Get Lost in Literature

"What are you doing?" "Just reading." I suppose this post is sort of a tie-in with B and F and my upcoming K entry. Books are wonderful, and we all have Favorites, and K would be telling so let's hold off on that one. I'm just reading... Done on the weekends with my morning coffee while I sit in my rocking chair, or done outside in the shade in an adirondak, or done sprawled out on a towel at the beach. And let's not forget those blog posts when I'm sitting in front of a computer. I'm just reading. This whole blog is basically about my reading habits, and while I read some genres more than others, I read a little from almost every one. I'm a thrill seeker; excluding my aversion to carnival rides, skydiving, reckless driving, or anything else that could get me injured or killed... Okay, maybe 'thrill seeker' is the wrong term but I'm constantly looking for the next book to thrill me, enchant me, fill me with passion, sweep me off m...

  “Be yourself; everyone else is already taken.” ― Oscar Wilde Today's topic is inclusivity in literature. With the Trump Administration cancelling the DEI policies that sought to make it easier for minorities in the USA to be included, it's more important than ever to raise awareness for the fact that everyone needs a story that they can relate to and not just stories aimed at your stereotypical Mr. and Mrs. Mary Sue who are probably white. There's been a lot of talk about lack of representation of minority groups in media (in the US; I can't speak as to other countries' societal problems) over the recent years, including tv, movies, and yes, even books. People aren't always white, heterosexual, or without handicap. So if you supported Trump's so-called 'anti-woke' policies, which I believe is just an excuse to legally exclude people based on bigotry, feel free to leave at any time rather than be offended by my book recs. I'm going to start with...

“He moved like a dancer, which is not surprising; a horse is a beautiful animal, but it is perhaps most remarkable because it moves as if it always hears music.” ― Mark Helprin, Winter's Tale The above painting was discovered in the Lascaux cave in France. It portrays two bulls, a handful of tiny red deer at the bottom, and in the center, a horse. This painting is estimated to be about 17,000 years old. Which confirms what I already suspected: We've been obsessed with horses for a very long time. (I certainly have been.) And maybe they haven't been appearing in books for as long as we've been painting them, but they've been appearing in books for quite a while. They're portrayal in literature is unsurprisingly memorable. Some books were written to convey major themes, like Black Beauty by Anna Sewell meant to remind us of animal welfare, or War Horse by Michael Morpurgo which has long been hailed as anti-war propaganda important enough to have been made into b...

 “We are the universe watching itself, watching and learning.” ― Christopher Paolini, To Sleep in a Sea of Stars Today's bookish topic is galactic... More specifically, our desire to be amongst the stars.  It's a desire on everybody's mind, more often than we care to admit. It was why Neil Armstrong walked on the moon, a feat that seemed too fantastic, so people called it a hoax. It's why when we imagine the apocalypse, be it zombies or global warming, we imagine a space station or alien planet capable of supporting life after earth. It's why private space companies emerged after NASA, with billionaire entrepreneurs like Jeff Bezos and Richard Branson building their own spacecrafts, one of which looked comically like a male body part. And it's absolutely why the concepts of space-tourism and privatized space flight are so popular, even if the 'common people' probably won't be able to afford it. And although this is a book blog, I would be remiss if I...

  “It’s a gift if it makes us better. It’s a curse if we let it destroy us.” - N.K. Jemisin, The Fifth Season Let's talk about favorites today. via GIPHY I'm sorry if the giant Mamoa-making-heart-sign-gif is too much, I got excited thinking about my favorites. ( To be fair, I did try to shrink it, but resizing wouldn't stick. ) If you asked fifty people off the street what their favorite book is, they'll more likely than not, give you different answers. That doesn't make a single one of them wrong, not even if your answer to the same question is different from theirs. And the question, what makes a favorite a favorite, is equally subjective both to the individual being asked and the circumstances around the book. The first thing that stands out to me in any book, are the characters. They're the ones telling the story, regardless of setting or plot, so they better be good. The second thing that stands out to me is the setting... If I'm going to go on a proper...

"Wash the bones, bring the body, leave the heart behind." Tea Obreht, The Tiger's Wife  E is for Encyclopedia. An Encyclopedia is a collection of knowledge - history, science, art, people, whatever you want to know - hard bound, organized by alphabet and number, sitting shiny on a bookshelf. The dictionary, predates them, inspired them. A dictionary tells you what a word or topic is, but an encyclopedia explains it. Encyclopedias used to be a staple in most households and remain so in libraries. They're great for research, dependably true and easily citable.  If this sounds a lot like Wikipedia, it is and it isn't. They were the inspiration for Wikipedia, and for many 'modern' digital encyclopedias, but they are unalterable after publication, facts embedded in ink on paper. Wikipedia is open source, meaning anyone can publish an entry or alter one. The internet offers us all the knowledge we could ever want, but at a price: Everything you read on the inter...

