Once again I bring you my quarterly reading update! These past few months have been busier with school and theatre, but I still had time to read some great books. Here are my top five (in no specific order), and some honorable mentions. 

Murder Your Employer is a hilarious novel that answers the question “what if there was a school for murderers?” It’s fast, funny, the dialogue is witty and perfectly paced in every scene. The perspective swaps feel natural, and even the side characters were likeable (or incredibly hate-inducing depending on the character). I especially enjoyed the little classified documents/letters/school papers sections. I highly recommend this novel to anyone who enjoys the technical side of murder mysteries, because it gets right into the gritty details of planning a murder, while still remaining one of the funniest books I’ve ever read. 

The Bell Jar was a hauntingly beautiful memoir thinly veiled as a novel. Sylvia Plath wrote this about her 20s, and changed the names of the characters and places. There’s a very specific analogy that stayed with me even after I finished the novel: the fig tree. The main character reads the biblical story of the fig tree, and hallucinates herself becoming the tree. Each branch holds a fig and each fig represents a direction her life could take or decisions she could make. But she thinks over which she should choose for too long, and the figs begin to rot and fall off the tree, in the end leaving her with nothing. 

Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children was right up my alley. It was creepy, tinged with historical fiction, and had a multitude of clever plot twists. The antique photos of children scattered throughout the book are eerie and some genuinely disturbing. Ransom Riggs is an excellent author, often blending the lines between gothic horror and paranormal horror in this novel. 

Lovely War was a historical romance book, with some twists. It was told through the lens of Greek gods, mainly Aphrodite, which added a lot of depth to the descriptions. I loved how each god telling the stories of the four main characters had their own unique voices and takes on the characters’ actions. Ares would interrupt Aphrodite to correct an artillery term and Apollo fixed her medical names. It’s set in WWI, and shows the pain of each person in an incredibly multifaceted way: Hazel (English nurse), James (English soldier), Aubrey (Black American army musician), and Colette (a Belgian orphan-turned-army-singer). I appreciated the detail of every single wound and obscure piece of artillery; Julie Berry doesn’t shy away from harsh descriptions. 

The Picture of Dorian Gray. Dorian Gray is an impressionable young man who makes a foolish wish: that he should never grow older. There’s a specific line of his that almost sums up the entire book “I am jealous of everything whose beauty does not die.” I really enjoyed Oscar Wilde’s witty prose, snappy dialogue, and odd but well written existential moments. This book was excellent, but there’s this strange chapter where he just goes off on tangents about obscure gems/minerals/fabrics/metals/clothing designs and their history, which was interesting but not part of the plot at all. 

Honorable Mentions: A Good Girl’s Guide to Murder by Holly Jackson, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight (translated by Simon Armitage), and The Girl of Fire and Thorns by Rae Carson.