December 3 - December 9

One More Thing: Stories and Other Stories  by B.J. Novak
I don't remember when I stumbled upon this, but it's been a while since I first heard of it and my interest was piqued. Of course I wanted to read what the actor who played the ambitious-but-useless-hipster-of-pretention character from The Office was actually capable of doing. And my conclusion is DAMN is he capable! This just makes it that much more hilarious that he's actually a fantastic and imaginative writer when his best known acting role is for someone who couldn't write (or do) anything. I don't often read short stories or collections, but I'm glad I made an exception for this! His style varies widely so you get a different experience every time. This was good because I always got something new and exciting, but sometimes I loved what I'd been given that I wanted to get more of it and see how it would work in other ways. Definitely highly recommended though, and especially for people who aren't really interested in reading. These are varying lengths for when you have time, keep you from getting too bored, and cover a huge range of topics to give enough choices that there should be at least one that catches someones eye.

The Art of War by Sun Tzu
Okay, so it's a little weird that I went for this. I was honestly looking for a short audiobook on youtube that I could listen to while I had a fairly repetitive and lengthy task to accomplish at work. I ended up with my trusty Librivox version of The Art of War. I honestly didn't know what to expect, but the book is exactly what it says it is: a description of wars and how to win them. I definitely did NOT expect it to be so literal.

This is popular as a business-person high-risk-career book, and I'm not really sure why. Sure, some of the advice you can sort of translate to a fast-paced modern-day workplace, but when it starts discussing the best way to organize your carriages and what exact provisions to take to certain climates... well, maybe that's not so applicable anymore.

What irked me most was the startling naivete or ignorance of external factors. There are multiple statements made that I feel are unfair in their expectations and deliberately ignore the uncontrollable aspects of this world. For example, there was an aphorism that was, as closely as I can recall, "Do not make any mistakes and you will win the war." WELL... yeah. Obviously that's the goal. But if mistakes were that simple to avoid, they would never happen! Additional pieces of advice like "Don't let yourself get into an unfavorable position" are, again, really not that helpful and kind of annoyingly simple. No shit, Sun Tzu. If I do everything right, then I'll win. Definitely merits writing that down.

China Rich Girlfriend by Kevin Kwan
The followup to the first book nominated for a 2017 Goodreads best book award, this book was a delight! I was impressed with the author's ability to parallel the first book comfortably while not just rewriting the same plot in a slightly different manner. The author gave us some issues that I was genuinely surprised by, but not because they weren't believable, but rather that they weren't predictable, which is super appreciated. All in all, very satisfying! I'll have to be patient until I can get the next one!

Cupcakes, Trinkets, and Other Deadly Magic by Meghan Ciana Doidge
I'm pretty sure I picked this book up for free in one of the weekly deals I receive, and it just kind of sat around waiting for a day when I ran out of all my other books. Well, I recently had to really hit the gas on what I was reading to meet my yearly goal and I figured this would be a quick, if not terribly great, read. I was definitely surprised by what I got, but that's probably because my expectations were pretty low. The morals in this book were perfectly gray, and I really appreciated that. There were some interesting new dynamics added to the usual lore characteristics of the supernatural (zombies are super strong and can pretty well take out a vampire? that's a new one to me). I just kind of plodded along with this, and while it was okay, I got to the end and thought "You know, I could just stop here." I wasn't really that excited to continue with these characters. And yet...

Trinkets, Treasures, and Other Bloody Magic by Meghan Ciana Doidge
I still picked up the next book pretty quickly for two main reasons: it was available at the library, and I was trying to meet my reading goal for the year. Not the best motivation, but whatever. It did take me a while to start this one though, too. There were some SERIOUSLY predictable moments that I was deflated by. Some standard cliches used. I really love when authors have the balls to kill a character and make them stay dead. But nope. Anyway, by the very end this actually did surprise me once, but the turn it took made me think that the next book will be radically different from what we've had... which doesn't really excite me. It's probably for the best, since what I've had hasn't really excited me either, but I have no idea if I'll ever actually continue this series. Maybe next December when I hit crunch time again.