Once again, I find myself wracking my brain about what I’ve purchased this month. I could have sworn that some book or other had been preordered a while ago and it arrived earlier this month. Apparently that is not the case, as I’ve picked through the books lying around and found nothing. Nevertheless, it has been another rather big month, though unique at the same time, as I usually don’t buy a lot of one series at once. I guess I kept looking for anything else I might have bought because I wanted more than one thing to talk about.

Enough vague waffling, on to the books!

New Books

As you can see, I bought quite a few volumes of Berserk by Kentaro Miura. There’s only one more volume that I need, in fact, and then I will have the entire series so far. I decided to push myself to buy these because I became determined to finish reading the series, convinced at the time that 41 was the final volume. Apparently, it actually isn’t; the impression I’ve gotten is that it’s just the final volume that Miura worked on before his untimely passing. The information is honestly a little vague, at least from what I’ve seen, though I’ve not researched it exhaustively. I’ve heard tell there will be a 42nd volume, and that’s enough for me to say I was wrong. Nevertheless, if I’m not finishing it, I’m at least going to be caught up before the end of the first quarter of 2023; that is my short-term reading goal at the moment, and I seem well on my way to meeting it.

I went to a thrift store with some friends yesterday, which is where I decided to pick up The Pull of the Stars by Emma Donoghue. I’ve read her book The Wonder before, which I really liked, and this book seems to be in a similar vein to that one, so I decided to pick it up. Admittedly, I also just wanted another book to talk about other than Berserk. I love that series, but that is an awful lot of one thing. For some reason, I’m not inclined to read Donoghue’s book Room, though a copy of that was available there too. I know the core idea of what it’s about and just don’t feel like engaging with that.

Novel Discoveries

What If? 2 by Randall Munroe is a book I was very excited to discover exists. I read the first one quite a while ago now, but I absolutely loved his ability to seriously answer ridiculous hypothetical questions with serious science and still make it fun and engaging. The only impasse I have with this book is that I only own the ebook of the first one, but I liked it enough that I would buy the physical version of this…but then I will want a physical copy of the first book. This really is too much, sometimes.

I must be perfectly honest: I haven’t the faintest idea what Veniss Underground by Jeff VanderMeer is about. Goodreads told me about a giveaway and I decided to enter it. I’ve enjoyed the small amount of his work that I have read, but honestly I haven’t really read enough to say I’m a fan of his yet. Still, if I do become more of a fan this will no doubt be one I’ll want to check out.

I believe I learned about Night Terror by John Kenn Mortensen on social media somewhere, but I can’t really remember. Nevertheless, I love the author’s illustrations, enough that I bought his art book Sticky Monsters a number of years ago, so I’m happy to pick up yet another book collecting the artist’s work. At first, I thought this was maybe a graphic novel, but it seems that I was wrong. Nevertheless, I would like to add this book to my collection some day.

Stone Blind by Natalie Haynes is another novelization of Greek myths, this time about Medusa the Gorgon, “the original monstered woman.” A great many books like this by different authors have caught my attention in recent years, though I’ve only ever read the work of Madeline Miller so far. Haynes has caught my attention more than once too, but I have a particular interest in monsters, so I’m especially interested in checking this book out.

Closing Thoughts

This has been a particularly odd month, as it seems that the only other post other than WWW posts that I’ve managed to put up was the last one of these that I did. I honestly have no idea where the time went, as it doesn’t feel like I’ve let all that much of it pass me by. At any rate, I’m hoping I’ll be able to turn things around a little next month. At the very least, I’ve got a review of Wolf in White Van by John Darnielle in the pipeline, which should be up within the next week or so. Once I catch up with Berserk, perhaps I will do a little retrospective on my thoughts on that series as well, any sort of proper review feeling too unrealistic for me.

Until next time, thank you for reading.