Category: Books

New Books & Novel Discoveries (October 2022)

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No unfortunate happenings got in the way of me posting this on time in October, I just wanted to indulge in Halloween, so I didn’t set aside the time to work on it. October was a strange month, as it was so eventful that it didn’t just fly by, but I also find myself marveling at how little I was able to finish doing with respect to the blog. Work has continued to be a lot busier than normal. I also managed to do a lot of fun things for the Halloween season, though, so my life still has a little balance.

Enough rambling about life, we’re here to talk about books!Read More »

Book Review – The Dark Lord of Derkholm by Diana Wynne Jones

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Dark Lord of Derkholm

The Dark Lord of Derkholm is a 1998 young adult fantasy novel by author Diana Wynne Jones. Once a year, a magical fantasy land receives guests from another world. These guests, whom visit as Pilgrim Parties under the organization of a ruthless businessman named Mr. Chesney, embark upon this journey to experience a real-life fantasy adventure, complete with dragons, battles between the forces of good and evil, and even a Dark Lord to vanquish at the end of their hard-fought quest. However, after years of suffering the devastating consequences, the people of this fantasy land have had enough. Maybe, if they completely sabotage this year’s tours, nobody will ever want to visit again. To do so, they’ll have to appoint the worst wizard for the job of Dark Lord. Unfortunately for Derk and his family, that’s him.

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New Books & Novel Discoveries (September 2022)

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I normally try to get this up during the last couple of days of a month, as I have successfully done for nearly every month before now0 since I started, except for one. But, on September 30 I had to say goodbye to an animal companion who’d been with me for just over 13 years, and I frankly forgot that I even needed to write one of these up. Then, I just needed some time. Without further delay, I’ve now got the motivation and time to put this up.

I’ll not linger on this any longer. Let’s talk about some books.Read More »

Books On My Fall 2022 To-Read List

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Top Ten Tuesday is a weekly book meme run by That Artsy Reader Girl. Considering how poorly my reading progress has gone throughout the year, it’s rather generous to believe that all ten of these books will be read before the end of the year (I’m just going to go ahead and count Fall as from now until the end of December). Nevertheless, this was a rather easy list to fill, as I do indeed intend to try and read all of these during this span of time. A great many of these are taken from my yearly to-read list, in fact, so I’ll actually be rather disappointed if I don’t get to most of them.Read More »

Books I Loved So Much I Had to Get a Copy for My Personal Library

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Top Ten Tuesday is a weekly book meme run by That Artsy Reader Girl. I’m amused with how surprisingly difficult I found this week’s prompt to be, as it seemed an easy one to provide ten books for, but I tend to buy the books that I read so much that it’s rare for me to read a book that isn’t already a part of my personal library. Nevertheless, after some digging, I was able to find some books that qualify, though some of them are repurchases of more worthy editions.Read More »

Books I Love That Were Written Over Ten Years Ago

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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 »

Book Review – The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows by John Koenig

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The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows

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 »

New Books & Novel Discoveries (July 2022)

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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 »

Reading Challenge Update

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This is a couple of weeks later than I ought to have put it up, but a lot of life has been happening, so I hope you can forgive me procrastinating this a smidge. I still want to get it up regardless, though, so it’s time to see where I’m at with my challenges with the year now half over.

Right off the bat, I’m not really where I want to be. Having been doing freelance editing work for almost a year now, I think it is safe to say it has a significant impact on my reading progress. I will have to re-evaluate my goals in the future, presuming that I continue to do this job long term, which I would like to do, but you never know what the future might hold.Read More »