I recently realized that I never did a loves round-up for March! What kind of slacker am I?? Anyway, apologies to the three of you who read my blog!  To make up for lost time, I prostrate myself before you and offer you my loves from both March and April...





The Twenty Days of Turin by Georgio De Maria
This novel gave me the chills because it's incredibly prescient with regards to our current political and cultural landscape. The story is about a writer researching an event called the Twenty Days of Turin, in which strange things began to happen in the northern Italian city. A group of young men create something called The Library, in which residents of the city are invited to anonymously write down their thoughts and ideas in journals and leave them behind for others to read.  This eventually spirals out of control, with all manner of depraved notions being written and shared between citizens, and spreading like poison. The result is terrifying. If this doesn't remind you of modern-day chat rooms, it should. This one was a page turner and shook me to my core.


The Vegetarian by Han Kang
This was one I picked up after seeing it on numerous "Best of 2016" book lists. It's another disturbing book (hey, I was on a roll!), this time about a woman who decides to be a vegetarian, and the dire consequences of her decision. The story is told in three parts, and not by the woman herself, but by a few people connected to her - her husband, her brother-in-law, and her sister. It's a sad tale about what happens to women when they don't conform to society's expectations, told through food, violence, and the body. I found The Vegetarian to be a strange read, because we're rarely inside of the the main character's head. And when we do get a glimpse of what she's thinking, the anger and violence she's repressing is legit terrifying.



Wicked Weeds by Pedro Cabiya
This novel was the strangest of the ones I read during this period, but I absolutely loved it and had a book hangover after finishing. Why can't all writing be this strange, wonderful, thought-provoking and fascinating? Taking place in an area between Haiti and the Dominican Republic, the narrative revolves around a "gentleman" zombie. He doesn't stumble around with arms out front, moaning, looking for brains. No. He's brilliant - a top executive at a pharmaceutical company, in fact. He's also obsessed with trying to find his "qualia" - his sense of self - through his research at the lab.  The book presents itself as a series of writings and notes from the notebooks of one of his co-workers - Isadore  - and can be read in the order that it's organized, or in the order presented by the table of contents. Wicked Weeds is so much more than this, but it's difficult to describe it in an accurate way. Honestly, just read it!



I loooooove video games. Love love love them, and you'll only be able to rip my PS3 from my cold dead hands (yes, PS3...I haven't upgraded because I have an unholy love for this machine and its games). Lately I've been playing a lot of Skyrim which, if you aren't familiar, is a massive, open-world RPG. I have Skyrim to credit for getting me to actually ENJOY fantasy RPGs, which were never my thing before. Anyway, the epic scale of the game requires an epic soundtrack to match, and composer Jeremy Soule has done something wonderful here. He's made a soundtrack that both enhances and balances the game. Recently, I found myself humming the themes a frightening amount, and decided to pick up the soundtrack to save myself and those around me. It's fantastic and fits right in with the rest of my classical collection. There's 3+ hours of music for you - enjoy!!!