Discworld Mini-Reviews (2/2) | Monstrous Regiment and Soul Music

Blink and another week lapses. By way of achievement, what I have managed to do is read two more Discworld novels, thus growing the absolute pile of unreviewed books for this blog, and thereby growing more nervous in the process. What is the self if not taking a beloved hobby and ruining it a little?  …

Discworld Mini-Reviews (1/2) | Mort and Reaper Man

Somewhere in the beginning of 2021, I had begun my humble foray into the splendid Discworld series. I had really enjoyed both my initial outings with the series, The Colour of Magic and Guards! Guards!, and had even managed to dedicate two separate reviews on this blog, with full ambition to keep up the tradition …

Lady Killers: Deadly Women Throughout History | R E D R U M

“Even the most psychopathic woman can realize, when staring death in the eyes, that what she valued, in the end, was life all along.”Lady Killers: Deadly Women Throughout History, Tori Telfer I have several unfinished blog-posts collecting digital dust on my archives explaining away both my long silence as well as my reading slump. There …

Horror Shorts (mini-reviews)

In this brief interlude between writing in the blog, I truly did something out-of-character. I read horror.  Do you ever feel like you need to be in specific circumstances, specific mental states to get to reading specific kinds of books? For me, the usual status quo is picking up character-driven, rich-prose speculative fictions. But in …

Ideal writing day or what I would like to spend my days doing if life did not have the demands of a full time job, the pandemic and mental illnesses

Hello, dear readers. Are you still here? Are you still reading? Does these random tonal shifts in narration, at once clumsily funny, at once uncomfortably serious, daze you? It dazes me too. Writing updates are a bit overdue, innit? It's not like I have not been writing. In fact, if you would check my word-count …

The Curse of Chalion by Lois McMaster Bujold | Political fantasy and free will

“What is this astonishing foolishness, that shines brighter than all my father’s gold? Can you teach me to be such a fool too Caz?” “Oh,” breathed Cazaril, “I’m sure of it.” The Curse of Chalion, Lois McMaster Bujold [I have been in a bit of a slump. And in other news, water is wet. Work …

Fugitive Telemetry by Martha Wells | I love Murderbot!

“All I wanted to do was watch media and not exist.”- Fugitive Telemetry (The Murderbot Diaries #6), Martha Wells 2020 was a troubling year. This is a statement that holds true without any further clarifications. I was no exception to the intensity of pain and anger people felt around the world, and to cope, I …

Act Your Age, Eve Brown by Talia Hibbert| Love, families and being your own self

“You're not just my sunshine; you're the sun.”Act Your Age, Eve Brown, by Talia Hibbert I have peaked. I have finished an actual trilogy in a respectable and timely manner, that is, within the duration of less than a year, and not, y’know, four years and counting [looking at you, Thomas Cromwell series].  Can I …

A weird sort of update (?)

I never know how to start these, and the matter is always exacerbated by the fact that I have in fact, nothing much to update in terms of writing. Or do I? The blog has been sparse for the last one month and so, for multiple personal reasons, including the fact that I found myself …

Guards! Guards! by Terry Pratchett| Human nature | Flawed orders

“Down there - he said - are people who will follow any dragon, worship any god, ignore any inequity. All out of a kind of humdrum, everyday badness. Not the really high, creative loathsomeness of the great sinners, but a sort of mass-produced darkness of the soul. Sin, you might say, without a trace of …