Although I am, as usual, paranoid that there is something I’m forgetting, I believe that July has been an especially laid back month as far as book buying is concerned. By next week, I’ll be away on a trip, so I suppose the expenses related to that have helped rein me in from spending too freely on things like books. Still, I did manage to pick up a couple of things.

On to the books!

New Books

Can Such Things Be? by Ambrose Bierce was unfortunately a mistake similar to the copy of The Yellow Wallpaper I recently picked up, though I feel it was less my fault this time as this is more of a proper book with multiple stories in it. In short, it feels cheaply made and bound, which is a reflection of its price, I suppose. Similarly priced books are not so bad, though, so I don’t think that’s an excuse. In any case, I picked this book up to go a little deeper into stories of the King in Yellow, as the first mention of such a figure/idea is contained here in the story “An Inhabitant of Carcosa”. I’m happy to have the text available to me, but it really is unfortunate how cheaply made this is; in a room full of books, it’s the only one that the recent humidity has caused to curl.

I believe I learned about Cursed Objects by J.W. Ocker from a TikTok video. At first, I was just looking it up out of curiosity, but when I found that I could purchase a digital copy for only a couple dollars I decided to just go for it. This is probably for the best with an impulse purchase like this, as I feel like the quality of books like this can sometime be a toss-up. Still, I have nostalgia for reference books about the unusual and/paranormal, so I’m hoping poking around in it will be fun, the digital format being less accessible for that notwithstanding.

Novel Discoveries

The Past is Red by Catherynne M. Valente is another book I heard about on TikTok. It isn’t as fresh in my mind why somebody’s commentary on it stood out to me, but it is about somebody surviving on a garbage patch in a post-climate catastrophe Earth that seems to have a surprising tone of hope to it despite its setting. I really can’t remember that much, but it sounds interesting all the same.

This Thing Between Us by Gus Moreno is yet another book I learned about on TikTok (a lot of that going on this past month), though I ended up hearing about this one from a few videos. Right off the bat, I really like the cover design of this book. The story is apparently a ghost story that ties in some social/political elements and it explores the idea that it isn’t a place that is haunted but a person. I always feel a little better about knowing less about what’s going on in horror books. I feel like I’m more likely to pick this one up.

Closing Thoughts

This is a bit of a tangent, but I feel bad that July didn’t see a single book review; I did manage to finish reading Jurassic Park, but I found I had virtually zero interest in actually reviewing it. I don’t really know why that is, as I want to blame it on that fact that it’s a well-known book where a review feels redundant in a weird way, but the book I reviewed before that was American Psycho, which is much talked about in its own right. I guess I just felt like I had more to say about the latter. It perhaps doesn’t help that Jurassic Park was a reread. Can anybody else relate to what I’m talking about? Let me know how you rationalize it, help me out here.

Until next time, thank you for reading.