Get Lost in Literature

I won't be posting anything, or responding to comments, the 22nd-29th. I will be on vacation and hope to be lounging on a beach. I hope you all have a great week and I'll see you soon. glitter-graphics.com

Hello all! I'm just giving an update on what's happening at this blog. You may have noticed my Monday Book Reviews have lessened, making my blog a little slow and desolate. Just letting you know it's not forever. This year I'll be participating in  April Blogging from A to Z Challenge  again, which is a blogging challenge where bloggers pick a theme and 26 alphabet based topics to go with it, all to be posted in the month of April. This year, I'll be participating with another set of A-Z Book Reviews (some old and some new) but I was missing books for the letters H, Q, X, and Z. I've been spending much of my time tracking down books for the missing letters and trying to read and review those books in time for April. So basically what I'm telling you is you're going to go from too few reviews to too many. I'm hoping to have it all under control by mid-March. Those four missing books will be read, the reviews will be pre-scheduled to post on their own,...

Happy New Year! The Sunday Post is a weekly news meme created by Caffeinated Reviewer . I will be posting on the first Sunday of each month and I hope you'll join me. I hope you are all doing well, and are as excited about the New Year as I am. I'm welcoming it in with a recap of last year and my goals for 2025. In 2024, I challenged myself to read 12 books. I know it's not a flashy number, but I figure if I'm doing one a month I'm doing alright. I'm happy that not only did I meet my goal of 12 books, I exceeded it by reading 33, a grand total 14,755 pages. Last year I had set aside some reading goals (other than book count) to help keep my reading habits organized. I wanted to read only from my TBR list, except for when following up previously started series, or rereading prequels to their sequels. And while I did read some from my TBR, I added in a few ARCs and a handful of rereads during the busier holiday months. I'm proud to say, even though I didn'...

 I'm taking a break from reviewing through the month of November. I want to recharge my batteries a bit. I don't want to fall into a reading slump from overdoing and November is a busy month. I'm participating in NaNoWriMo ( I won't make it anywhere near the winning word count ), Christmas shopping, and of course spending time with my family Thanksgiving week. And that's all on top of my regular schedule of work, making sure my horse is taken care of, and my never ending battle with laundry. But don't worry, I'll be back in December and I'll still be posting for my blog memes ( I think ).

  There will be no review today, as I spent last week reading Carving Shadows into Gold by Brigid Kemmerer  (publication date set for January 28, 2025), and I have to be within a month of posting my review. My review is scheduled for January 6, 2025 so don't forget to stop by.

Looking Back at 2023 Happy New Year!  In 2023, I challenged myself to 12 books, determined to make time for at least one book a month.  It's not a flashy number, but I was pretty excited to see myself surpass it by three, reading 15 instead of 12. Overall, I read 6,656 pages in 2023. My second goal was to cut back on impulse buys and read something off my to-be-read list. Good Omens   by Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaimen  was a book I was inspired to re-read after watching the adaptation of the same name. Th e City Where We Once Lived by Eric Barnes , being my only impulse buy of the year, was also my shortest book . Everything else I read in 2023 was either sitting unread on a physical shelf, or sitting on Good Reads TBR shelf. My  Favorite Book of 2023 was A Thousand Splendid Suns by Khaled Hosseini , if you haven't read it I recommend that you do.  My Worst Read of the year was Interview with the Vampire by Anne Rice . I don't want to say it wasn't a g...

 I'm not sure anyone actually follows my blog, since my posts and visits are so intermittent, but here's a couple of updates for you. One, is that the blog has been switched to have the adult warning sign, because I somehow keep getting flagged for adult content. Not sure how, my posts seem pretty PG13 to me, but maybe I'm missing the bigger picture. Two, is that I'm in the mood to blog.

Happy Hump-day Readers! I've been trying to figure out which of my GoodReads reviews to integrate into my blog, and when. I had some stories that I read and didn't bother to review, some I reviewed in three sentences or less, and some that got reviewed as if the review was its own novel. While I was on - let's call it an "unplanned-hiatus" - my unplanned hiatus, not all reviews were created equal. I'm planning on using Monday as the day to post older reviews, and I've got the following scheduled: Mr. Penumbra's 24 Hour Bookstore by Robin Sloan 4/16 Homegoing by Yaa Gyasi 4/25 Library of Souls by Ransom Riggs 5/2 A Map of Days by Ransom Riggs 5/9 A Time to Kill by John Grisham 5/16 The Pillars of Earth by Ken Follet 5/23 To Sleep in a Sea of Stars by Chris Paolini 5/30 I've restarted book blog memes TopTenTuesday hosted by  ThatArtsyReaderGirl  and Thursday Quotables brought to you by  BookshelfFantasies ; I'm also trying a new one, Friday Book ...

 Changes are coming to my blog. The biggest change: I'm using it. I haven't been by in awhile, but I'd like to be by more often. I'm still reading and I'm still reviewing, and I find sometimes after work my mind needs a distraction, which has brought me back here. My blog is getting a newer sleeker look, so I'm reorganizing some of my content to fit. Instead of keeping track of my ratings on separate pages, those are now getting added to my labels. I'm working off of a computer with less storage capacity so there will be no homemade graphics...I think this template works fine, anyways. I hope everyone out there is safe and healthy in our strange new world. We've survived the Trump Administration, Covid-19 Pandemic, and things are looking dicey for the Biden Administration as the threat of WW3 looms on the horizon. We've seen royals abdicate for true love, riots against hate, war's end and war's beginning. It's like a post-apocalyptic worl...

