I think this is the longest I’ve neglected posting one of these. October was an interesting month for reading, but despite it being my birthday month and a time perhaps for picking up more spooky reads, I didn’t do much of any book shopping, which feels weird. So, on top of things feel a bit weird with work, I’ve let this uneventful month lie unwritten about for almost two weeks. Time to fix that.
Let’s see the new books!Read More »
Once again, the Halloween season has come and gone, and it’s time to look back at all of the spooky books I managed to read in this year’s horror reading showcase hosted by Silver Button Books.
I feel like I did a little better last year, and there were a couple of books that I’m disappointed I failed to read, but I’m still rather happy with how things turned out. Below are my Frighteningly Good Reads for 2024, though the selection looks a little different from what I presented at the start of last month.Read More »
Once again this year, I will be taking part in Frighteningly Good Reads, a horror reading showcase hosted by Silver Button Books.
This year she’s organized a Bingo card, which I will see how well I do on, but my reading list this year, as per usual, is mostly just tailored toward what books I really feel like checking out this year.
Without further, here are my Frighteningly Good Reads for 2024:
On top of this, I want to challenge myself to find a book at the library to include among these. I have a graphic novel in mind already, but if I can find a novella I would really like to do that too.
This is a fairly modest number of books, but my reading speed has been especially stunted lately, so I’ll be happy if I can get these ones done.
Have you got any books you’re reading for the Halloween season? Let me know below, and thank you for reading!
The past month was a surprisingly heavy one for book shopping, though I mainly blame a surprise library book sale that came up. It’s hard not to make some especially impulsive, even random, purchases when books are going for one or two dollars. I also got a little fixated on determining how my shelf would look going forward with a certain series and ended up picking up a couple brand new books too.
Now let’s see what books I’m carrying on about.Read More »
Last month I had actually hoped to do some more shopping than I ended up achieving. I went to Fan Expo in Toronto for the first time in five years, after having gone for about 10 years in a row until the pandemic hit. I was hoping to use the opportunity to pick up some comic book omnibuses I’ve been wanting, but it turns out the event is less worth it for comic book shopping than ever. They used to at least list trades for American cover price, giving a significant discount in Canadian dollars, but the few vendors that were selling them were just advertising Canadian cover price, except for one that just didn’t have any of what I wanted. So, boo to that.
With the griping out of the way, let’s check out the books that I did get, how about it.Read More »
I’ve continued to show a little more restraint this past month. Though I’ll be showing more books than June, I only actually bought one new physical book. While I once again wonder if I’m forgetting something, one of these is actually a book I forgot to mention last month too. So, perhaps not for the first time, I actually did forget a book.
Enough carrying on, let’s have a look at these books.Read More »
All things considered, June was yet another month where I was fairly well behaved with respect to buying books. I gave into an impulse or two, but I also put some things back and decided to abstain. It really is getting to me how little space I have for new books, which really is a pickle when you love buying them.
Anyway, let’s see what I did get.Read More »
May was nearly a historic month for these monthly posts; since I started them in 2018, I’ve always had at least a new book or two to share every month. May 2024 was very nearly the first month in all of this time where I didn’t get any new books whatsoever. I was almost excited about it, in a weird way. Money being a little tighter due to car trouble has been the main reason, but it hadn’t happened before either, so it was remarkable in its way.
Enough dawdling, let’s see what managed to sneak in.Read More »
I may have gotten a little carried away this month. It was something of a perfect storm of circumstances that allowed me to get a lot of books for rather cheap.
Let’s see just how much I went overboard. Still, I could swear I’m forgetting one or two, can you believe it?Read More »
Though it happened a couple of weeks ago and I’m not entirely sure of the date because WordPress’s alert would not tell me (and I can’t remember), some time at the end of March marked the ten-year anniversary of this blog. I consider this milestone to be a pretty big deal despite how unorganized I’m being about this.
Over the years, things were a bit shaky in terms of output. I knew I wanted to review books, but I also wanted to use this as a vehicle to publish thoughts and ideas about all sorts of storytelling media (which I’ve largely left in the past). I remember I started with the idea of posting something every Tuesday, which I recall doing fairly consistently, but I sometimes had to stretch for an idea of what to post when a review wasn’t at the ready to be written. Eventually, blogging became more habitual and I found I could make myself more flexible with when I posted, and I became a lot more confident with my book reviews.
Turns out a weekly schedule of some sort did still come in handy though, as I feel I owe a lot to WWW Wednesday for giving me a weekly meme to take part in that gives me a good excuse to post updates about what I’m reading; of course, I could have just posted updates on my own, but the participatory aspect gave me the nudge that I really needed.
There are many simple things I should have done for this blog in all this time that I just haven’t, most of which I’ve probably not even thought of, but I’m proud that I’ve been able to keep this thing going, regardless of changes in my schedule, for so long. Consistency is the one thing I feel I did right in terms of admin, and I’m routinely pleased with the amount of traffic my existing posts manage to bring in. Time was that I was anxious about how many likes each new post got, but I’m happy it never stopped me from posting. There’s no guaranteed way to make it big, but if you keep at something there’s a good chance of some sort of returns, however modest.
As a note on something I’m particularly proud of, I started reading the Discworld series by Terry Pratchett in 2016, and to date I’ve read 24 novels from that series; each novel has a corresponding review on this blog, and I intend to keep that going.
Furthermore, here’s a small list of five book reviews I’m particularly proud of:
I’m sure there’s more if I revisited things in more depth, but these always stick out in my mind. I’m sure I could go on about this milestone, but I wanted to keep this brief while still allowing myself to acknowledge this as something of a big deal for me.
Thank you to everybody who has stuck with me over the years or just stopped by to read a post or two.
Thank you for reading.
Muse with Me 