Brought out in 2017, A Castle in England by Jamie Rhodes is a historical graphic novel telling the story of Scotenie Castle.
Sometimes I enjoy one off graphic novels because it gives me a quick hit of “Finishing Dopamine” as I call it. One of those – I finished a thing! Woo. So, this is one of those Finishing Dopamine books for me where I read it in about twenty minutes – if that. It is pretty short.
I can’t honestly suggest it. Realistically, the comic panels are set out okay, but the stories in it – there are a few short stories all compiled together – the short stories needed more room to be fleshed out. And…not meaning to be cruel, but the art styles were not always on point. The dialogue also fails in certain stories to help convey what is occurring.
It did help at the end of each short story that there were sections that described the history surrounding the story. A couple of the stories honestly needed that to make the image work and chopped dialogue make sense.
I rented this from my local library and have no interest in buying a copy for my shelf. I’m not quite sure I would suggest anyone go out of their way to read it unless they’re interested in castle history as a whole and want to read a graphic novel for kicks and giggles.
Published in 2023, Witch of Wild Things by Raquel Vasquez Gilliland is a lightweight urban fantasy crossed with modern drama/romance. It’s about family, healing, and acceptance.
There are instances of magic, but primarily it revolves around the main character learning to let people in past defenses she built for very good reasons. Raquel Vasquez Gilliland approaches mental health and family flaws with a realistic touch that feels lived. The misunderstandings and animosity aren’t dispraportionate to modern romance/drama.
As someone roughly the shade of mayo and growing up the suburban farm life – entering into a LatinX household and those experiences was a lovely experience. It was nice to see that representation and to learn a level of empathy or sympathy that I am developing with regard to diverse cultures from my own. I can be accepting and an ally, but I also need to do the work to better understand other people’s lived experiences to do better.
I couldn’t fully relate to the drama in the story. The logic wasn’t quite working with my flavor of neurodivergence. So, some of the animosity and misunderstandings between the family, friends, and love interests were a little outside my wheelhouse. However, I think the conversations and circumstances were well written and thought out.
The editing was clean. It read like mass market rather than literature, and that is perfectly fine for the style of book and length.
I rented it through my local library, and I’m alright with that. I think this would be a decent book on a shelf for folk who enjoy modern drama/romance on the regular.
Hannah Whitten brought out For the Wolf, a mid-fantasy/romance in 2021. This is the first book in the series. It has been well received by the mass market community and publicized enough to get a lot of readers.
Having read a Court of Thorns and Roses recently, the similarities in structure and content was a bit much. Then again, having been written like a Beauty and the Beast retelling (but with a Red Riding Hood toss in) what can you actually hope for? Sometimes you just want a good B&B retelling, and that’s enough.
If it doesn’t sound like I’m enamored with the book, don’t get me wrong. I really did enjoy the read. The editing was done well. The sentence structure, cadence, and vocabulary were what I would expect from a 2020s author writing for an adult audience raised on young adult literature. The pacing felt like an editor had taken a strict hand to it and defined it down to word count rather than clarity – which is par for the course at this point with mid-fantasy novels.
Maybe my issue comes from the side characters not having enough screen to develop them into actual beings rather than tokens. Is that too much to be disappointed with a book? Maybe. I just wish there had been about four chapters interspersed throughout to help really develop more info on the two main side characters.
The interactions between the MC and the LI and the depth of the world build to me were more interesting than the MC’s sister’s arc. I got through maybe three of her chapters and then just didn’t care and started speed reading those sections. I wanted more of the woods and more of how that worked. Of the MC and LI interacting together and really developing a complex relationship. It instead really read more like a piece written up as a concept screenplay for a PG13 HBO production.
I would say if you liked ACOTAR then you really will enjoy this series. For me, I don’t really have much interest in reading the next book in the series. I don’t mind that I bought the Kobo edition for a couple bucks on some kind of sale. I don’t think that was a bad deal. It just might be something I have to be more aware of as I pick and choose stories to read from here on out. It isn’t fair to authors to review a book poorly only because I didn’t care for the storyline at a personal level. Objectively, the story worked. I’d say if you want a read that doesn’t require heavy emotional work, then it would make for a nice weekend.
Fumio Sasaki, lauded as one of the great modern Japanese minimalists published Goodbye, Things in 2015, just in time to contribute to the firestorm that is the building minimalist obsession paired with The Minimalists, Minimal Mom, Marie Kondo, Dana K. White, and so many others. Grant it, not all of those listed qualify themselves as minimalist. Quite often they are just proponents of decluttering and living with intension, the simple life, etc.
This is one of those books I have read probably five times at this point. I just got done with another round of reading it. I’ve been a practicing minimalist since 2017. And a practice it is. In the same vein as meditation and yoga, showing up and participating is necessary to keep from getting rusty. I had this year where I really didn’t practice like I should have and ended up with so many bags of kids toys and several boxes of books to get rid of.
