When we left off, 27 days ago, I was at 38 books for the year out of my goal of 52. Since then, football season started, I got back into a regular treadmill routine, and I went out of town for a long weekend, and all of this added up to a ton more books.
39/52: Survive the Night by Riley Sager: Charlie needs a ride home from campus back to Ohio for the December break, and Josh is putting up a poster on the ride board right when she is. Happy coincidence, right? But there's something a little off about Josh. He won't show Riley the inside of the trunk. His story keeps changing and is full of holes. He seems determined to drive her somewhere, very quickly, and Riley starts to wonder if maybe, in leaving campus, she hasn't quite left the Campus Killer who murdered her roommate behind. This was suspenseful and twisty and very enjoyable.
40 and 41/52: Goal Lines and First Times and Line Mates and Study Dates, by Eden Finley and Saxon James: The last two books in the college hockey gay romance series I was reading. Again, they're pretty much the same book over and over, but they were very entertaining on the treadmill. Maybe I should go back and finish the 50 Shades trilogy.
42/52: The Only Good Indians by Stephen Graham Jones: Ten years ago, four American Indian men slaughtered a herd of elk on land reserved for the tribal elders, and left the carcasses to rot. Now, something is coming back for them and their families, looking for revenge. This was a little different, but still good and spooky.
43/52: Bath Haus by P.J. Vernon: Nathan and Oliver seem to have it all: a dog, a townhouse, a happy relationship, but when Oliver visits Haus, a gay bathhouse, while Nathan is out of town, things go horribly awry and Oliver barely gets out alive. Now he's caught in a game with a killer, and his lies are stacking up and about to topple. Can he save himself, his family, and the perfect life they've built? And will he want to? The tone of this book reminded me a lot of Scott Smith's books, where one thing goes wrong and bad choices keep stacking up the problems. It was a good read.
44/52: Burnt Offerings by Robert Marasco: Amazon suggested I read this, and since I've seen the movie a bunch of times I figured why not read it? A small family gets out of New York City for the summer by renting a vacation home that seems too good to be true. The sprawling mansion upstate rents for the entire summer for less than a month of their apartment, and the only caveat is that they must bring food upstairs every day for the lady of the house, who keeps to her room and won't be any trouble at all. It's a slow burner, but a decently distracting read.
45/52: The Suicide House by Charlie Donlea: Deep in the woods on the grounds of an elite prep school is the Suicide House, an old former faculty residence that the students now sneak into for late night parties. A year ago, a teacher murdered two students in the Suicide House, and now the other students on campus keep returning to it to kill themselves. What's happening at the prep school, and what does it have to do with a mysterious secret student society on campus? Is there a way to win the game, and survive? This was a decent mystery, but deeply exploring all the personality quirks of the various police distracted from the plot more than it enhanced it.
46/52: Fledgling by Octavia Butler: An interesting vampire novel with an uncomfortable undercurrent of pedophilia. Based on how the novel unfolds, you can argue that it's not pedophilia, but putting your vampire in the body of a preteen and having it have sex with multiple adults sure looks like pedophilia. The novel, like I said, is interesting, but there's a strong undercurrent of uncomfortable.
47/52: Haunted City by Joy Dickinson: Subtitled "An Unauthorized Guide to Magical, Magnificent New Orleans of Anne Rice" there's a lot of meticulously researched history in here but not a lot of Anne Rice. If you want a building by building history of every structure in the French Quarter of New Orleans, this is the book for you. If you want discussion beyond a sentence or two of how these buildings and locations shaped Rice's most famous works, then you should pass on this.
48/52: In Calabria by Peter S. Beagle: Claudio lives alone, by choice, in a hillside estate in Calabria. His only regular contact with others is his weekly delivery from the mailman, and he likes it that way. Claudio's peaceful days of writing poems and caring for his animals are interrupted when he receives a strange visitor: a pregnant unicorn chooses his farm to give birth. A chance sighting during the mail delivery leaks Claudio's news to the world, and his solitude is broken by reporters, gawkers, helicopters, and other, more sinister forces. Can he protect his life and the life of the unicorn from the overwhelming attention of a world looking for a miracle? This was short, but thoughtful.
49/52: More Happy Than Not by Adam Silvera: Adam Silvera will break your heart. I know this each time I pick up an Adam Silvera book, but I read them anyway, because they're good, but they'll break your heart. In this one, Aaron struggles to recover from his father's suicide, and his own attempt soon after. His girlfriend and his friends are trying to help, but he's also growing closer to Thomas, a new boy in the neighborhood, and conflicted about his feelings toward Thomas. With so many things making him unhappy, Aaron wonders if the controversial new memory-altering procedure from the Leteo Institute is what he really needs to find happiness, by wiping away everything that troubles him.
50/52: Killing Is My Business by Adam Christopher: This is the second book in Christopher's "Ray Electromatic" series, featuring the robot private detective of the same name, who is also sometimes a robot assassin. Ray's dual roles have him playing both sides of the same case in this book, which moves very quickly. I breezed through it in an afternoon, but it was still atmospheric and fun.
51/52: I'd Die For You by F. Scott Fitzgerald: As I read these 18 lost and previously unpublished stories by F. Scott Fitzgerald, I got the sense that I'd read them before, and think maybe I did read the hardcover when it came out. Ether way, most of them are still a good read if you like Fitzgerald.
52/52: More Than Enough by Elaine Welteroth: This memoir felt like it was missing something. Welteroth is most famous for being the first woman of color to be named editor in chief of "Teen Vogue", but the book seems really scant on covering that part of her life. I was surprised to see that this won awards, but hey, good for Elaine Welteroth, I guess.
