I’ve not been feeling the blogging mojo these past few weeks, as you may have noticed. I did do some NetGalley maths the other day to work out I’m only two reviews away from that mythical 80% feedback ratio! That’ll be a first.

I reviewed A Restless Truth by Freya Marske and shared the October new releases on my radar (it’ll be the November edition in no time). I’ve signed up last minute for this weekend’s Dewey’s 24 Hour Readathon, with a big pile of comics if I’m not feeling it, and challenge reads if I am.

It’s feeling very autumnal now, with loads of mushrooms popping up in the woods:

At the weekend we had a mooch round Southampton. OMG it was so busy, queues everywhere! Maybe we’ve just turned into country mice 🤣. You’d never guess there was a cost of living crisis on. After getting lunch we walked round the city walls and found some genuine old bits of the city. I’ve never really done any tourist stuff in Southampton so it was fun to go round reading all the plaques and walking on the walls.

I’ve been trying to plough through my remaining challenge prompts, so I just pretended the ocean liner that A Restless Truth takes place on is actually a cruise ship for Popsugar. I also ticked off an award winning book for ATY with The Tea Master and the Detective by Aliette de Bodard, a Sherlock homage with a wonderful main character who is the sentient mind of a space ship.

I finished listening to Stone Blind by Natalie Haynes and I can thoroughly recommend her audiobook narration, it’s so entertaining. The story of Medusa is rather sad though, and Perseus is a wet blanket.

 

I was determined to read a lighthouse book for ATY’s glass prompt (this year was the 200th anniversary of the fresnel lens), and so I read The Lighthouse Witches by C.J. Cooke. While it started out quite slow, I liked the story of the witches and the wildlings (basically foundlings) until a spanner is thrown into the works, which did not work for me. It made other stuff make no sense, and also added an upsetting aspect to it that would not have been the case had the the thing been the thing. Hah, yes vagueness ahoy. Also why on earth did no one notice the numbers were years?!

And I got round to reading off an ATY list prompt with The Marrow Thieves by Cherie Dimaline, which was quite depressing in that I can entirely believe people would round up the indigenous people to suck out their bone marrow for treating the rest of the population. There is a magical realism aspect (people stopped dreaming, they got ill) but it could just have easily been some sham cure. I may read the sequel next year.

If you’re interested in doing the ATY challenge next year, the group has now finalised the list of prompts. It’s a lot more flexible than Popsugar!

New books acquired:

[gifted] Emily Wilde’s Encylopedia of Fairies by Heather Fawcett (Orbit)
[gifted] House of Hunger by Alexis Henderson (Transworld)
[gifted] World Running Down by Al Hess (Angry Robot)
A Scatter of Light by Malinda Lo
The Heartstopper Yearbook by Alice Oseman
Fault Tolerance by Valerie Valdes
The Boy With Nails for Eyes by Shain Gardiner
What Moves the Dead by T. Kingfisher (ebook)
Honey & Spice by Bolu Babalola (ebook)
One Last Stop by Casey McQuiston (ebook)
The Girl Who Fell Beneath the Sea by Axie Oh (ebook)
A Witch in Time by Constance Sayers (ebook)
How to Kill Men and Get Away With It by Katy Brent (ebook)
Plutoshine by Lucy Kissick (ebook)

 

 

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