Some folk like having books around. For me, I had wrist surgery a couple of years back and have been struggling to get back into reading physical books. It only took me the last year to figure out why it was a struggle. Holding a book open for more than twenty minutes hurts. This actually made it easier to get rid of more books this go around than in past sweeps. I’ve just about got all of my books to fit into a particular cabinet I wanted them to fit in. The outliers are the recipe books above the microwave which I do use.
However, a good portion of Sasaki-san’s book has me on the war path to purge more out of my domain. I want to have less laundry to do, less dishes, less dusting and upkeep. And I’m pretty paired down at this point. A great deal of what is left are things that are shared amongst the family that I personally can’t get rid of. Mounds of boardgames that never get played. They aren’t mine, but they do occupy the space that I maintain. There isn’t room in the other family member’s office for them.
That’s something that I think might get lost in translation between a single minimalist and a family minimalist that people fail to extrapolate. They might say Sasaki-san’s minimalism is unachievable for families. And that’s failing to internalize quite a great many values found within the book. You don’t have to live out of a backpack to be a minimalist. He says that pretty early in the book. It’s a matter of getting to the point of having what you need. And that ‘need’ takes a long-long-long time to fully understand. “But I need this for xyz!” A person on the outside of that phrase might tell you “no, you don’t need that”, but for you, you still do. Your psyche still does. You have to come to a conclusion about needs in your own time. Hence practicing minimalist.
I still don’t feel like I have the house to where I would like it to be. Some of that is construction material floating around in strange spots.
I still have items that I am hard pressed to let go of, even though I really do want to let go: i.e. an Amish made solid oak rocking horse my godparents commissioned for me when I was born when the rest of my extended family figured I would die as a premie. That thing has no space in the house. It takes up a funny corner that I don’t like it being in, but I don’t really have any other good solutions. Ultimately, I should put it down at the curb and let some other family have it and get use out of it. To me, it symbolizes validity of my existence, and I really do need to pull myself out of keeping things for symbolic reasons. It’s hard. Practicing is not perfect.
The book itself is well written. The translators and editors did a great job.
It’s one of those top books that I would suggest people who have already gone through Marie Kondo or Dana K. White’s books look at. It feels like an intermediate minimalist book. Not because of difficult concepts, but because it will make you question things that you value even more so than the other books and that is something that can really wound an ego if you haven’t already had practice in letting go of some material possessions.
Margareta Magnusson brought out her beautiful little memoir/self-help book /cultural philosophy on death book in 2017 and contributed to yet another facet of the intentional living movement.
I rented the audiobook this go around. I’ve read it a couple times from the library before. This one I really should just add to my bookshelf. I don’t visit it as frequently as Goodbye Things, but three times in six years is probably enough times to qualify buying the ebook.
The title is morbid. I think every person says that who talks about this book. In a way, I think that is the point. It faces the major element of the topic head on and makes you look at it without beating around the bush.
The bad part is: it’s really hard to buy it as a gift for a lot of people. I want to give it to my Mother in Law (kindest woman you’ll ever meet) because she’s been wanting to downsize, but isn’t sure how to go about it. She’s not wanting to be a minimalist by any stretch of the imagination, but she’s aware she’s struggling to decide what is important, and what is not. Sadly, I really can’t help anymore than I have at this point. This is where I know this book would be of value. She’s in the age bracket to really get full utilization out of it. But it feels really morbid to give it to her. So, I’m pressing for her to rent the audiobook and listen to it when she gets the chance.
I’ve used some of the points in it to better evaluate sentimental items. It’s helping me getting going in the New Year with another wave of cleaning out things I just don’t want to be managing anymore. I’ve been downsizing my physical book library pretty ruthlessly. I have a couple antique books and children’s picture books I’m keeping because I love looking at them, but if I can get the physical book as an ebook, I’m just ditching the physical and will buy the ebook if I find I want to revisit reading it with enough frequency to warrant spending the money. This has opened up a phenomenal amount of space in my house already.
This is definitely one of those books, along side Savvy Estate Planning and There’s No Such Thing As Bad Weather that I feel should be given as very well meaning gifts and out of a realm of love. I would highly encourage you read this book. I don’t rightly care if it’s audiobook, rental, buy it – but give it a read before you get squeamish about the book title. It helps with prioritizing the space you want to live in as you age. We all age. It’s inevitable. And if you say ‘but some people die early!’ Well. That’s also part of the point of this book. Do you want your family fighting over your stuff? Or do you want to make that transition as painless as possible as one of your last gifts to them?
Published in February of 2020, Gods of Jade and Shadow is a headlong ride into Mexican mythology, a slow burn romance with a logical ending, and beautiful prose that might lean a bit floral, but it is beautiful to behold none the less.
