Like most who will end up reading What Happened, I found Election Day 2016 to be one of the most gut-wrenching days of recent memory. I'll never forget as the day unfolded the sinking feeling turning to absolute horror. And now we're 9-months into a Trump presidency and it's as bad (if not worse) than we expected. Over those 9 months, I've thought more then I'd care to admit about the trajectory of our country had Hillary won. 

This almost never happens but I went into Stardust expecting not to like it and came out loving it. I've read one other Neil Gaiman novel, The Ocean at the End of the Lane and really didn't enjoy it. Stardust seemed to be in a similar vein and yet I literally fell in love with the story of Stardust and the world in which Neil Gaiman presented.

I absolutely adore the concept of American War by Omar El Akkad. Not that I'm wishing for a second American civil war, but the concept of the book astounds me in how real it feels. It's 2074 and the US decides that it will end the use of oil, making it illegal to use. In this move, a good portion of the South decides to secede leading to yet another civil war. 

It doesn't happen often, but I love when it does. There's no better feeling than when you get fully enraptured in a novel. For me personally, I haven't had a novel move me the way The Hate U Give did in a long, long time. This is one of those rare novels that instantly transported me into the world of young 16-year-old girl, Starr Carter. 

In a couple of week's I'll be boarding a flight to Machu Picchu in a couple of weeks and I wanted to read a novel about it and the surrounding area. Well, I realized early on that The Lost City of Z was not referring to Machu Picchu but instead the quest to find The City of Z (also known as El Dorado). Yet, after the first ten pages, the idea of reading about one man's insane quest into the Amazon sounded intriguing so I persisted. 

Had I not been reading Dune for GamersRead I would have given up on it. It never gripped me, never made me interested, and so I'm sad to say that Dune for me was not the epic that everyone made it out to be.