The Singer of Stories

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...

Last time I posted, I expressed my surprise at how many books I'd managed to finish in a week. This week, I'm surprised at how few I've finished in the past two weeks. To be fair to me, the past two weeks have involved midterms and several other factors that resulted in a highly disrupted schedule (which is why I also didn't post anything the last two weeks...). Now things are starting to settle again, and hopefully I can slip back into a regular reading rhythm. In the meantime, here's a catch-up post of all the books I missed the last two weeks while I was dealing with other things. As a heads-up, the formatting gets funky on this post. For some reason Blogger wouldn't let me do what I've been doing for no apparent reason and I got fed up fighting it. I'll just try to do my normal formatting again next week... ~~~ How to Be a Pirate and How to Speak Dragonese Author:  Cressida Cowell Genres: fantasy, middle grade Star Rating:  4 Stars Review Type:  Reco...

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...