May’s been a weird month of trucking along. Are all of the month’s just weird now? I feel like I did a lot in May, but that it has ended far too quickly too, as per usual. For a good while I was pretty laid back about buying books, at least of the physical variety, until some events spurred me on to purchase some.

To divulge more, let’s get on to the books!

New Books

The most obvious things in the picture above are the three new volumes of Berserk by Kentaro Miura. I bought my last pair of volumes a couple of months ago, and I went out and bought some more this month in the wake of the news that Miura tragically passed away on May 6th. It’s been disheartening, and I guess I just wanted to make sure I didn’t lag behind with his work again, to keep it fresh in my mind.

I also received the copy of Alien: River of Pain by Christopher Golden that I ordered last month. This is the last book in the trilogy of canon Alien novels that came about five or so years ago, which I’ve been slowly going through. This book is part of my reading challenges for this year, so I needed to make sure I actually have a copy to read. Fortunately, I was able to get one that matches the size of the others too, which I wasn’t 100% sure I’d get. I expect I might like this novel the most of the trilogy, as it seems to be straightforward, telling the story of what happened to the Hadley’s Hope colony that is seen in the film Aliens.

I only just talked about Backstories by Simon Van Der Velde last month, when I featured it in Novel Discoveries. I’m not actually all that compelled to read it anytime soon, but it was only about $5 for the ebook and 30% of the proceeds go to causes including Friends of Earth and Stop Hate UK, so I decided to pick it up for the sake of those, for what that’s worth. I’m still pretty intrigued by the premise too, being about famous people without directly telling you who there are. For some reason I suspect that when I do eventually read this, I won’t be able to identify anybody. I don’t know why, just a feeling.

I also bought these three volumes of the Godzilla: Kingdom of Monsters series by Eric Powell et al, which were on sale in the wake of the Godzilla vs. Kong coming out. I have a weird, if limited, history with this series. I tried collecting the issues as they were coming out many years ago, but for some reason my local comic shop at the time only managed to get me something like issues 1 and 4, then nothing else. So I wanted to have read these ages ago, but didn’t get to. Welp, I’ve got all three volumes now, so I can dive in whenever I want.

Novel Discoveries

A little light on the “novel discoveries” this month. Excellent Sheep by William Deresiewicz is a book I heard about from Instagram of all places. Somebody made a video responding to a prompt about “books that have changed your life” or something to that effect, and this was their answer. The book talks about flaws in the American educations system, and the ways their society pushes bright minds into the same narrow direction. It sounded interesting, at any rate, so I thought I’d shelve it to keep it in mind.

Nothing to See Here by Kevin Wilson I just heard about from another blog’s WWW post this week, though I sadly cannot recall where. It’s about a woman who becomes caretaker to twin children who burst into flames when they get agitated. It’s the sort of weird premise that immediately grabs my attention, so I wanted to make sure I remember it. You’d think it would be easy to remember a book about about combustible kids who don’t die from the fire, but I only have so much rent-free space in my head for unread books.

Closing Thoughts

I had a thought while writing about Excellent Sheep just then, which I thought would go well here. I’ve become increasingly self-conscious of how immediately interested I become in stuff about American society, despite the fact I am not American and I do not live there. Granted, it’s not like it’s a hobby, but it does make me aware of how saturated Canada is with American media and culture, even if I still feel separate from them. It’s making me want to put more effort into actually reading such content more geared towards Canadian history, society, and culture, though who can say how much effort I’ll put in; nonfiction is not what I go for most of the time. Is there anything you’re not directly related to that you find yourself incidentally drawn toward anyway?

Until next time, thank you for reading.