book that I think is going to define my 30s.

And so it's like this really funny like high school like romcom vibes. , the art is really great. It's green and black and white, which is like the perfect like color vibes.

this just came out in July and I read it in like a day and it was completely devastating. , we're at a really bad part in the series right now.

it's about an author who mysteriously disappears and nobody can find any of his works because somebody is trying to destroy them all. And so it feels a little bit like S by Doug Dorst. if it was slightly less meta.

But like the plot is really compelling. The main characters are my favorite characters ever. I love them so much.

This book is really, really sweet. It's like 22 vignettes of a family that lives on an island in the summer in Finland. and it's mainly about this grandmother and her granddaughter. and they get up to some really funny hi jinks and they do talk about some serious stuff and it's just it's very sweet.

It's really good. I am not enjoying War in Peace. I have to make that known. It is a good book. I just am small brain right now and I am depressed.

It's really abstract and I think it was a little too abstract for my preferences. , and I don't know if that's because I listened to it on audio or not, but it wasn't bad. It's translated from Danish, but I did want more from it than I got.

And it's just so well done. It's so well done. I would love to see it as a film because it would be so deeply horrific and [ __ ] up.