School is out, the children are free, the weather appears to be playing in reverse (gotta love climate change, sarcastic, sarcastic), and I have time to read and also to review. Guess whose plan to write one review a month didn't work out? Yeah. I was positively beaten over the head with schoolwork as a sophomore, and I expect that junior year will be even more forceful. So that's eaten up my time for reading for fun and subsequently reviewing what I have read. The other reason for why I don't review nearly as much as I used to is that I listen to an obscene number of podcasts now. I started with Welcome to Night Vale in the fall of 2015, but last summer my subscriptions sort of...exploded. Wildly. And then kept exploding throughout the last year. So I've been spending a lot of my free time listening instead of reading. And who knows, you might see podcast-related things begin to worm their way into In Which Much Concerns Words before too long...
Since I would prefer to avoid dredging up memories of the laborious days of second semester by full-out reviewing the books that I read during that busy time, I'll just give you a nice round-up, shall I?
Okay, I said "books." If we're being honest (and not counting what I read for school), it's more like "book." Or "book that I only finished after school was out." I genuinely read Goliath by Scott Westerfeld from mid-February until mid-June. Just thinking about it is exhausting. I have never been so happy to finish a book in a very long time. Now, I don't have much to say about it. It was a lot like the previous two books, Leviathan and Behemoth. I was moderately frustrated because I still feel like this is actually a series about a non-binary soldier and their bisexual prince boyfriend only Westerfeld made it disastrously straight and cisgender. Otherwise I liked it. Yay, we're done. (Can you tell I am tired of this book.)
I suppose we could also make some forays into what I read for school. We read A Tale of Two Cities, which definitely deserves a mention because DICKENS. It was absolutely amazing, and I highly recommend that you read it if you haven't already. I had great fun finding evidence that Sydney Carton is queer, which I then wrote my in-class essay on, much to the interest and delight of my teacher ("how very postmodern") and my friends ("YES"). Then I read The Bluest Eye by Toni Morrison, which was wonderful and horrifying. I also recommend that one. Our final book of the year was the dubious Cry, the Beloved Country by Alan Paton, which is full of yummy gender roles and clueless racism. Good as a piece of literature, and good for critique. It was really only tolerable because we liberally (in two senses) critiqued it in class. I do not recommend that one.
This summer, I plan to create fictional languages, go outside, dance, visit family, see friends, study astronomy, and do some slightly less interesting but necessary things, such as earning money, scouting out my junior service project, and taking Health 2. And I certainly, certainly plan to read and get back on track with reviews, at least until I disappear once again into a whirling tunnel of school and Science Olympiad and have nihil temporis ulli.