wow wow wow! this collection of 4 short stories has received TONS of hype and had had 3 of its 4 stories adapted into movies. It did.NOT disappoint. It is the first entire short story collection of King that I've read and I can't wait until my next set of adventures!

all my friends who love serial killers AND graphic novels really need to get these. I started reading them last year and I'll finish this weekend. LOVE this series and the illustrations are dope!

The End of the Fucking World is a graphic novel by Charles Forsman that, on the surface, chronicles a young sociopath boy and his girlfriend as they embark on a small road trip to escape the mediocrity of their lives at home.  I decided to take a chance and buy the hardcover of this because I found out it was going to be a British TV show on Netflix.  I am always "that guy" who has to read something before watching it (mainly so I can be a judgy bloke and feel all worldly and pretentious because I read).

The story starts with James sort of coming into the world and nothing goes right for him (and he's also quite a downer on himself).  After some time passes, he meets innately co-dependent Alyssa, they start dating, she wants him, he pretends to love her, he eats her out, and then the journey begins.  Each "chapter" sort of switches back and forth from their different points of view, and we are able to see the typical teenage experience through two sets of eyes.

James does a lot of things that make your inner Dahlmer or Bundy senses start to tingle, and you are intrigued to see just how far he will go. And he goes far, let me tell you.  It seems that the end of each "chapter" left me a little more gaspy than the previous one!  His extremely violent fantasies becomes realities and poor Alyssa is just ignorant, naive, and clearly in love.  She plays that girl who loves a boy who doesn't know how to love anyone or anything.

The story read quickly as it has basic dialogue, maybe six to nine stills to a page, and the illustrations are black and white and extremely simplistic and minimalistic so there is not a lot of fluff to distract you.  Forsman does a great job pairing the dialogue with the simplistic drawings to evoke all those teenage feelings of dark anger and deep frustration.  TEOTFW takes us all to a darker part of humanity and it kinda made me wanna stay there!

I am gonna give it 4 out of 5 stars and I am READY to binge the hell out of this on Netflix now!

Certain Dark Things by M.J. Pack is my first completed short story collection for 2018.  While I wanted to love this and all the dark, twisted stories in it, I came up at the end giving it 3.5 stars out of 5.  There were a couple stories that I absolutely loved and thought were incredible, but most of them were just okay and a couple relied too heavily on that last sentence or paragraph “twist.”  I listened to this on Audible because it was free a year or two ago.  I think I may have given it closer to a 4 out of 5 had I read it because the narrator was a little monotonous for me and there were a lot of female leads in the stories and he did not really change his voice at all, causing a little confusion at times.  Some of her tropes, mannerisms, and sayings are a little repetitive as the you progress through the stories, too.  BUT, this IS the debut short story collection from M.J. Pack, and I can really see her growing as she refines her craft and gets deeper into that spot between the shadow and the soul.  She knows how to choose topics that can get under your skin and make you cringe: rape, incest, spree shootings, etc. 



My FAVORITE story was one about telepathic twins.  Twins fascinate me; I am not sure why I am so obsessed.  Perhaps because my twin niece and nephew just turned three on January 4th, the same day that my best friends welcomed IDENTICAL twin boys into the world, too (is this not the craziest small world?!  And do I need to mention that the mother was our officiant and said twins were in her belly at the time, too??!)   But the way twins can supposedly communicate with each other differently, have been reported to feel things/emotions of the other twin at times, etc is something that is on another level for me.  And in Pack’s short story, there is a dominant twin and a submissive twin.  The story is told from the POV of the submissive twin and, without giving too much away, the child is ready to stop playing second fiddle.

"You’re supposed to love your sister. Aren’t you? When I search my heart for that feeling I always come up empty, and yet there’s still that phantom cord running between the two of us, a kind of passageway from my mind to hers like the tunnels that ran under ancient asylums."

Do I recommend this? Yes.  Do I recommend it with the fire of a thousand suns and all the approval ratings (like I would Full Dark, No Stars by Stephen King)?  Nope.  M.J. Pack is an author that I will continue to read!

I just love when Audible has the authors narrate their comedic novels or memoirs.  They wrote the book, so they definitely know how it sounded in their minds and can give it that perfect inflection, emphasis, loudness/quietness, etc.  Unqualified, by Anna Faris, is no exception from that.  Anna does a great job narrating in this book and, as always, I came away from the book with a greater sense that she is ACTUALLY a person, too.  We get caught up in the fame and gossip of everyone that we forget they have joys, fears, pains, anxiety, etc that we do too.

