Words On Wednesday

Fourth Wing isn't what I expected when it was recommended to me by my favorite librarian, but I'm not mad about it. I love new book recommendations. When someone recommends a book to you, it says a lot about them. Sometimes the book doesn't fit my personal preference, but I try to give an honest attempt at any book that gets recommended to me. This is especially true for people like librarians, who tend to read a lot of books. When the librarian recommended Fourth Wing, it moved immediately to to the top of my reading list. Unfortunately, it was already at the top of a lot of other people's reading list. The five copies of the audiobook that my local library had in circulation were already heavily requested. It took several weeks before I was able to get my digital hands on it. Near the beginning, Fourth Wing comes across like pretty standard fare high fantasy fiction. There's a little drama, plenty of magic and dragons as one would expect, and just the general feel...

I tend to avoid trending books and BookTok recommendations, but I was drawn to "Thirteen Reasons Why" by Jay Asher out of a contrarian mood. I read an article that South Carolina recently became the state with the greatest number of banned books. Always one to oppose the banning of books and support the reading of banned books, I decided to look up some of the most banned books in the United States. The full list is included at the end for posterity. If you're looking for something to read, it's a good place to start. The first on the list, "The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian," seemed like a decent place to start but my local library didn't have it in circulation as an audio book. The second book (or rather, series) was "Captain Underpants." I'm not opposed to reading books intended for children , but I wasn't committing to an entire series, and the fact that "Captain Underpants" even made this list is frankly as...