Happy Sunday! I hope you are all doing well and enjoying your weekend. The Sunday Post is a news meme created by Caffeinated Reviewer . I'm also linking up with Sunday Salon at ReaderBuzz . I will be posting on the first Sunday of each month and I hope you'll join me. That super ridiculous amount of snow we got hit with last month is already gone. We had a heat wave, the temperature spiking from 30 to 70 almost overnight paired with a couple rainy days, and 30-something inches of snow just vanished. But the week of warmth gave way to cold weather again, just as quickly as it came...But Spring is here and the warm weather won't be far behind. My blog is finally getting a little more action; that is to say I've been posting again and gone back to responding to comments. The A-Z Challenge has finally begun, and while I enjoy blog hopping, I'm a little wowed to think of how much prep-work I put in for it to all be over in a month. The idea for this year's challenge...

 “There are times when the world is rearranging itself, and at times like that, the right words can change the world.” Ender’s Game by Orson Scott Card Dystopia - an imagined state or society in which there is great suffering or injustice, typically one that is totalitarian or post-apocalyptic. Science fiction often likes to bring us visions of the future. Flying among the stars, robots, cloning, utopias... But dystopia has really taken off in recent years, providing us with visions of the future where humanity is struggling to survive or the government has taken away our rights and imposed cruel and sometimes unusual laws upon us. Sometime there are monsters, sometimes there's disease. It's become so popular there is now an end of the world scenario for almost everyone. For young adults there's Uglies by Scott Westerfeld, where the government has created a superficial world where teens are forced to undergo plastic surgery, and the wildly popular The Hunger Games by ...

  "I wanted my life to count for something, but not because I wanted to be important. People can be important and not have their life count for anything." - Justin Blaney, Evan Burl and the Falling. Review quality on my blog is not always consistent.  A lot of this has to do with the substance of the book, whether or not it's a metaphor or whether or not the author integrated his or her own life views into the story, or some other message of moral or lifestyle lesson. There are stories like  The Ink Black Heart by Robert Galbraith  that tackle everything from cyberbullying to various types of bigotry under the guise of a who-done-it novel. There are stories advertised to be exactly what they are, contemporary fiction like  Homegoing by Yaa Gyasi  that cover cultural separation and systemic racism. They produce reviews like novellas, with endless content to study. My reviews for The Cursebreakers trilogy by Brigid Kemmerer were quite small. They were light,...

 "There are some awful things in the world, it's true, but there's also some great books." -Jo Walton, Among Others Okay, so not a very imaginative B for a book blog, but that's why I'm here: Books. Beautiful, bountiful, books. A book is a dream recorded. A book is an adventure waiting to be had. A book is a hero undiscovered. And a villain just a little bit bad. Okay, so poet I am not. But there are a lot of things to like about books. They can offer education. From a baby’s ABC book to your childhood textbooks to how-to manuals… Like how-to build that cabinet from IKEA, books journey with us every step of the way, even if we don’t like them. And if you do like them a whole new world opens up to you, or should I say worlds? Because the best part about books is their ability to take you somewhere new. With so many genres - spine tingling horror to the warmth of fairytales, to contemporary fiction with cities as familiar as the one you live in, to the strangene...

"I suppose that is the nature of monument...The monument does not say that this man or that man walked here...The feeling, at least here...and there... it remains the same." Interview with the Vampire, Anne Rice Imagination is the place where your dreams are true. And it's as simple as opening a book and allowing yourself to be drawn into the world between the pages, get lost in that adventure with characters you've only just met...  Or maybe you're not much of a reader. Maybe you seek adventure through television, movies, or videogames. Getting lost in the dream may mean getting lost in the screen.  There is a place where dreamers of all types merge: the adaptations. Admittedly, some adaptations are  better than others, others deviating laughably from source material, but literary works are often translated into other forms of media. Like The Walking Dead ... Which started out as a graphic novel (not really my cup of tea) about surviving the zombie apocalypse an...

"It was downright uncanny, in a way that had nothing to do with ghosts and monsters. You could feel the weight of the stone pressing down overhead..." Before I summarize the story, let me express my surprise that Alex Easton is non-binary. In the first book I was convinced Alex was a he and in the second book I saw evidence that Alex was a she.  In this last book, I realized Alex is neither which is why gender is never emphasized. Three books into the  Sworn   Soldier series(trilogy?)  and it’s clear to see that I’m kind of slow on the uptake. Alex Easton is back in a new adventure. Kan (the pronouns Alex uses are ‘ka/kan’ originating from Galician) old friend Dr. James Denton has written to tell kan about an abandoned mine where his cousin Oscar has gone missing. Denton insists that Oscar was taken by something ‘other’ and that there’s the possibility he is still alive. Alex agrees to look into Oscar’s disappearance. While the original inspiration for this series wa...

