dear @internrachel and @julia1 and autoreaders,
I’ve read two more books since my last post! The first was Down River by John Hart, 464 pages. I had some trouble getting into this one and I’m not sure if I would have finished it if I wasn’t reading it on a long plane ride. It’s a fairly standard mystery set-up: guy accused for murder in his teen years comes back to his hometown after five years where everyone is basically like GTFO murderer. The main character, Adam, pretty much drove me crazy throughout the whole novel. Very much an “I am a Dark and Broody Man with lots of Inner Pain but in a Masculine Way”. This is why I tend not to read books by men too often. But it picked up a lot about halfway through, and the conclusion was actually surprising. I’d recommend it if you have a long flight/drive, you enjoy Southern-based mysteries, and if reading about broody men doesn’t make you want to tear your hair out.
The second book I read was The Egyptologist by Arthur Phillips, 416 pages, and it was FUCKING FANTASTIC. Definitely one of the best books I’ve read in a while, and I read a lot. It’s written in epistolary form, if you like that sort of thing. It’s got a very big plot but the main gist of it is about an Egyptologist who’s obsessed with finding the tomb of an apocrypal king. I can’t even describe why I loved this book so much because there’s too much that I loved. See, when a book is bad I’m great at describing why I hated it but when I love a book I just flail. Anyways, this book has lots of twists and unreliable narrators (my favorite) and a main character who is just one of the most fascinating characters I’ve come across in literature. He’s kind of a horrible person but he’s just so interesting that you can’t look away and by the end of it I wanted him to succeed just because…because. I can’t even. I loved this book. You should read it. I had to re-read the last 50 pages because I could not believe that what happened had actually happened. Warning: it got a little slow for me about halfway through, but keep going through it and you won’t be disappointed, or my icon isn’t of a kitten wearing a hoodie.