A lot of books

It's been a really long time since I shared a book list, and they've just kind of stacked up, so I'm going to roll right in without a lot of preamble. 

24/52: Between the World and Me by Ta-Nehisi Coates: I probably should have read this twice, but instead just went through a really slow reading where I'd absorb, think, go read some more, absorb, think, and go read some more again. It took me a surprising amount of time to read what is essentially a short book, but it was time well spent.

25/52: Home Before Dark by Riley Sager: I'm really enjoying Riley Sager's brand of horror. In this one, Maggie returns to the house where she lived as a child, and where her father claims they were tormented by demons and the ghosts of the family that was killed there. He turned the story into a best selling book that Maggie has spent her whole life trying not to live under, and now that he's dead, she wants answers. But what if the answers are that the book is actually true?

HALFWAY/52: Divas, Dames, and Daredevils by Mike Madrid: An exploration of the lost female heroes from the Golden Age of comics, I found this somewhat disappointing. Each chapter has a full comic story reprinted, in some cases two, but were somewhat light on comics history or a discussion of what these characters meant in the long run, what else they influenced, or why we should remember them now.

27/52: They Never Came Home by Lois Duncan: I found this on my bookcase, and like most of Duncan's books it's a solid suspense novel for the age group. Reading them when older, you notice a little more that the story often depends on a lot of coincidences. In this one, Joan copes with grief after her boyfriend and her brother vanish on a hike in the mountains together. What happened to them? Where did they go? And why didn't they ever come back?

28/52: The Darkness Outside of Us by Eliot Scrafer: Ambrose and Kodiak are teenaged astronauts from rival nations, forced together into a joint rescue mission, and they have a lot of questions. Why don't they remember the launch? Why does their ship show signs of other people having been inside? And why are they picking up radio transmission from earth that don't match the information they're receiving from mission command? The two of them have to work together to figure things out and survive, but can they?

29/52: Cemetery Boys by Aiden Thomas: Yadriel's family summons and speaks to ghosts, but Yadriel has never been able to participate because he is trans, and his family constantly pushes him toward the traditionally female role instead. When his cousin goes missing and is assumed dead, Yadriel takes the chance to prove himself by summoning his cousin, but instead summons Julian, the leather jacket bad boy of his high school. Now the two of them have to work together to figure out what happened to Julian and to Yad's cousin, because Yadriel's whole family is in danger.

30/52: We Keep the Dead Close by Becky Cooper: When Becky Cooper was an undergraduate at Harvard, she heard the whispered rumor about the anthropology grad student who was murdered in her apartment, her death scene ritualistically staged and a rising star professor suspected of the killing before Harvard covered up the investigation. Eventually she discovers that the murder was real, and spends years investigating the case, the suspects, the victim, and what it means to become a story instead of a person. I'll go ahead and spoil that the killer is discovered at the end, so the book isn't incomplete, but by the time you find out who the murderer was it may not matter anymore.

31/52: What If It's Us by Becky Albertalli and Adam Silvera: Arthur and Ben have an adorable meet-cute at the post office, but is that all they're destined for? What if their attempts at first dates keep falling apart? Are they meant to be together in a classic New York City love story, or are they just two guys who bumped into each other? This was very cute, and an enjoyable read.

32/52: Utopia Drive by Erik Reece: This road trip through America's mostly failed utopian communities should have been interesting, but reads like a textbook. I really wanted to like this, but it was a slog to get through.

33/52: The Night Visitors by Carol Goodman: In the same way you know what you're getting when you open a Mary Higgins Clark or Tom Clancy novel, you know what you're getting with Carol Goodman: endangered woman with a complicated past, central New York location that's referred to as upstate because it's above Westchester but really there's like seven more hours of New York state above it where the actual real upstate is, and at least one secret baby per novel. They're still interesting, and fun reads.

34/52: The Sky Blues by Robbie Couch: Sky Baker is openly gay in high school, but doing his best to be invisible and just get through his four years. At the same time, he wants to invite his crush, Ali, to prom, but his plans are shattered when a homophobic email about him goes viral at school. Now, all eyes are on Sky and he only has 30 days to decide if he's going to fight back or vanish quietly away.

35/52: Any Way the Wind Blows by Rainbow Rowell: In the final book of the Simon Snow trilogy, we say goodbye, but what does that mean? What happens after the chosen one and his friends graduate from magical school and have to be adults? Where do they go? What do they do? And who do they want to be? This was a long goodbye, but a good one.

36 nd 37/52: Power Plays and Straight A's and Face Offs and Cheap Shots by Eden Finley and Saxon James: I am reading this quartet of books on the kindle while I treadmill. It was recommended to me by Amazon as a gay romance, and... yeah. So far the books are pretty similar: there's at least one hockey player who accidentally falls in love with another guy, who may also be a hockey player, and I'm not sure how Amazon classifies "romance" or what happens in straight people romance books, but all of a sudden there are a lot of parts going in a lot of places in extensive detail and should I have been more of a hockey fan in college?

38/52: The Final Girl Support Group by Grady Hendrix: They are the Final Girls, the sole survivors of various massacres, and they meet regularly for group with their therapist until the day that one of them doesn't come to group, because she's dead. And then they're all in some sort of trouble, and threats are coming from all sides. Someone is out to kill the Final Girls, but is it someone from outside, or someone they've shared all their secrets with all along?