You know when you find a good book how it makes you want to tell everyone else around you how AMAZING it was? That is exactly the point in this post. Now normally, I’d have an audience of 3-5 people; my mother, Matt, and a few random people in the checkout line at Harris Teeter. BUT. Because I have a blog, that expands my audience to at least…. 3X bigger than before.

Matt is really into Greek mythology. It was always his favorite subject whenever it came around during elementary school. I was ok with it, but I couldn’t keep track of all the gods and their different personalities/talents/Pokemon powers. That was, until Matt discovered a book series called “Percy Jackson and the Olympians,” by Rick Riordan. Maybe some of you saw the first movie? Let’s forget about how bad the acting was. The book is fantastic.

After I was done reading Harry Potter series for the 15th time (that’s not a joke), I was craving something else to read. So when Matt suggested we read the Percy Jackson series together, I figured “why not?” Well folks, it was awesome. We read the entire series aloud, all 5 books. We started in January or February of 2010 and finished around April. I had my wisdom teeth out over Spring Break, so Matt had to read the majority of “The Battle of the Labrynth” to me, lest my jaw swell up a glue my mouth shut.

The fifth and final book, “The Last Olympian,” was the hardest. We were still doing the lost-distance thing, attending two separate universities, but we were starving to know how the series ended. So I read the last book to Matt over the phone. The rules were that I couldn’t read ahead without him, so I’d dash home from class, call him 4 times til he’d pick up, and resume where we left off.

Rick Riordan also has two more series in the works- one call “The Kane Chronicles,” based on the Egyptian deities, and another called “The Heroes of Olympus.” It’s sort of an extension of teh Percy Jackson series, but with different main characters. And the next book in the series comes out in less than three weeks on October 4th!

If you’re a Harry Potter fan and haven’t checked out the Percy Jackson series, I definitely recommend it. It’s a different kind of awesome, but similar enough in genre that people who get caught up in the alternate world of Hogwarts will really enjoy the woodsy goings-on of Camp Half-Blood.

Happy Thursday!