Knives as Bookmarks

   Let's talk about one of the most notorious killers: HH Holmes, the man with his own murder house. HH Holmes was born on May 16, 1861, as Herman Webster  Mudgett in Gilmanton, New Hampshire to an affluent family. He was fairly intelligent at an early age with an interest in medicine and he reportedly practiced surgery on animals, tick one for the MacDonald triangle. He graduated high school at the age of 16 and worked as a teacher after graduation. On July 4, 1878, he married Clara Lovering and had a son named Robert on February 3, 1880. At the age of 18, he enrolled at the University of Vermont, but after one year he left and then in 1882, he enrolled at the University of Michigan and graduated two years later. Before he graduated, Clara took his son and left back to New Hampshire, people that knew them would say Holmes treated Clara cruelly. His schemes started in medical school where he would steal corpses to make false insurance claims.           In 1885, Holmes moved to

  OH. MY. GAWD! Okay, so if you guys haven't heard about this book, I'm going to give your post-rock self a fairly new book that you are going to want to pick up ASAP. Truth be told I have no idea what the genre of this book is, it's historical fiction, but I feel like it's more revisionist historical fiction, but then there are dystopian aspects to it because there are ZOMBIES, or shamblers as they call them in the book, but holy shit you will love this book. Also, I wrote this in September (?) so this maybe a bit old.    So this book is about Miss Jane McKeene who is one of the students at Miss Preston's School of Combat in Baltimore. It takes place during "post-war" Civil War, although technically the Civil War was never finished it was... put on hiatus because zombies take priority over the Union and the Confederacy. In this alternate universe, as opposed to being slaves, African Americans are sent to combat schools to be taught how to fight the

  Keeping on the trend of "goal setting killers," let's talk about Alexander Pichuskin, although most people know him as the Chessboard Killer. Pichuskin was on April 9, 1974, in Russia and was known as a fairly sociable child although at the age of four he fell off his swing, resulting in damage to his frontal cortex. Once he was in school, he was physically and verbally bullied, which intensified his anger, and eventually, his mother put him in a school for disabled children, I couldn't find anything about Pichuskin's father just btw. Anyways, his grandfather though, was kind of his father figure and believed that Pichuskin was much smarter and the school wasn't engaging him enough so he taught him how to play chess and for a while, this was his outlet for aggression.   However, his aggression never went away and in 1992, Pichuskin committed his first murder when he pushed a boy out of a window, killing him. Pichuskin was questioned but eventually, the po

   Alrighty, it's been about six(ish) months since I talked about my "Around the World Reading Challenge," but for those of you that don't know what the hell I'm talking about, I'll give you a tldr. If you want to read the full blog post I'll leave it here: https://knivesasbookmarks.blogspot.com/2018/07/around-world-reading-challenge.html. But basically, I'm planning on reading my way around the world, so the gameplan is to read two books from every country, one in which the author is from that country and one that is set there or the main character is from that country. Now that you know what's going on, let me tell you how much I ignored this. Now, it's not like I decided to give up on this, but I just have so many books I want to read and I wasn't really paying attention to any nationalities. So let's talk about the actual update, also I won't be talking about the ones that I talked about in the first post. Countries complete

  I'm super excited to finally be doing this, so let's talk about some murder! So, I want to give some explainers first since this is the first one. One, I'm not glorifying these killers in any way, following Philip DeFranco I won't be showing the killer's face unless they haven't been caught. Two, I won't intentionally mock or blame the victim's, but of course, I can't know how other people might respond to this, so know that I'm not intentionally being garbage, I might not convey my thoughts in the best way possible, I'm still human after all. Three, reader's discretion is advised, I will be discussing murder, but I will be discussing child abuse, domestic abuse, rape, torture, etc depending on the case, I will try to label certain triggers as best as I can, but don't go crazy because I'm discussing murder.  I think that's it for right now, but to quote Small Town Murder "Shut up and give me murder!"  Let'

 I'M STARTING ANOTHER READING CHALLENGE! I know I only have one other challenge on here, but I just wrote the update for the Around the World Reading Challenge so it feels like more. Now I've only seen one person do this challenge on Youtube (I'll leave her video at the end of the post) but from what I understand basically, you read a book for each letter of the alphabet. Now, from what I've seen you pull from your physical TBR and go in order of the alphabet... and I might be changing up some rules. For one, I mostly read books from my library so I don't own most of the books I read; so for me, I'm just going to be pulling books from my Goodreads TBR (and since it's sitting at 1700+ I got some choices) and I'm not going to force myself to go in order, also I'm going to go by the first letter in the title (but not counting a or the). I'm expecting this to take no more than a few months, I'll just update this post for each book I read. A

   So I figured to start out Murder Mondays here I would talk about some of my favorite true crime podcasts. Usually, this is how I get my true crime fix since it's small amounts of true crime but they make me feel like I'm not insane for finding this stuff interesting. If you have a favorite true crime podcast that I didn't mention leave a comment down below since there are so many true crime podcasts and a lot of new ones are coming out.   Unsolved Murders, (Also Serial Killers and Cults): Now each of these Parcast podcasts talk about different things, but their titles are self-explanatory, and the episodes are fairly short, no more than an hour each, but most of the subjects are separated into two episodes, for example in Unsolved Murders the first episode is about the murder itself and the second episode talks about the potential suspects. But in the episodes not only do they provide historical or psychological context, but there’s also some old school radio dram

It's a new year, a new start, and a whole bunch of new books coming out. I'm super excited about some of these, so let's get started. An Anonymous Girl by Greer Hendricks & Sarah Pekkanen Release Date 1/8/19 Genre: Thriller, Mystery   When Jessica signed up for a study conducted by Dr. Shields, she thought she would just have to answer some questions, collect her money, and that was that. But as the study furthers, the questions become more invasive and the sessions become outings where she is told what to wear and how to act. Jessica's paranoia grows as she feels like Dr. Shields knows what she's thinking and the study starts to blur into her reality and she can't distinguish the two. I am such a sucker for thrillers, but a lot kinda have the same song and dance, so I'm always excited when a thriller comes out that strays from the usual. Two Can Keep a Secret by Karen McManus Release Date:1/8/19 Genre: YA, Mystery, Contemporary  Ell