Hello everyone. With 2023 coming to an end, now seems like a good time to wrap up my year in reading and writing. This is a bit of a hard thing to do, because I feel that the last three years have been one massive blur. It was surprise to me to starting writing about …
Category: Review
Unboxing the Creepy Book
The bubble wrap does detract from the forbidding aura of the book I admit. You ever get an impulse to order a cursed book online? Last month I learnt about Einar Baldvin's beautiful but creepy graphic novel The Crawling King, and I instantly wanted it. The book is a collection of scraps of stories and …
Hugo Nominated Short Stories 2022
With the Hugo Nominees announced, I decided to dive right into the short stories. The finalists this year are a good batch, and are all free online. The first three stories in this list; Mr. Death, Proof by Induction, and Where Oaken Hearts Do Gather, are also finalists for the Nebula Award. Here's what I …
Terra Ignota Re-Read Part 3: First Read of Perhaps the Stars
Oh wow. OH WOW. This is how you wrap up a series. It's been a month since I finished Perhaps the Stars, and I am still just in complete awe at this series. So much was payed off, and the war was depicted so well. I'm going to try and be lighter on spoilers here …
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Book Bingo Challenge 2021 Results
I read a lot of great books in 2021. In total I read 71 books, with a total of about 14,634 pages. This year I was marking off books on a randomly generated book bingo card, and I got three bingos. I almost finished the card, but there were a few easy tiles I missed. …
Book Bingo Review #3
Look at my Book Bingo Card; I managed to sneak a bingo in right at the end. This was a diagonal line, that includes the free square, so I can talk about any book I want. I'm going to use that square to talk about a book I hated, although the four from actual challenges …
Terra Ignota Re-Read Part 2: The Will to Battle
Re-reading the Terra Ignota series was a good idea. A really good idea. This is such a richly detailed world, with new ideas on every page and politics that are so damn complicated. Which is good, as it makes this crazy world feel more plausible, and makes a book that consists mostly of people talking …
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Terra Ignota Re-Read Part 1: Too Like the Lightning & Seven Surrenders
A couple of years ago I read Ada Palmer's Too Like the Lightning for one of my Hugo review posts. I then went straight to the sequel, Seven Surrenders, and devoured book 3, The Will to Battle, as soon as I could. Since then it has been a long wait for the end of the …
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Brave Little Toasters
I've heard that Thomas M. Disch has written a lot of really good books for adults and a lot of high quality poetry. Of course, what he is best known for now seems to be the Brave Little Toaster stories. These strange books, The Brave Little Toaster and The Brave Little Toaster Goes to Mars, …
2021 Hugo Award for Best Novel Nominees as Pokémon
Time to do my annual reviews where I relate everything back to Pokémon. In a normal year, the Hugo Awards would be over and done with by now, but this year it got dragged out due to certain world events. In this post I will be reviewing the nominees for Best Novel, but since this …
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Jayde Holmes 