Books

Book 639: The Music of What Happens – Bill Konigsberg

No matter how many of these I read I’m always going to ask where these were when I was in high school. Kids these days don’t know how great they have it. I’m legit laughing at myself writing that, because I know how much better things were for me when I was in high school/college than it was just 5-10 years before that.

This is the third Konigsberg I’ve read and I feel like I should read The Porcupine of Truth and Honestly Ben just to complete the novels! I have enjoyed all three of them so it’s not like it’d be the most difficult thing in the world, but I do have a lot of books on my TBR list, so maybe I should wait a little longer. Spoilers to follow, so don’t read it if you don’t want to know any major plot points.

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Books

Book 636: Bloom – Kevin Panetta & Savanna Ganucheau

[Check out my updated 2024 response.]

SO MUCH CUTENESS!!!!!!!!

Seriously though! With the second volume of Ukazu’s Check, Please! being pushed back to April 2020, I needed more adorable gay comics/graphic novels in my life so I went searching at the local library and found this one. I’d seen it at a few bookstores in LGBT young adult sections, but hadn’t given it a second thought.

Bloom is the story of Ari Kyrkos and Hector Galea. It’s a coming of age, coming out, coming together, teen rom-com type book and it was wonderful. You’ve got the meet-cute, the miscommunication, the driving passions of each of them, the drama-point, and then the adorable make-up/happily-ever-after.

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Books

Book 615: Pride – Ibi Zoboi

It took a lot of effort not to read the Goodreads comments on this one. It wasn’t that I didn’t want to, but I knew I would get mad after I read the first one and it legit said “this is nothing like Pride and Prejudice, but maybe I’m wrong because I haven’t read it in a while.”

Don’t get me wrong, there are major deviations from Pride and Prejudice, but how could there not be. The OG is set in 1797, this is set in modern day Brooklyn (Bushwick, specifically). The OG is about decently rich (aka they own land and make money from others, but poor compared to the really rich) British family and their neighborhood and this is about poor Haitin-Dominican family and their neighborhood. OF COURSE THERE ARE GOING TO BE DIFFERENCES.

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Books

Book 575: Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows (Harry Potter #7) – J.K. Rowling

I have avoided writing this since I finished it back in the middle of September.

Each time I re-read these, it’s harder to say goodbye. The next time I re-read them I either won’t blog about them, or it’ll be to retire this blog (or after it’s retired). This re-read reiterated how I absolutely would be in Ravenclaw and yet would probably sit outside the common room a lot waiting for someone to come along and solve the puzzle.

“The deserted Ravenclaw common room was a wide, circular room, airier than any Harry had ever seen at Hogwarts. Graceful arched windows punctuated the walls, which were hung with blue-and-bronze silks: By day, the Ravenclaws would have a spectacular view of the surrounding mountains. The ceiling was domed and painted with stars, which were echoed in the midnight-blue carpet. There were tables, chairs, and bookcases, and in a niche opposite the door stood a tall statue of white marble.” (242)

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Books

Book 574: Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince (Harry Potter #6) – J.K. Rowling

I wish I knew what took me over a month to write my response to this book. I’ve read it at least 10 times, if not more. I’m 95% certain not writing my response is non-book related and totally real world/job/life related, but there’s still that little bit that every time I re-read this series (and blog about it twice now) it could be the last time I read it. I didn’t realize it had been SIX years since my last read. It doesn’t feel that long!

Similar to all of my other re-reads of the series, I found myself focusing on different things. For some reason I got super stuck on the history of magic and how Hogwarts was founded in 990 A.D. and is somewhere in on a loch in Scotland and yet Scotland and England were basically at war (Wikipedia link) from the mid-900s to the late-1500s give or take a few years and a few quiet periods and even today are jostling for independence! How did the magical communities work around this, were they impervious to it?

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