The Singer of Stories

It's amazing to me how much my expectations can color what I'm reading or what books I choose to prioritize. This week was a stark reminder of that for me. I finished three main books this week (again, not including the How to Train Your Dragon books that I finished because I still haven't figured out how to review those properly). One was a book I was looking forward to and was disappointed by, one was a book I'd avoided for actual years because I expected to hate it and then didn't, and one was one that I picked up randomly from the library and then read in a day because it was overdue. Oops. Lesson learned. You can't always judge a book by its cover... or even by what other reviewers say about it on GoodReads. ~~~  A Graveyard of First Chapters Author:  Johnny Payne Genres:  Magical Realism, Adult, Literary Fiction Review Type: BookSirens ARC Star Rating:  3 stars, although I'm still considering lowering it to 2.75 My Tags:  booksirens-arc, modern-fiction...

It's kind of weird to say this, but this month just largely hasn't been a reading month, which has made posting blog posts a bit tricky. I think this week was the first week all month where I actually had a good number of books to post, so here we are, back again for another exploration. I was apparently in the mood for fantasy this week, so all the books below feature fantastical worlds of one sort or another. I'm still figuring out how to review long series since I don't often have lots of new things to say as the books progress other than "Yup, still like it," and it gets harder and harder to review the books without providing spoilers even just by posting the synopsis for the previous books. That means that even though I listened to and thoroughly enjoyed two more books in the How to Train Your Dragon series by Cressida Cowell, I didn't include the review to them here. Maybe someday I'll circle back and review the series as a whole or something? We...

Well. This week happened. Somehow I read a lot this week? Which confuses me because it was an absolutely hectic week and I spent a lot of time wondering where my brain went and how the heck I could possibly convince it to come back and play nicely for a while. I'm still not sure I have a brain, but at least I have a blog post? It even has a theme again, and I'm still not sure how I did that because it was definitely a week where I read wherever my fancy took me and didn't try to stick to a genre or even what I was "supposed" to be reading. That means that in this post you'll find everything from Gothic classics to thrillers to middle grade fantasy. Some are obscure or still unpublished, others are famous and have left their mark. Some feature people living on the margins of society while others detail the lives of celebrities. It's a week of extremes. And honestly after the week I just had, it seems oddly fitting. Sort of on that note, the first review thi...

Remember how last week I said it was surprising to me that I'd been able to theme everything so well when I normally have a ton of books going that I finish at random? Yeah, so apparently this was "finish half the books Singer was in the middle of" week, and there is no rhyme or reason to how they're organized that I can see (although if you can see a pattern please don't hesitate to point it out.). This is going to be a long, largely random weekly round-up with four different books representing four different genres. Here we go! Our first book is a Christian nonfiction work that I've been working my way through and finished this week. Garden City: Work, Rest, and the Art of Being Human Author:  John Mark Comer Genres:  Nonfiction, Christianity, Theology Star Rating:  3 Stars Review Type:  I was simply curious My Tags:  nonfiction Synopsis * You’ve heard people say “Who you are matters more than what you do”. Does the Bible really teach that?  In  Gard...