Category: Blog

Books to Read if You Love Inhuman Characters

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Top Ten Tuesday is a weekly book meme run by That Artsy Reader Girl. This week’s topic is “Books to Read If You Love/Loved X (X can be a genre, specific book, author, movie/TV show, etc.)”, so I took this opportunity to talk about a favourite character type of mine: inhuman characters. This could be anything from machines and aliens to gods and monsters, though the less human-like the better. My focus for this list is more on the ways a character’s inhuman-ness is represented and explored in the story too, rather than them just happening to have inhuman qualities.

In putting together this, I realized that the list of books/series I could personally pull for this post was not nearly as extensive as it could be. There’s surely a wealth of sci-fi and fantasy that qualify. I really hope there isn’t something obvious from all of the books I’ve read that I’m just not remembering. At any rate, I hope you enjoy checking these out if you do, and feel free to leave any recommendations of your own in the comments.Read More »

Frighteningly Good Reads 2021 Wrap-Up 

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Though my schedule has had me a lot busier these past few months, over October I participated as much as I could in Frighteningly Good Reads, a laid back readathon hosted by Molly at Silver Button Books. Be sure to check out her wrap-up post too!

Ideally, I would have chosen a few more books to get through for the spooky season, but I tried to be a little more realistic for the amount of time I have for reading lately. As it turns out, results were oddly familiar to previous years anyway.Read More »

Ten Spectacular Spooky Reads

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Top Ten Tuesday is a weekly book meme run by That Artsy Reader Girl. This week’s topic is a Halloween freebie, so I thought I’d take the opportunity to recommend some spooky reads. Honourable mentions go to Frankenstein by Mary Shelley and The Haunting of Hill House by Shirley Jackson. They’re a couple of my favourite horror books, especially the former, but you hardly need me to tell you about them. The books I’ve selected are hardly unknowns, but I did try to be a little less obvious (for the most part).Read More »

Reading Challenge Update

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Things really can change just like that, can’t they? My life’s hardly been turned upside down, but since my last quarterly update I got a second job doing freelance editing, so I’m a heck of a lot busier than I used to be. This has been great in a lot of ways, as I’m feeling more challenged on a regular basis and my skills are noticeably improving. I don’t get to read for fun as often, however, which has had an impact on these challenges. I’m hopeful I can still complete most of them, but there is some tweaking that will need to happen.Read More »

Frighteningly Good Reads 2021

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October is one of my favourite months of the year, due in no small part to Halloween! It’s the time of year where we celebrate all that is spooky and weird, and for the past few years I’ve tried to focus my reading on a selection of horror reads during the month. Due to my busier schedule, this selection will be smaller even by my standards, but I wanted to participate in Frighteningly Good Reads again this year regardless.

Frighteningly Good Reads is a laid back readathon hosted by Molly over at Silver Button Books; be sure to check out her selection of books too! All are invited to join. If the book is scary to you, it counts, so don’t feel intimidated by having to read outside of your comfort zone.Read More »

New Books & Novel Discoveries (September 2021)

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Book buying was a little more conservative this month, though that’s also relative to last month, where I went on some sort of spree for some reason. This is at a time when I’ve been reading a lot loss, thanks to my working two jobs. Feels like the freelance editing is going well, though, so I just have to balance things better to get more reading done.

Enough carrying on, let’s get to the books!Read More »

Books on My Fall 2021 To-Read List

Ryan2 Comments

Top Ten Tuesday is a weekly book meme run by That Artsy Reader Girl. I can’t believe I have to start thinking about my Fall to-read list already. I did a decent job getting through the Summer list I posted, but some cuts had to be made as my schedule suddenly got busier.

It was pretty easy to conclude what I’d need to be getting to this season, as I still have a handful of personal reading challenges that need finishing up. Since autumn lasts until nearly the end of December, these are essentially the books I mean to get to between the start of October and the end of the year.Read More »

Books Guaranteed to Put a Smile On Your Face

Ryan2 Comments

Top Ten Tuesday is a weekly book meme run by That Artsy Reader Girl. For this week’s post, I’m afraid I may have bungled my interpretation of this week’s topic. I read it as referring to myself, but topics in the past used first-person references for that. Oops…

Maybe these books will put a smile on your face anyway, but when I put together this list before I started actually writing this post, it was under a different pretense, so take that for what you will. My specific criteria for these were books that I still think about, maybe just an aspect of or moment from it, that makes me laugh or feel some facet of joy. Maybe both, who’s to say, but for some of these they’re smaller, fragmentary things that have stayed with me.Read More »