I've been gone but I've not been slacking. Long at last, I finally found a job that was willing to overlook my lack of experience, in favor of training me up. The good news is I thoroughly enjoy the job even if it's possibly the weirdest job I could have found. It allows me to do two things I love: work with my hands and work with my mind. Unfortunately, its been an adjustment; getting up early made me come home an exhausted dragon lady with no time to read (even though the books keep piling up!) In 2015 I participated in the AZ Challenge. I haven't decided yet if I will repeat the feat this year. I also set out to read 30 books. I read 14 instead. I started Short Story Sunday, which like this blog has remained obviously inactive (but I remain confident in its purpose). I've finally got a handle on my working hours, which is good because its the First Day of the New Year and I'm excited to be accessing abilities and setting goals for 2016. This year I...

I'm inventing a theme for Sunday. I have not yet decided whether or not it will be a permanent fixture, but right now I like the idea of it and I'm going to see how it goes.  My first short story collection ever reviewed on this blog was by Scott F Fitzgerald and there was a problem. How do you review one book when it's full of many stories? I wound up trying to do both: review the book as a whole and acknowledge each individual story inside. This made for one long ass review.  So instead I thought: why not review each individual story as an individual and then upon the books completion review the book as a whole? That way short stories have short reviews and the book review looks a little bit less like pretentious word vomit.  So when the A-Z Challenge is complete, I will be starting Short Story Sunday. It will feature the first story of the following:   Second order of business: when the AZ Challenge draws to a close, I will be shutting off th...

So my upcoming reviews will be typed out slowly on my Kindle Fire, with less spellcheck and probably inferior formatting. I regret the inconvenience.

Taking a moment this Sunday morning to mention my plans for the week. Monday, I will be posting my review for The Knife of Never Letting Go by Patrick Ness, and though it isn't official yet, if The Ask and the Answer is half as fun as The Knife, I'll have that review for you by Wednesday. I'm also re-reading The Wicked series; I have my thoughts on the 4th book posted, but I never did a write up for the first 3 and that's something I want to do. Sometime, in between Monday and Wednesday, I've got a TTT List scheduled and since I've got plenty of reading to do this week, their should be no problem getting a Thursday Quotable to you...And then we're back to the weekend which will probably have me offline.

I am not a Christmas person; for me, the best part of this holiday is the tree in my living room, sparkling and bright, wafting its scent through the house. But as I am surrounded by Christmas people, I am obligated to try my hardest to make the holiday bright and cheerful for them even if I'm not having the time of my life. Bah-Humbug!  Where's the Grinch when you need him? Yesterday night, my dad gave me a bit of money, and sent me to Walmart to look for some Stocking-stuffers for my mother's stocking. Normally that's his job, but his actual job had him working overtime and it was unlikely he'd escape to a store. So I discovered Walmart, the week of Christmas, was the epitome of madness. It was like watching panicked looters during the end of the world. Most of the shelves were cleaned out, others looked like they'd suffered a tornado. If I could get near a shelf, I had to get what I wanted or get out...Otherwise, strangers would growl at me. I walked fas...

You may have figured out, I'm not much of a weekend post-person. I much prefer that time for *lies* spending time with family and quiet reflection...Okay, * confesses * mostly I watch football and ride horses on weekends. But I hope the new week is starting out great for you, I realize no one really likes a monday morning. And since I have no review to post today and nothing hot-topic-y to give my opinion on, I thought I'd share a couple of things I've found in blogs recently. My affiliate at  Drunk on Reviews  also isn't a weekend poster and she's got a NaNoWriMo badge on her site--technically I didn't put my badge on my blog, but I did sign up this year so we have those things in common.  New author, JRRichardson posted an excerpt  on her blog, from her upcoming romantic/murder mystery novel, Cursed be the Wicked ...I'm not usually one for romance novels, but I know potential when I see it, and I'm excited to read a story taking place ins Sale...

I expect to finish with True Grit by this evening, a review for it will probably go live sometime tomorrow. I've added an "Upcoming Reviews" section underneath currently reading. I'm going to be using Wednesdays to add some of my older reviews... First on the list is Whitechapel Gods and I'm giving advanced warning that that book earned itself a rare (from me) really negative review, so if you'd rather not read about all the ways I didn't enjoy the book, don't stop on by. I haven't decided on my next read just yet, but it's going to be something on my list of Freebies, if only because I'm dangerously close to being a hoarder.

1.       I'm still fairly new to the book blogging world and the more I explore the more ideas I get for improving upon my little corner of the bloggerverse. I'm noticing most book bloggers, have review policies and rules on what they read, what kind of interaction they want with their followers. Do they accept requests for reviews, do they participate in giveaways and ARCs... So I put some thought into what my blog is about "officially" and added a  Blog Policies  page under the Home link. 2.       The more obvious update; I added a background that better matched my banner. The soft blues are easy on my eyes...No harsh color contrasts for me. 3.       Book Memes. I notice a lot of book bloggers have something fun, book themed, thing they choose to do on the same day as whoever invented the meme in question...I am intrigued by the concept and looking into it...So add that to my list of maybes. If you know of a good one, feel fre...