While July felt as long as an entire season somehow, August has blow by like it was nothing. It’s weird how things work out like that. I’ve not even really thought about a lot new books this past month, buying or otherwise. This may be the most uneventful one of these that I’ve ever put up.
Nevertheless, let’s move on to the books!Read More »
WWW Wednesday is a weekly book meme run by Sam over at Taking on a World of Words. Check out her post and others over on her blog!
The Three Ws are:
What are you currently reading?
What did you recently finish reading?
What do you think you’ll read next?
I’ve made more decent progress in Dark Lord of Derkholm by Diana Wynne Jones again this week, though not nearly as much as I probably should have. I had more incidental free time than I had been planning this weekend, but I just didn’t end up dedicating a lot of it to reading. With editing work requiring so much reading on its own, it really is harder to motivate myself to read for fun. I’m still enjoying the book a lot, and it looks like a proper shift in the story is coming. Derk had to play Dark Lord for his first batch of pilgrims, who actually seemed to be outsiders bent on exposing the whole scheme from the other side, and his son Blade has gone off to lead his own Pilgrim Party, so I’m hoping things will become all the more substantive from here on out.
Yet again, I have failed. I’m not in the best state of mind as of late, however, so I hope you can forgive my more barren posts this last little bit.
I still want to start reading A Carnival of Snackery by David Sedaris soon, though I think I will have to make a more concentrated effort to read it at home, as it is a bit to big to be lugging to my typical reading haunt. I have a harder time getting myself to read at home, though, so I will have to figure things out. I still want to start Paper Girls by Brian K. Vaughn et al. too, I’ve just continued to neglect it. Maybe I will turn that around this week; I certainly guilt myself about not starting it enough. If I’m going to keep thinking about it, I might as well actually start it.
Until next time, thank you for reading! Feel free to share your own post down below.
WWW Wednesday is a weekly book meme run by Sam over at Taking on a World of Words. Check out her post and others over on her blog!
The Three Ws are:
What are you currently reading?
What did you recently finish reading?
What do you think you’ll read next?
I’m still tootling along in Dark Lord of Derkholm by Diana Wynne Jones; there’s a lot left, but I made some decent yet modest progress over the weekend all the same. The story has outdone itself in terms of surprising me with its darker elements, though I won’t get into exactly what happens. I thought it was handled with fairly deft tact though, I just hope it isn’t completely swept under the rug going forward. The endeavour to march these dark soldiers across the land still hasn’t quite wrapped up yet, so I’ve yet to get the further momentum I was hoping for in the story. I’m only a little over halfway through, however, so I’m still invested. It seems the plot to end the tours has progressed a little too, though I hope it doesn’t all come down to a breach of contract on the part of the true villain.
Once again, I have failed to read Paper Girls or anything else.
Like I’ve been saying repeatedly, I’m going to start reading Paper Girls by Brian K. Vaughn et al. soon, but I’ve been saying that for a couple of weeks now, so who can say how soon that will really be. At the moment, I’ve decided that the next book I want to start reading is Carnival of Snackery by David Sedaris. It’s not on my yearly to-read list, but I’m hoping it can make for another decent supplemental read. Those usually don’t work out great for me, but I feel like I need to try and have more than one book on the go at a time anyway. I’ve been waiting a while for the sequel to Theft by Finding too, so it’s time I finally started it.
Until next time, thank you for reading! Feel free to share your own post down below.
Top Ten Tuesday is a weekly book meme run by That Artsy Reader Girl. It’s been a while since I’ve done one of these posts, but whenever I see one that I know I can easily answer I try to post one of my own. Initially, I started to be concerned that this will be a list not unlike a lot of others. In that vein, certain obvious answers aren’t being included here. I’m sure I don’t need to once again talk about how Far-Seer is among my favourite books. So, I followed this week’s topic to the letter, but tried to pick some books that I’m fond of but don’t immediately spring to mind, just to keep things interesting.Read More »
WWW Wednesday is a weekly book meme run by Sam over at Taking on a World of Words. Check out her post and others over on her blog!
The Three Ws are:
What are you currently reading?
What did you recently finish reading?
What do you think you’ll read next?
I’ve made some decent progress in Dark Lord of Derkholm by Diana Wynne Jones this past week, though it had to share attention with a few other things. I’m still really enjoying the story; managing these tours has become a proper nightmare for Derk’s family and they haven’t even had to deal with any pilgrims yet. Factors are being introduced that complicate things further, and I’m still wondering if this will turn into a phenomenal blunder or if this is a villain’s origin story. It’s exciting not to know, though I would like a bit more momentum in the story soon. I’ve continued to be surprised by of the ideas this book is exploring too, such as the fact that the world where the tourists come from frequently sends its prisoners to play soldiers in the Dark Lord’s evil army as a means to deal with its “violent criminals”, which carries with it a lot of unsettling implications considering how many tours this fantasy land seems to host on a regular basis.
