Nerd...

A brief post of supreme nerdiness:

I finished HP 5 & 6, both of which were as good as usual. A few thoughts:
I like Ginny more than I thought I did. She's a bad ass, not the boring movie version I've been thinking of for the past year.
I still think book 6 is my favorite.
I am still not at all annoyed by ALL CAPS ANGRY HARRY at all. He's angsty. So are lots of teens. I have no complaints.

I just read Cocktail Party Cheat Sheets by mental_floss magazine today. It was EXCELLENT. It reminded me a lot of Plato and a Platypus in that it is both clever and funny. It's essentially a collection of short explanations of various topics that might come up at a cocktail party- like different religious schools, famous poets, scientific theories and dead royalty. The chapters followed no logical order (the first 10 or so were alphabetical, then it became seemingly random), but each section is self-contained, so it didn't really matter. I've always loved mental_floss magazine, which I heard of through John and Hank, who both have written for it. I only recently learned that John co-wrote CPCS along with several others.
I can actually tell which sections were written by John pretty easily. That's not that impressive, since I've listened to him vlog for years, I've read all of his fictional work, and I've met him. But I'm still rather proud of it. He has such a distinct voice... an awesome distinct voice. Also, as CPCS was written around the same time as Looking for Alaska, you can tell that John was still dwelling on those themes. There are a lot of references to the last words of the historical figures covered. Boy do I love John.
Some of my favorite topics were: Miles Davis, Alfred Nobel, Kama Sutra, Martini, Tanakh and Virginia Woolf. I didn't know much about them before I read the chapters. There were a few topics that I completely understood already (like Keynes, Machiavelli, Beowulf, W. E. B. Du Bois, etc.), but the sparknotes version was still fun to read. And the jokes were funny.

Total Book Count: 60
NonFic: 19 (31.7%)