December Favorites: Glee, The Heroes of the Olympus, and Whatever the Actual Teenager Loved, Too!

 Check out what we did over winter break!

Never mind that our giant DIY wall-mounted bookshelf is for sure going to crash through that floor pretty soon (pro tip: when you put something super heavy in your house, you should definitely stand its legs on top of a joist, and not on top of, like... apparently nothing but 1980s-era laminate flooring...), because look how crowded it is! I needed Matt to build me MORE space for MORE books!

And he did!

Yes, we vacuumed up all those cobwebs later. We did it after we emptied all the shelves and stacked all the books up in piles! Fiction is organized into alpha by author, nonfiction is organized by Dewey Decimal, and biographies/autobiographies/memoirs are alphabetized by subject's last name. Comics are more roughly organized into alpha by series or title; same with magazines.

It's GLORIOUS now, all tidy and organized and with plenty of room for new acquisitions.

When I wasn't putting my hands onto every single book that I own, I was apparently channeling my inner teenager, because other than this interesting (and depressing) book about anthrozoology--

--I spent the entirety of December fangirling my way through Rick Riordan's Heroes of Olympus series, ending up just about as wildly obsessed with it as Syd is:

As I was nearing the end of The Blood of Olympus, I asked her what I was supposed to do next.

"Read The Trials of Apollo series," she texted me (from two rooms away, as you do).

"And then what?" I texted back, meanwhile looking for suitable Percy Jackson gifs to send her.

"Start back again on The Lightning Thief!" And then we got distracted with Percy Jackson cat memes, so that ended that.

I LOVE Rick Riordan. If you haven't read him, his world-building is on level with J.K. Rowling, only unlike her, his depictions of various social issues are enlightened, normalizing, and compassionate. There's a lot of depth in his postmodernism, making his works meaty and thought-provoking, but they never read as too dark, they're not disturbing, and you don't have to sacrifice lots of adventure to watch interesting relationships develop between the characters. 

And Syd tells me that Apollo is a literal cinnamon roll, so I'm pretty excited to start his series next!

Our public library is still closed to in-person visits, and Will is still dreadfully missing those long days she spent wandering the stacks and reading everything that struck her fancy. Here are her favorites of what she was able to scrounge up to read in December:

That Trevor Noah memoir is SO GOOD, by the way, and I've heard that it's even better as an audiobook, because he narrates it himself. Will actually wrote her final paper in her African Studies class on this book... and she earned an A+, yay!

And here's the rest of what Will read!

I finally got back in the habit of taking a long morning walk, although I now have four different routes that I take depending on where the loose dogs are on any given day, sigh. Some of the Trump signs have also come down, too, which helps me feel a little less like I'm about to be axe-murdered and disposed of in a gully. I had to stop listening to anything at all scary or suspenseful on my walks, though, because I'm already jacked up enough about dog attacks and Trump terrorists. So instead I've been binging this podcast as I walk:

It's funny and casual and the banter is pretty fun. They're still on Season 1, which I've seen all of and remember disturbingly well--I'm sure there are important facts that should actually be living in the places where all of my accurate recaps of Season 1 of Glee live!

That podcast led, indirectly, to me searching out Glee clips on YouTube, which led me to learning that there is a Vietnamese remake of Glee! I only watched the first episode, but in some places it's a shot-by-shot remake of American Glee! I found it highly amusing to watch:

Winter break was so lovely (all those Heroes of Olympus books!), that it's been kind of a bummer to get back to the real world this month, and Girl Scout cookie season is also about to start, so I'm about to have to figure out cookie season during a pandemic. That's going to be... something. 

Perhaps I should save The Trials of Apollo for a post-cookie season reward?