[rantanplan]

I'm further in my reading goals than I anticipated. If we were Villains by ML Rio is my favorite read of the year so far. As soon as I was finished, I thought that I have to re-read this because I just like it that much. But it's probably useful to get a bit into reading Shakespeare before that, so that I won't miss that many references and allegories.

I also finished Die unenedliche Geschichte / Neverending Story, because it became available on OverDrive after waiting for months. I read it as a child, and it was a wildly different read as an adult. To me, the true villain of the book is

Spoiler:

the Childlike Empress, because she forces Balthasar into the story, even though he's hesitant to do so. Furthermore, she doesn't care that for any child that gets into the Story, there's a real possibility of them becoming a mindless Zombie that can never go home. I get the fact, that the book is all about change can only come from within and Balthasar needs to take responsibility for everything he does, and he just doesn't care right until the end. He needed to learn that he's a toxic person and that all the bad traits have always been within him, he just needed to be able to finally acknowledge them.

Yesterday, I finished Herbert West Reanimator. Man, this was a bad read that was thankfully short enough. Reading a bit on Wikipedia, it seems like Lovecraft himself didn't like the book very much, and it shows that it was originally published as a serialized work. It's a pretty tame Zombie horror book, which may just be a thing of the times, and it only gains traction in the penultimate chapter, where shit hits the fan. It's also incredible racist, and I found it hard to finish the chapter with the dead POC boxer. My wife tells me, that his later works fare a lot better in that regard, whether he changed his opinion on people of color or just had to tone his racist descriptions down to improve his standing with the publishers, I cannot say.