"One sailor saw a dead eel in a barrel of vinegar. But it might not have been dead, because you know what eels are like." In 1628, Mayken and her nursemaid Imke set sail for Batavia on the Batavia.  Imke is taking Mayken to live with her father after her mother dies. During the journey Mayken learns of a monster that lives below deck and takes the form of a giant eel, Bullebak. Mayken comes to believe Bullebak is real when Imke's toe is bitten and begins her quest to capture the monster on board. In 1989, newly orphaned Gil is sent to live with his ill-tempered grandfather, Joss, on the island where his mother grew up. Once on the island, Gil is ostracized by the small community and left alone most of the day while his grandfather goes out fishing. Left to his own devices, he learns about a ghost that haunts the island and the ship that wrecked just offshore. I loved the tone of this book. While killing mothers in the opening act is nothing new - Disney has made a fortune...

The A-Z Challenge is almost here and I'm pretty excited about it. (I think I started working on my posts in December). Last year I focused on posting A-Z Reviews, some new and some old, for the yearly April Challenge, but this year I decided to go a different way. This year, I'm going to be posting A-Z Bookish Topics/Discussions . I'm going to make sure to add a related question at the end of each blog post, hoping to make my blog a little more interactive this time around, and I look forward to hearing what other people will have to say. Be sure to leave me a link to your Theme Reveal, I'm curious to see what everyone else will be doing!

"Betrayal lodges in my heart like a hot coal trapped behind the grate of the hearth." In this final installment of the Forging Silver into Stars trilogy, Grey has been chased from the Crystal Palace in Syhl Shallow and has returned to Ironrose in Emberfall, leaving his wife Queen Lia Mara to rule her country alone. Like with the first two novels, the continuation of Grey and Lia Mara's complicated love story is a delicious side plot to compliment the story of Tycho, Jax, Callyn, and Alek. Tycho, who promised he'd only be gone for a few days, returns to Emberfall after months away from Jax. Jax had spent his alone time making friends and a not-so-secret admirer. They both feel a little guilty; Tycho per usual looking to hide his emotions behind a wall of toxic masculinity, and Jax trying to hide his emotions with fake indifference. Both agonize over the distance growing between them, neither willing to yield. Callyn is living under the weight of her anxiety; Alek upon ...

Book Beginnings on Fridays by Rose City Reader -  Share the opening sentence (or so) of the book you are reading this week. You can also share from a book that caught your fancy, even if you are not reading it right now. "Sing me, O Muse, the unheroic morning. When the bruised world begins to fracture for them all." The Brides of Maracoor by Gregory Maguire The book gets off to a pretty, lyrical start with a small sense of foreboding. I couldn't resist seeing what happens next. Book Blogger Hop Q: If you had to, would you pass your book collection on to someone special? If not, what would you prefer your family or friends do with your books after you’re gone? (submitted by Billy @ Coffee-Addicted Writer) A: If I had to, I would pass it on to my two nieces. If they don't want the whole thing, they can pick the titles they do want and donate the rest.

Today's Top Ten Tuesday was listed as: " Genre Freebie (Pick a genre and build a list around it. You could do historical fiction featuring strong female leads, contemporary romance set in foreign countries, mysteries starring unreliable narrators, lyrical fiction books in verse, historical romance featuring pirates, Gothic novels with birds on the cover, etc. There are so many options!) " I decided to make a list of my favorite historical fictions that have a foot in the door of a second genre. 1. The Map of Time by Felix J Palma. Historical Fiction x Science Fiction 2. The Snow Child by Eowyn Ivey. Historical Fiction x Fairytale 3. Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter by Seth Grahame-Smith . Historical Fiction x Horror 4. The Book Thief by Markus Zusak. Historical Fiction x Fantasy 5. Devil's Lair by David Wisehart. Historical Fiction x Fantasy 6. The Terror by Dan Simmons. Historical Fiction x Horror 7. The Reckoning by John Grisham. Historical Fiction x Mystery ...

