Most of this book was a slog. The final sprint really did pack a punch and I loved that friendship was the ribbon that pulled the whole story together. But there was way too much info-dumping to make it actually fun to read.

Naturalism and atheism and a memoir and a discussion of the meaning (or lack thereof) of life? You could not keep me away from this book! I really liked the audio. Miller does a beautiful job of interspersing information from her own life to add value and depth while discussing the history of taxonomy in general and David Starr Jordan in specific. (Also, I'm definitely on team murder for this one.)

Genuinely can't believe how much I'm enjoying these. Such crisp, clear, evocative prose. And also really puts life into perspective.

This was a very lackluster start to spooky season but that is why I start early. I listened to the audio which wasn't great; it was difficult to tell when the timeline switched so I kept having to stop what I was doing to see what time I was in, and the narrator's voice was bland. It took too long to get into the supernatural stuff and by the time it did, I didn't care anymore. I liked the idea but the execution was just meh.

I was a little nervous since I didn't love the third book, but this was better than I could have imagined! Maberry did such a brilliant job bringing us from Benny Imura's tender and immature mind in the first book all the way through to a promising young man in the last -- all while never failing to let his female characters shine. And shine they do. Nix, Lilah, and Riot are three of the most badass young women I've ever had the pleasure to read about.

This book does the near impossible: wraps up a four book arc with moments of joy and moments of profound sadness, offers a plausible and satisfactory explanation for the zombie plague and its origins, somehow manages to increase the already impossibly high stakes, and shows us what humanity can be capable of when we work together--and learn what we are capable of.

When I teach yoga, I love to have my students get into the same pose in a few different ways throughout class. For example, our warm up might start with low lunge, then lifting from low lunge to high lunge, then a bigger shift from down dog to high lunge. I like the way the pose becomes different based on how you arrive at it, even though it's technically the same.

I felt the same way reading this book. These are all ideas that I've found many times over while studying yoga and meditation and other forms of self-work, but Rubin is bringing them to the reader from the perspective of a musician and creator. It's beautiful that we are all looking for the same connection with what he calls Source and I call the universe and someone else might call god. We all want to express ourselves and feel seen.

Take a deep breath. Make your art. Let it consume you.

This was terrible. I finished it because I thought the plot was going to thicken, but it never did. Flat, insipid characters, egregiously slow pacing, and a weirdly ambiguous ending that followed dozens of pages after the final conflict. I genuinely can't think of anything nice to say. This was my first and most likely my last kindle first reads book.

This was so bad it was almost worth reading but I abandoned it at 34%. You cannot expect me to believe that anyone drinks Jack Daniel's on the rocks, especially a man who is as posh as I'm supposed to believe Thierry is. But the two unbelievably terrible sex scenes were what made me give up.

This book is 90% high fantasy politics, so if that doesn't interest you (it does not interest me) I'd steer clear. Also Maia is extremely irritating.