Okay, wow, now we're talking. Back into the Expanse world, and back into the Holden future.

After the last Expanse book, I was very very hesitant to read this one. I hemmed and hawwed about it, wondering if I was going to dislike the next one as much as I disliked the last one, and oh, that would just ruin the series for me, because I read a series until 2 in a row are bad, and then, nope, you can't recover.

Oh boy did this one recover. Loved this one. This one might have been my second favorite of the series. We follow Alex and Amos and Naomi and Holden as they have their adventures. We learn about them, their pasts, their futures, their fears.

The book still doesn't (books still don't) convey time scale well, but I think it works. We don't see how the days are filled on a spaceship (always, always, always fixing things), or how long time passes, which is fine.

Really really really liked this book, almost as much as the first one. Wheeeeeee! Can't wait for book six!

Yes, I like zombie books. My delight with the genre started with Mira Grant's Feed / Newsflesh trilogy, and has continued through a large gamut of good to crappy zombie books. This zombie book is the first of an eight book series. It isn't long, it's a fast read (all of sixty-nine whole pages), and really, would be a great first part of, say, a longer story, say of eight parts.

It follows the story of David, who is in an office building when the zombie apocalypse breaks out. The plot follows his journey home, and his family's escape.

AND I AM GOING TO COMPLETELY SPOIL IT FOR YOU, if you keep reading this.

What I find very odd about the story is that the story, as told from David's perspective, has information in it about the beginning of the zombie apocalypse and its origins that he can't possibly know, BECAUSE HE DIES IN THE END. How the f--- could he know that the apocalypse was man-made and started with lots of needles poking people if he's dead?

Okay, maybe he's not dead in the end, though getting eaten by a hoard of zombies usually means dead in zombie books. David wasn't just bitten, there are several series that discuss how "bitten" could mean zombie fever, followed by a craving for blood/flesh, but a normal(-ish) person otherwise, he was eaten. Dead. Nothing. Nada.

Yeah, so, I'm not likely to read the rest of the series. The one was a quick fun read, though.

This is, once again, one of those books that I'm unsure why I bought other than I heard about it from somewhere and thought, okay, this is a book that maybe I should read. The book is actually 7 short stories, the main one being The Yellow Wallpaper, and the reason I bought this book. This, I recalled, was the story I had heard about.

When I read the stories, I stopped after each of the stories to ponder them, get a feel for the message being sent, and well, to be honest, read the stories as if I were in English class in high school. I read them, asked the various questions, who, what, why, what is the context, what is being said, why is this important, how has the context changed over the last 100 years?

So, the seven stories:

1. The Yellow Wallpaper

   This is the main story of the collection and the one from Gilman is the most well known. It's the story of a woman who moves to a house and essentially isolated "for her health." It is a fascinating description of a woman's descent into psychosis, well written and more than a little creepy. It is also a commentary on the crappy system of isolating women "for their health" (isolation is considered torture these days), along with how society continually ignoring women's opinions in favour of men's "because men know better." I sat with the story for a bit before looking up the analyses on the story, and I hit the top two main interpretations. The other interpretations required a better understanding of Gilman's life, so I'm okay having missed them.