Artemis Fowl series

Instead of posting about the books I've read in the past four months (I don't remember enough of them to give good reviews), I'm going to write about the books I've read recently!

I first read the Artemis Fowl books back in elementary school. I first encountered it through my cousin, who was really into the series at the time. I don't think I read them in order though;; And neither did she. We had a copy of the first book up at our great-grandparents' house one time and I sat down and cracked the code that ran along the bottom of the book. It was fun! It was kind of hard but it was a good kind of challenge. (The messages along the bottom of the book weren't all that interesting, though.) Anyway, I checked out the first book today for the first time in years and I'm going to see if I can do it again :)

If you don't know, the Artemis Fowl series is about a boy genius (Artemis), his butler (aka Butler, I'm not kidding), and how they get wrapped up in all sorts of mythological stuff. The series starts out with Artemis kidnapping a fairy for a ransom. And he's 12. Amazing, right? It only gets better from there.

This whole "revival" of sorts for me was out of desperation. I needed a book to read from the library but I couldn't find one that interested me enough -- I've read through most of the books in our school library that fall into categories that interest me. I was running out of time to pick, so I went and grabbed Time Paradox because I knew I liked the series. I don't think I had read it before. It was a little confusing at first to jump into the series mid-way after so long, but luckily it wasn't that difficult to get caught up.

After Time Paradox, I read The Atlantis Complex and The Last Guardian. I have to say that they were super interesting as a continuation of a book series I'd read when I was younger. It was so cool to see how Artemis had developed over the course of the series, or even between what I remembered from the first few books and what I was reading.

The end of the series was also really surprising! It was kind of sad to think that there wouldn't be more books, but I'm also happy with how the ending was written. I think it was better than Allegiant, even though you could draw similarities between both of them.

I also had to go back and fix my headcanons for the series. I know that I found the comic book so against what I had pictured in my own head that I wouldn't read them. (I want to go back and read them now, but I'm not sure where to find them OTL) I always seem to forget that Holly is supposed to have really short hair, among other things.

On an unrelated note, I ended up solving those puzzle games Cracker Barrel has at every table because I had just finished The Last Guardian and wanted to prove I could be even half as smart as Artemis. It definitely took a few tries to get it, but I actually did win once!

TL;DR I really liked reading the Artemis Fowl series and I hope I'm going to enjoy it just as much while re-reading it.