Over the weekend I pushed myself to finish reading The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows by John Koenig, which I enjoyed quite a lot. In typical fashion with my “supplemental reads”, I had to just blitz the rest of it to finally be done with it. So it goes. Reading so much of it at once actually made me a little melancholic, which I probably could have expected. It’s not about obscure delights, after all. I’m happy I was able to post a review of this book so quickly afterwards, albeit more of an informal one since it’s the sort of book that feels less my forte. In my review, I shared some words that stuck out to me, as I’ve been doing on these posts. I’ve liked doing that, and since this is the last one, I thought I’d share just one more.
This week’s word is vellichor, “the strange wistfulness of used bookstores, which are somehow infused with the passage of time—filled with thousands of old books you’ll never have time to read, each of which is itself locked in its own era, bound and dated and papered over like an old room the author abandoned years ago, a hidden annex littered with thoughts left just as they were on the day they were captured. From vellum, parchment + ichor, the fluid that flows in the veins of gods in Ancient Greek mythology. Pronounced ‘vel-uh-kawr.'”
I’ve not really cemented any further plans about what I’ll be reading next as of yet, other than getting a start on Paper Girls by Brian K. Vaughn et al., which I still plan on doing.
Until next time, thank you for reading! Feel free to share your own post down below.
The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows is a project by John Koenig that he has undertaken since 2009. Originally a blog and then a YouTube series, the author’s work culminated into this book, which was published in November of 2021. All of them created by the author, the book is a collection of new words and their definitions, which encapsulate emotions we all feel but have difficulty putting into words.
This review is going to be a little different from normal, as fiction/nonfiction is more typically my wheelhouse. I don’t feel I’m equipped to examine it more deeply as a reference book or a work of linguistics. However, I wanted to write a little something about this book anyway to share some of my feelings about it, so this is going to be a less formal review among my posts.Read More »
WWW Wednesday is a weekly book meme run by Sam over at Taking on a World of Words. Check out her post and others over on her blog!
The Three Ws are:
What are you currently reading?
What did you recently finish reading?
What do you think you’ll read next?
Here I am again after a week off! Getting this up pretty late again, though, but still happy to be here. I went on a camping trip last week, so I wasn’t able to post. I tried to get some reading done, but as is common for me on trips I did not manage to read all that much. I did make a little bit of progress in The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows by John Koenig, but only about 10 or so pages. This week’s word is allope, “a mysterious aura of loneliness you feel in certain places; the palpable weight of all the lonely people secretly holed up in their houses and apartments, with a flickering blue glow cast up on their walls—so many of whom might just want someone to talk to, or just want to feel needed, and could be that for each other if only they could somehow connect.” Short for “All the lonely people,” from the song “Eleanor Rigby” by the Beatles. Pronounced “al-uh-pee.”
I’ve also made some progress in Dark Lord of Derkholm by Diana Wynne Jones. This book really does continue to throw me for a loop, as yet another thing has happened that I really wasn’t expecting, dealing potentially permanent physical harm to Derk, who will be playing the Dark Lord of their world soon. It seems to be taking things in a direction I was speculating on though, as pain and disfigurement may very well put him on that path of becoming an actual Dark Lord, rather than just playing one for tourists. Whenever I happen to have the time, I really need to dig into this book properly and get a proper long reading session in. The tone surprisingly fluctuates in this book too, as part of me feels like it’s written for a younger audience, yet at times Jones doesn’t really restrain herself with some of the grisly details, while still refraining from being too graphic. Perhaps she just gives her audience a lot of credit.
Nothing in the past two weeks, regrettably.
I’ve still not fully made up my mind on what novel/book I’ll want to start up next, but I have decided what comic books I’d like to start cracking open. I’ve had several volumes of Paper Girls by Brian K. Vaughn for a while now, and the release of the TV series adaptation has oddly spurred me into wanting to start reading them finally. I don’t actually remember a lot of what this series is supposed to be about, other than the 1980s and time travel, but I hear so many good things about Vaughn’s work that I’m confident I will be more into it than I was with Animosity.
Until next time, thank you for reading! Feel free to share your own post down below.
I think for the first time ever I’m getting one of these up late. Unfortunate, but not the end of the world. I was on holidays last week, and though I was back home by the end of the week, I didn’t manage to set aside time to get this post in order. July was a hard month for a lot of personal reasons, so that little trip did me some good. Not going to let a post being a little late get me down.
Enough about this, on to the books!Read More »
Muse with Me 