"Cossy didn't know much about memory.  All existence measures itself in creeps and ticks, as far as she knew." The seven brides of Maracoor Spot, a small island off the coast of the greater Maracoor Abiding, are left in isolation to safeguard an ancient relic. There can only ever be seven brides and when one dies, the overseer will bring another. They hold tight to their rules and ceremonial obligations until a strange woman washes ashore, increasing their population to eight. This is the continuation of Rain's story; Rain who flew from Oz on her grandmother's broomstick, to find herself trapped on an island of bickering brides. Helia, leader of the brides, and Cossy, the youngest, wish to keep Rain on the island and want to hide her existence from the overseer. Mirka, second in command, wants to be rid of Rain by any way possible. Unbeknownst to Rain, on the same day she washes ashore, strange things begin to happen across Maracoor. Spirits revealing themselves, ...

Happy Sunday! I hope you are all doing well and enjoying your weekend. The Sunday Post is a news meme created by Caffeinated Reviewer . I'm also linking up with Sunday Salon at ReaderBuzz . I will be posting on the first Sunday of each month and I hope you'll join me. Punxsutawney Phil predicted 6 more weeks of winter and he nailed it. We got a blizzard. Everything was closed, there was a travel ban, and it took about two days for us to shovel out. I think the weatherman said before the storm we'd be getting about two feet, I think we got more than that... Someone said they thought we got 37 inches? But I'm not sure on our exact measurement. And it was on top of the snow we already had from a couple of weeks ago, so we have a lot of snow. My blog has really taken a boring turn, not that it was so exciting before. I haven't kept up with comments this past month, I haven't been as involved with my usual blog memes as I have been, and it took me forever to work up ...

"The stories made it sound so good. Fighting for a cause. Being a hero." He shook his head. "Why does everyone pretend it's anything like that?" Like with many fantasy novels, there is a war between good and evil. But this book starts after that war has ended and evil prevailed over good. A woman held captive by the aforementioned evil, turns out to be an undocumented prisoner and when she's discovered, her captors are determined to learn her identity. As far as anyone can tell, Helena Marino is a glorified nobody but somebody went to a lot of trouble to erase her memories. Enter the High Reeve, Kaine Ferron. He's cold, calculating, and vicious; he's one of the most powerful necromancers of all time. It becomes his task to repair Helena's broken mind and he's willing to destroy it trying. Book One of this 1000+ page novel is absolutely brutal. I think the story opening with evil in control was unique and set the tone for the whole story, but ...

Happy Sunday! I hope you are all doing well and enjoying your weekend. The Sunday Post is a news meme created by Caffeinated Reviewer . I'm also linking up with Sunday Salon at ReaderBuzz. I will be posting on the first Sunday of each month and I hope you'll join me. Today’s post is a recap of 2025 and my upcoming plans for 2026. January's weather has been positively glacial. We've had snow, we've had sub-zero temperatures, we've had everything but penguins. But according to the weatherman that seems to be going on all across the country right now. If you live in a state where snowy winters are not the norm: drive slowly if you have to go out, take aspirin for your back after shoveling, and curl up under a blanket with a good book and a hot chocolate when your day is over. I almost didn't post anything today. My blog has been inactive for a month. I normally do something in between reviews, and I've never really gone a whole month without posting a revi...

Happy New Year to you all!  I hope everyone’s holiday season was filled with positive vibes. The Sunday Post is a news meme created by Caffeinated Reviewer.  I'm also be linking up with Sunday Salon at ReaderBuzz . I will be posting on the first Sunday of each month and I hope you'll join me. Today’s post is a recap of 2025 and my upcoming plans for 2026. My month of December contained very little reading so I don't really have anything to share on the final month of 2025. Instead, I'm going to jump right into my yearly recap. 2025 In 2025 I gave myself two challenges: My Good Reads Challenge was to read at least 12 books, and my second challenge was to participate in the Pick Your Poison Challenge (a challenge that was discontinued this year) by reading at least 13 books off the list of subjects. (the list of books I read for the challenge can be found here ). I wasn’t sure I could read more than twelve books, but not only did I achieve the 13 books required for PYP...

I was looking for a yearly reading challenge that I’d be able to complete in a year, and I found the inaugural Speccy Fiction Challenge hosted by Book’d Out . The rules say, “It allows you to choose from the genres of fantasy, science fiction, and horror, (though the focus is skewed towards the first two), and their myriad of subgenres.” And since I read a crapton of fantasy, I thought this might be an achievable challenge. There are 4 levels/goals: Spectator who can set their own goal, Squint read and review 3 books from 3 categories, Stare is 6 books, and Survey is 12. I’m aiming to at least achieve ‘Stare’ and read 6 books from 6 categories, but if I make it to 6 with time to spare, I’m going to try to get to 12. CATEGORIES: Published in 2026   A speculative novella (less than 250pgs)   A translated speculative novel   The first book in a speculative fiction duology/trilogy/series   Romantic speculative fiction   Speculative fict...