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The Sunday Post is a chance to recap the past week, talk about next week, tell you what I’m reading, and share news. It’s hosted by The Caffeinated Book Reviewer, Readerbuzz, and Book Date.

The Sunday Post #374

On The Blog Recently

• Books I Hope Santa Brings
• Books To Read In Winter
• The Challenges Of Book Blogging & How To Conquer Them
• The End Of The Year Book Tag
• I'm Not Dead. I Just Feel Like I Am.

In My Reading Life

So . . . I haven't written a Sunday Post or a book review since September. Oops. It's entirely EMT school's fault. I was attempting to go to school full time and work full time so I could pay for school. It was a terrible decision, but things have slowed down now, so let's talk about books.

I finished my 12 happy books challenge! In 2024, my goal was to read one happy book per month. It was a very good challenge. I'm trying to decide if I want to commit to it again in 2025. Do you have any book recommendations that are similar to the books below?

My December happy book was The Undertaking Of Hart And Mercy by Megan Bannen. It succeeded in the goal of making me happy because romances are always better with zombies.

Hart is a zombie hunter. Mercy is an undertaker at the funeral home where Hart brings the zombies he destroys. The main characters start off hating each other for petty, childish reasons, but as the story progresses, they fall in love, and it's adorable.

I like the author's creativity. The story is mostly a romance, but it takes place in a world full of talking animals, zombies, and gods. I'm too dead inside to enjoy a regular romance, but I can appreciate a romance with "extras." The world building and side characters make this book a lot of fun.

I think the book could have been at least 100 pages shorter. The pace really drags at times, but I still enjoyed it. This zombie romance made me slightly less dead inside.

The other book I read in December is Don't Let The Forest In by C.G. Drews. I liked this one too! It's a young adult horror novel about two teenage boys at a boarding school. One of them is a writer. The other is an artist. They love creating monsters until those monsters come to life and attempt to destroy their creators.

The body horror in this thing will give you literal nightmares. If a book can make me throw up in my mouth, I'm going to give it at least 4 stars.

Everything about this novel is intense. The characters' emotions are stuck at level 10. Even the writing style is constantly at top intensity. The characters don't fall in love. They rip their hearts out and giftwrap them. Or something like that. The nonstop intensity makes the book impossible to put down. I wanted to know how weird and twisted it would get.

The intensity is a double-edged sword because it makes it difficult to feel settled in the story's world. You never really know when or why things are happening. The characters are melodramatically emotional at all times, which makes them realistic teenagers, but also makes them hard to comprehend. I never understood why these boys are so obsessed with each other. There's a twist at the end that (somewhat) explains the lack of character development, but since the twist is predictable, it wasn't enough for me. I wanted to see the boys' relationship grow and become unhealthy. The book just dumps you into a horror/obsession situation and expects you to keep up.

Don't let that stop you from reading the book. I flew through it because I was always curious about what would happen next.

If you enjoyed The Wicker King by K. Ancrum, then this is your next read.

In The Rest Of My Life

Much has happened since we last spoke. I don't know where to start, so I'll go through the photos on my phone and see what I can find. If there's photographic evidence of an event, it must be important, right?

The moon was weird on December 15th. That's the moon! In the nighttime! It was so bright that it looked like sunrise or something.

I did EMT training at the local volunteer fire station. I got to wear firefighting gear. I do not recommend it. It's December, so it's literally freezing outside, but I was sweating and claustrophobic after approximately two minutes. I could not be a firefighter. All I could think about was how badly I wanted the clothes off. Massive respect for firefighters.

Since the fire station serves a rural area, they rely on helicopters to get patients to the hospital. I learned how to prepare a landing zone and help a helicopter land. It was fun. The flight nurses let me sit inside the helicopter and showed me how they do patient care in the air. I thought working in an ambulance was difficult. Then I saw the helicopter. OMG. The nurses can't do manual CPR because the helicopter isn't tall enough to stand in. They also can't reach the lower half of their patient's body. They just have to hope that everything is cool down there. Massive respect for flight nurses. I could never.

Someone donated their crashed car to the fire station, so we broke it even more. We practiced extrications and prying car doors open.

I love going to different neighborhoods and looking at decorations. I decided to tier rank Christmas decorations this year. People who Christmas-ify their Halloween decorations are top tier. Work smarter, not harder, right? Just cover your skeletons in lights!

More top-tier decorations. What about the bottom tier? Here you go:

I regret to inform you that the Sad Beige Baby trend has escaped from Pinterest and come for Jesus.

The opposite of Sad Beige Baby is Doing Too Much. The colorful house was blasting church choir music. If I can hear your house from three miles away, then you are Doing Too Much. You are Christmassing too hard. Also, if Christian Nationalism was a house, it would be this one.

Baby Brooklyn had a good Christmas. She got Barbies and several stuffed animals with massive eyeballs.

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Take care of yourselves and be kind to each other. See you around the blogosphere!