It had some genuine surprises and yet left me feeling like the entire journey was worth every page. Although the last book wasn't near as good as the second, I love the world that Pierce Brown created and its one that will stick with me for a long, long time.

It's really profound and for that reason alone I really loved my time with The Illustrated Man. 

I'm ashamed to say that during High School I made the grave mistake of using cliff notes to get through reading Fahrenheit 451. I did that for most books in High School and College and am just now going back and reading the for the first time. Like Orwell's 1984, Fahrenheit 451 is as relevant if not even more so in today's culture. 

I love novels that tell narratives through multiple perspectives. I think back to when I first started George R.R. Martin's A Song of Ice and Fire novels and getting lost in certain character stories and hurriedly rushing through others. Six of Crows is a novel told through, you guessed it, six different characters perspective. But before the book gets there, it starts with a prolonged prologue to set up the world that nearly had me put the book down. The entire first quarter of Six of Crows I found to be both dull and confusing.

For the first time in 2017, I'm incredibly conflicted about a book I read. Homegoing, the debut novel from Yaa Gyasi is far and away the most well-written novel I've read so far this year. The way in which she so eloquently weaves the narrative with the setting was often breathtaking. And yet, for the majority of Homegoing, I found myself drifting along without a real sense of direction or purpose.

After reading Ben H. Winters trilogy, The Last Policeman, I became cautiously optimistic about his latest venture Underground Airlines. On the surface, it's a novel that takes place in an alternative history where the Civil War didn't take place, and slavery wasn't abolished. Instead, it was relegated to four southern states. To avoid war a new set of amendments were added to the constitution that made it impossible to abolish slavery without basically disbanding the entire constitution. A compromise to avoid the Civil War.