Blowing Time

[art by Marta Milczarek] Lately I've been reading a lot. With the lockdown going on and staying a lot at home, I've had a lot of time that I had to fill up somehow. So what better way to do that than reading? My preferred genres right now are LGBTQ+ (Romance), Mystery and Crime. I squeeze in other genres here and there (right now I'm reading a Slice-of-Life Fiction book), but those usually take more time to complete. I am, after all, taking a break from reading right now to write this while I'm only 23 pages in. A while ago I started thinking about the books I used to read when I was little and then later in high school. I think those books helped shape my preferences for now. But let's go even further back.  I think I always liked reading. When I was little my mum used to tell me stories at night and I still cherish those moments. If I think about it, I can feel the curiosity, the interest, and the warm comfort enveloping me in those moments. From then on, I don...

Is the title too confusing? I think it is. Let me explain. Louise Collins wrote three books where the plot takes place in different prisons. Apart from that they are not connected in any way, there are no common characters, they don't know each other, it's not even the same prison, but I can't help thinking about these books as part of a series simply because they are so similar. The novels are, in the order they were published, The Freshman , The Psychopath , and The Rat . I first came across The Psychopath and I read that, afterwards I saw there were two more books and decided to read those as well, so I am going to go ahead and mix them up a bit next. 

[photography by  Brandi Redd ] Watching films is not all I did this month, I read too, so now I want to write about some of my favourite reads. I'm not going to write about the ones I did not like, and this list might not be in concordance with the ratings on my Goodreads account . Thing is, sometimes it's more to a book that just being written flawlessly. I might have rated a book 5 stars, but that doesn't mean it will make it into my top however many books. A 3 or 4 stars book might be higher on my list based on a thing that I thought was brilliant, or something that I found to be unique or outstanding. Or simply because on the vibe of the book and how I think about it a while after I read it.  That being said, here I my favourite books from this January.

Woah, I have this in my drafts since September, how did that happen? I have some ideas, but either way, I think it gathered enough dust and it is about time I post this. But first let me just mention from that start that I am not yelling at the authors here. There are a lot of different topics and genres and unless the writing is absolutely awful, anything goes as far as I am concerned. Who I am yelling at is the readers, but more accurately the ones of us (yes, me included) who write opinions or reviews on various sites after reading a book. And I am so mad at some of the reviewers. I have pretty good reasons, too, I'd say. At least me concerned. 

Can't believe this is my first post this month. I've been slacking. Okay, I have some good-ish explanation. In short I was so not in a state to write anything. I was, however, in the mood to draw. And watch some anime. Not movies. Reading... not quite, a little. This is a classical case of life happening. Work has been crazy lately. Besides an increase in customers (which is actually not a problem at all) some of the people I work with have gone completely nuts. Some ridiculous things go on, I don't even think you would believe all of it if I were to write it down here. I might do that at some point, preferably when that's not my main income source, but until then, take my word for it: people are nuts!  Moving along~

        I would put the titles of the books instead of 'two more books', but they are so long! The books are The Abbot's Ghost, or Maurice Treherne's Temptation: A Christmas Story and Behind a Mask; or, a Woman's Power . Just look at those titles.  Moving along, when I wrote about Little Women I mentioned at the end of the post that the books Louisa May Alcott wrote under the pseudonym A. M. Barnard were more appealing to me. I downloaded then these two books and I was pretty eager to start reading them. Of course, it took my a while to do so and today I put in extra effort to finish reading the second book.

I've had this film on my watch list for a while. I don't know what made me want to watch it, most likely Emma Watson because I like watching the cast of HP in various movies and see how they manage to slip into another character. I don't know, I think they are great actors and I enjoy watching them in roles as diverse as possible. I don't go out of my way to do it, but if I come across a movie that looks interesting, why not. So while I had Little Women on my watch list I happened to see the book in a store and I thought it would be fun to read the book then watch the movie and compare the two. What I did not know when I bought the book was that Little Women is a series. As I am not a fan of the genre I had no idea and no one bothered to specify that on the cover, I only got a hint about it on the very last page. There are two other books, Little Men and Jo's Boys that I have no interest in reading (I'll get to that).

A while ago, sometime in February, I read the Marshals series by Mary Calmes, and these days I finally published all the reviews I wrote about the series on Yaoi Otaku . If you want, you can read them all on YO, if not, this post is going to basically be a summary of what I wrote on YO. I guess? It's probably going to be more like a what's it about because my hatred for spoilers inhibits me from actually letting loose. Maybe let me know if I managed to spark your interest or not. Before I go into it, the Marshals series was first published in 2014, the fourth and last volume being published in 2018. Yes, there are four books, five if we count the short novella that I'm going to talk about in a few paragraphs, and sadly there is no news or hint of a sequel.  If you plan on reading the series and don't like spoilers, maybe don't read the whole post, read perhaps only about the first book of the series if you are not yet convinced you want t...