"After surviving an awkward childhood (when she bribed the fastest boy in the third grade with ice cream), navigating dating and marriage in Hollywood, and building a podcast around romantic advice, Anna has plenty of lessons to share: Advocate for yourself. Know that there are wonderful people out there and that a great relationship is possible. And, finally, don’t date magicians." - Amazon summary

Like a lot of people, I was bummed to hear that Anna and Christ Pratt were separating. They are such real people that I found myself always rooting for them.  They would share glimpses into their lives on Instagram that were not 100% glamorous or staged.  So you can believe that I was crazy excited when I found out the foreword of this book was written by Chris Pratt.  I was excited to hear him narrate as I pressed play for the first time only to find out that HE WASN'T NARRATING HIS PART.  My heart broke again basically.  And it doesn't matter WHO they chose to narrate that part, because if it wasn't Chris Pratt, all I heard was Gilbert Gottfried.

But once I got into the book I was extremely impressed with Anna and begin to learn so many things!  For starters, I have been pronouncing her name wrong for nearly twenty years.  It is pronounced like "On-uh" and I was always saying it like "Ann-uh."  My entire life has been a lie now it seems.  She is from Edmonds, Washington, which is where I would absolutely LOVE to live at some point.  It is such a quaint ferry boat town just about 15-20 miles north of Seattle with the cutest "downtown" are that gives me serious Ghost Whisperer vibes!  I learned why it is called a blowjob (FINALLY!) and my mind was... well... blown!  Because we all know you don't just hold it and blow on it, so... why!?  If you really wanna know, feel free to ask me - I do not think I should share such things here!

Overall, I gave this book 4 out of 5 stars.  It was entertaining, easy to stay focused, had some great stories about some of my favorite movies that Anna is in, and her narration was great.  Sometimes a narrator can ruin the book, but not Anna.  I enjoyed this so much that I even subscribed to her podcast by the same name, Unqualified, and I will be listening to those in my free time!

Rosemary's Baby has always been one of my favorite movies and actually ranks as one of my favorite horror movies, too.  There's just something about Roman Polanski's movie that captivated me so much growing up.  I was hesitant to read the book by Ira Levin because I was so familiar with the story.  I thought I would know everything that was happening (which I kind of still did) and that I would be bored (which I most absolutely WAS NOT).   We horror book fans owe Levin a lot because the success of this book helped launch what is referred to as the "horror boom" in the literary world.  This book was also so good that in just one year after its publication the movie was made.  This may not seem like a huge deal nowadays, but in the sixties that was a feat and screamed success.

Ok, on to the book.  I just love Levin's style of writing.  It is so simple yet descriptive.  And page after page just flows together and you do not even realize how quickly you are turning them.  He knows how to write seductively in a way that makes you want to stay up super late just to finish.  He writes real people (mostly) and you want to know what happens to them.  Take Guy Woodhouse, Rosemary's husband, for example.  He basically trades his wife's womb and its future baby to some witches just to get a bigger paycheck.  He's a greedy, selfish success whore.  But we all know people like him these days I bet.  People that we think, "You are such a bastard and workaholic obsessed with climbing the corporate dick sucking ladder.  Your poor family..." I mean maybe not to that extreme, and most certainly (I hope not, anyway) not as part of some witchcraft plot.  

Rosemary. Oh, honey.  I wonder if I would be rolling my eyes and screaming at her if I was in the same time period and do not know what I know about this kind of stuff.  Like... why are you taking a smoothie from your nosy ole neighbor made with stuff you've never heard of while she watches you drink it and won't leave until you do?  Or how about when she has stomach pains and cramps for like five months and every week the doctor tells her it is only going to last for a couple of days?  And who actually believes LOSING weight after months and months is a GOOD sign?  I mean I know there are difficult pregnancies out there, but come on, Rosemary.  GET IT TOGETHER.  Girl, GIRL. Get yo'self a second opinion!!  Poor Rosemary.  She just wants so badly to have a healthy baby and I truly believe she would be a wonderful mother.  But she starts looking so pitiful...

The Castevets.  They are the epitome of the most annoying old neighbors ever.  I wanna go to Minnie, shake dust out of her cobwebby ole cooch and tell her to find someone else to manipulate, deceive, and lie to.  Why someone as nice as Rosemary and with such a promising future?  Could they really not just find some homeless woman off the streets that had no one (not that I condone that EITHER, but I mean... the lesser of two evils?  I dunno...) The homeless woman would at least have a place to live and food ready for her.  But back to the Castevets, I think we have all known some people that are like that.  Not witches, of course.  Just overly nosy and annoying.  And smothering.  And anytime we turn around they are there.  Imagine seeing this face every single time your doorbell rang... sigh...

Book gets 5 out of 5 stars from me and I will be moving on to the sequel, Son of Rosemary, soon!

