A current picture of my nightstand. I thought not working would give me some time to catch up on my reading but the pile just keeps getting bigger. The stars have aligned somewhat this past week, however, and I have finished reading a bunch of books in rapid succession. At least for me. You know how on Overdrive if you're reading a book and it expires it just goes away? Finally got a bunch of those books back that I was already mostly finished. Anyways. What follows is a list of the books I've read this month, but before I forget I made The Ursus Verses available for Overdrive collections, so if you have an Overdrive account through your local library could you take a few minutes to recommend it to them? That would mean a lot to me, thank you.

Ok. The books.

First up, The Genius of Birds, by Jennifer Ackerman. Birds are dinosaurs, right? Old news though. They are also geniuses. This book explains how. I have a newfound respect for Chickadees but also a newfound disrespect for sparrows. Go away sparrows! 

1990 was one of the best years ever, as far as I'm concerned. Many of my favourite albums of all time came out that year. Happens to all of us when we are 15 or 16, yeah? But in my beloved genre of heavy metal it is widely acknowledged that many of the genre's best offerings came out that year. Persistence of Time. Seasons in the Abyss. And Rust In Peace. Absolute masterpiece. Masterpeace. Anyways Dave Mustaine put out a book about the making of this seminal Megadeth album. Every metalhead knows Mustaine was kicked out of Metallica for being a junkie but I had no idea he only just got clean right when they went to record RIP. He was such a mess it's kind of amazing Rust is even coherent let alone the absolute monster it is. But him and Dave Ellefson did manage to get cleaned up and the rest is history. If you're not a metalhead this won't be of any interest to you whatsoever. 

I really like N.K. Jemisin. Her book The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms was excellent, so I was glad to read the sequel, The Broken Kingdoms. Quite a different book than the first one, but still really engaging. I think there's yet a third book, and of course then I can tackle her other series. I also read her book about New York City earlier this year. She's the best.

Another series I enjoy has been Theodora Goss' Athena Club uh, I always forget the actual series name. Started off with The Strange Case of the Alchemist's Daughter and the third one, that I just read, is The Sinister Mystery of the Mesmerizing Girl. The series is about the daughters of all the famous Victorian-era monsters. Mr. Hyde, Dracula, Frankenstein and so forth. Sherlock Holmes is in it- though he is not the star. Good books! I first discovered Goss in an anthology- a short story that I enjoyed so much that I immediately looked her up on Twitter and discovered her first book was coming out. I wish I could now remember what the short story was! I'd love to reread it.

One day earlier this year a package arrived in the mail, unlooked for- always the best kind! My brother-in-law's family, so Pallas and Naia's cousins, had sent us a book they really enjoyed. We had just outgrown our habit of reading aloud to the kids every night- we now read together but each their own book. I think my brother and sister-in-law read it to their kids that way. It's called The Green Ember. It's about rabbits, and is slightly easier to read than Watership Down, a book I read as an adult and had a hard time with. It was really dark, as I recall. The Green Ember is not as dark, though certainly has that fairy tale non aversion to violence, if that's fair to say.

Alright gotta go get some reading in. Ahsoka arrives tomorrow!