Last September, I travelled to Europe with my Dad. I wrote a bit about the holiday at the time (read about my Ayreon Adventure here) but today I want to reminisce about one particular highlight from the trip: Jules Verne's house in Amiens, France. We only spent one day in Amiens and visiting Jules Verne's …
Category: Review
Hugo Award Novelette Nominees 2024
Novelettes are such an awkward length. Just enough more of a time sink than short stories to make it easy to put them off, but still effectively just a short story without the space to go deep the way a novella can. However even just a couple of thousand words extra allows for so much …
2023 Wrap Up
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 …
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 …
Continue reading Terra Ignota Re-Read Part 3: First Read of Perhaps the Stars
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 …
Continue reading Terra Ignota Re-Read Part 2: The Will to Battle
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 …
Continue reading Terra Ignota Re-Read Part 1: Too Like the Lightning & Seven Surrenders
Jayde Holmes 