Jess Reads February

I  may have gone a little Harry Potter crazy this month.  For some reason, of which I can no longer recall, something gave me the idea to reread all the Harry Potter books.  I haven't ready any of them since the last one came out in 2009.



I didn't actually read them all, but I did read books 1-5 and am a significant way through book six.  I  knocked out 5 of my 9 monthly books with just this series.

It was pretty fun and very fast reading, although I kept envisioning the movie scenes as I read instead of using my imagination of what I thought it would look like because the first time around I read, not all the movies had been made.  And I am having an internal debate about which Dumbledore I like better, the Dumbledore from movies 1-3, or from movies 4-7.

    
Richard Harris, died of cancer      Michael Gambon, the replacement
Movies 1-3                                    Movies 4-7

I lean towards Richard Harris personally.


I also read :

The Two Towers



I read book one as my 2nd or 3rd book of 2015 and then never finished the series.  Again, it's been since college when I read these last, 1999 to be exact.  We've been watching a lot of the movies lately and I thought it was time to revisit them in book format.

Spark Joy



This is Marie Kondo's follow up book to The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up.  I actually ended up buying this book because I was 22nd on our library's waiting list.  Then the day it came in the mail the library copy was mine because our library system allows those in a specific library to have first dibs on the book before those requesting the book from outside it.

I'll probably do a separate post since the KonMarie method of tidying is pretty much sweeping the nation right now.

But I will say that if you can only buy one of her books buy the first one.  Spark Joy was good, but Life Changing Magic was better.

On the Path of the Immortals



All right, this one is a bit strange, to say the least.  It focuses on ancient peoples and their many references around the world from different cultures that claim to have seen giants, unexplained lights and other strange hybrids of animals, and humans.  They focus on researching these cultures that have no known links to each other, and also link it with thoughts on unidentifiable things seen today. President Jimmy Carter filed a claim that he saw a UFO, as did several US and Russian Astronauts as well as Walter Cronkite, Alexander the Great and Christopher Columbus (both of these saw strange, round lights hovering and moving in the sky, a very common occurrence that continues to this day), to name a few well-known people.  This book is actually written by two Christians who research the sightings and cultural references with the view that these types of activities are mostly likely demonic related.

Weird but definitely interesting.  I wasn't smart enough to follow some of the physics like string theory and different dimensions that have been proven mathematically correct and how that factors in to some of these things, of which they delve into with some frequency.

I read 8 books for February, coming up short of the 9.3 I need to read to hit my goal of 100 for the year.