While having a mini-Christmas get-together with some of my best friends, I start to meander towards their bookcase after a few glasses/bottles of wine.  I basically attacked it like Ariel would a cutlery drawer or Chunk would a freezer full of flavored ice creams.  My friend came over and started talking to me about books she liked and then her excitement grew and grew until she found her favorite book on the shelves: The Sparrow.  I was basically like, “Oh it’s your favorite?  Can I borrow it?” And so I did, not knowing a single person who had read it or even heard of it (and it came out in 1997).  I also knew nothing about the plot, I just took it.  And non-spoiler-spoiler alert: I don’t think I even read the word “sparrow” until the last like 5 pages.  After finishing, I think I would categorize it as a blend of literary fiction and sci-fi.

But, dear friends, I will gift you with a brief summary:  The year is 2019 and proof of extraterrestrial life is discovered when a listening post in Arecibo, Puerto Rico discovers singing from a far off planet (which soon becomes Rakhat).  The Society of Jesus rallies a team to go make first contact.  The story flashes forward to ~2060 as only one man returned alive from the trip, a Jesuit priest who had 10 fingers when he left and definitely not 10 when he returned.  The inquisition takes places in Rome and they want to know what happened.  The experience on Rakhat makes one question the existence of God and what it means to be human.  His faith has been destroyed and his body has been crippled and defiled.  And then we get to hear what happened.

The book is so powerful and thought-provoking that I still do not know how to put into words how I feel or what I think about it.  I can tell you that I absolutely loved it and instead of trying to explain it to people, I am just going to slap a copy of the book in their hands and make them use their own eyeballs and brain to take it all in.

One of the things I find impressive is that this is the literary debut of Mary Doria Russell.  You would never know that based on the elegance and strength of writing (is that even a term? I made it up if not.)  The way she crafts a story and creates a whole new world with things like new language, economic system, gender roles, theology, etc will blow your mind!  As a former student of anthropology ( think I had ~50 credit hours in college in various anthropology courses), I am fascinated by what she is able to accomplish in 400+ pages!

While some parts of this book can come across as heavy or difficult to understand at first, it is worth it to take the time to read slowly or re-read those parts because you definitely want to be able to immerse yourself as deeply as possible for the full effect!

My husband is a HUGE trekkie, and in knowing that, I have already been pushing the book on him and I think he will read it next.  What does Star Trek have to do with this book?  Well, any Star Trek fan knows the Prime Directive:  a guiding principle of the United Federation of Planets prohibiting the protagonists from interfering with the internal development of alien civilizations.  So, after READING this book, I can see the connection!

In my mind, this book is like a brilliant combination of Arrival, Interstellar, Avatar, and religion.  Maybe?  I don’t know why I find the need to compare it to anything at all, but I want to get as many people to read this as possible and I feel like a blend of all of those powerful movies is a good start!  PICK UP THIS BOOK!  DO IT NOW!  Easily a 5 out of stars for me as it’s a life-changing book that I will talk about for years and years.

I am not sure I am at the right place in my life to need/enjoy this book as much as others do. It all seemed a little too “Dr. Phil with lots of cuss words” to me and not very much helpful information. Maybe I have already mastered the subtle art of not giving a f*ck? In short, this novel by Mark Manson is an attempt to piss on the mentality that positive thinking yields positive results. Screw turning lemons into lemonade; he wants us to be able to stomach the lemons! We learn here that bullcrap happens and you can’t just sugarcoat it to make it seem better or coddle someone who deserves a bit of the harsh honest truth. His brutal honesty is probably the most redeeming feature of the book to me.

One of the things I did like being reminded about, however, is that there are only so many things that we can give a f*ck about. We cannot spread ourselves too thin or there will be nothing left. We have to decide what to give a f*ck about and what to just let be.

A lot of the book just seemed so repetitive and, even with the cussing and hard truths, I kept waiting for him to break out a ukulele and start singing “Kum Ba Yah” or something as hokey. It’s not that I did not enjoy what he was trying to say, it just did not seem revolutionary or ground-breaking. It seemed almost like a daily devotional with Max Lucado and a lot of f-bombs.

It was entertaining enough to continue on, but nothing really stuck with me or made me go, “Hmmm!” I was so hoping this book would slap me in the face , slap my grandma in the face, and teabag me to death with what I needed to hear. But as I said earlier, maybe I am just in a place in my life where this book was not as beneficial as it could have been a few years ago. Maybe my subtle art of not giving a fuck is to actually just not give a f*ck. Am I a No-f*cks-given Sensei? Who knows

I DO still recommend this book to people because everyone is different and each individual will view this book differently and take away different key elements and tips. I am going to settle on giving it a 3.5 out of 5 stars for myself, however, because I just don’t give a f*ck.