The main character is a women in need of her own coming of age story. This slow burn provides her the time to develop her wants, desires, and to test her core philosophies when confronted with adversarial situations different from those she was already subjected to. The conclusion for the slow burn is one that I rather appreciated and it made good solid sense the way it did end.
The editing was handled quite well, though there were pacing issues in some sections that would have benefitted from a little bit more of a deft hand in shrinking the floral prose. Not all of it, mind you, just a little bit in some sections.
I don’t often encounter books within my reading familiarity written about Mexico that is presented by a BIPOC author. Often the adventure books I encounter and mass market white guy books with high octane levels of spy/archaeology/who-done-its. This was refreshing. It gave me culture, perspective, and an introduction into a mythology that other than for a few archaeology shows and The Road to El Dorado movie (questionable at the very least), I am entirely unfamiliar with.
I liked the Neil Gaiman style interpretation of the gods and their fallibilities. The stylization and depth that the story went into could be an interesting religious philosophies and social structures of the 1920s study. But, if you aren’t into it for the deeper meanings and symbolism, it still reads as a very good general slow burn with pretty adventure settings.
I finally bought myself a Kobo Libra 2 and rented the book through my local library Libby app. This one I could very much see people putting on a bookshelf. I might buy the ebook at some point. The imagery is really what sold me on the story, and I’d love to revisit that. The cover art is magnificent, but I’m also a sucker for Art Deco and Southwest/Mission style art – which is part of what drew me to look at the story in the first place.
I will say, the Kobo is going to revolutionize my library. I pretty much ditched some hundred and fifty physical books over the winter break. I had wrist surgery a couple years back and holding physical books open hurts after about twenty minutes, which meant my library was getting dusty from disuse. Being able to sit and enjoy this story on an ereader was so much more pleasant.
Published two years before Japanese Women Don’t Get Old or Fat by Naomi Moriyama, French Women Don’t Get Fat by Mireille Guiliano is another book written by someone who is not a nutritionist, but by a person entrenched in a culture that looks at food differently from the American perspective.
I read both books side by side in yet another desperate attempt to get rid of a copious amount of weight put on from medically induced malnutrition and pain eating. Who would have thought you could gain weight while being malnourished? Yes, you can. And yes, I thought I was eating pretty healthy outside of my pain eating. Standard amounts of fruits, vegetables, decent meat, not heavy on the baked sweets. The nutritionist and dietician looked at my food journals and have talked to me several times and every time they just shrugged and said “you’re doing alright, just keep it up and you should lose the weight.” Took a multivitamin and such. Yet pain eating was taking its toll.
Guiliano presented the concept of smaller portions. Making sure that you’re getting the nutrition you need to be healthy, but also have small portions of the things you enjoy, rather than the big American portions. The fundamental idea that occurred to me – I don’t remember it ever being stated blatantly in the book, but it occurred to me in reading this and the Japanese version – is that maybe American portions from the Food Pyramid or too large or aren’t adjusted appropriately. Then again, I’ve felt that opinion for a while and harkened back to when a ‘square meal’ meant a ‘square’ – i.e. four parts to a meal – meat, fruit, veg, carb. What I needed to solidly internalize was ditch the snacks, eat three filling good meals at proper times, drink more water, and take my time actually enjoying the process of eating.
We’re always in such a rush in America that it never feels like we are truly allowed to sit and contemplate our food. We have TV, our phones, we’re needing to get to the next place, next job, next chore – that food isn’t looked at as a daily event, but just one more to-do-list item to get out of the way.
Since turning off the TV, portioning smaller, and enjoying my food more, I’ve been reshaping my framing of food, which has made cooking more enjoyable. Also, not having to make as large of portions has been letting my grocery budget stretch and I don’t feel like I’m spending hours in the kitchen just to watch the family wolf it down and run away to go do anything else other than actually sit at the table and talk to one another. Grant it – they still wolf and leave, but I sit, take my time, and contemplate the food, or life in general. It’s been rather nice. Now – I can be texture averse and times, and that is also helping me clarify what foods I would rather rethink instead of forcing myself to eat ‘because it’s good for me.’ If I don’t like the texture of spinach, why not find a different type of veg that still hits the nutritional levels, but doesn’t taste terrible?
These are concepts that I learned in the first half of the book. Throughout the book are a variety of recipes – often for some kind of sweet that doesn’t involve a crust. Seeing as I’m not really into sweets, this isn’t a big deal.
It does however make it difficult to utilize the book effectively when used as an ebook rather than a physical book. I don’t want it on my bookshelf, though, so I make due. That is something for you to be aware of if you want to give this one a try. I would suggest renting a copy from the library first. It isn’t an end all be all that needs to live in your house. The concepts, once internalized, aren’t something you need to read over and over again. It’s not like you’re dealing with macro-ratios that have to be adjusted every time you gain or lose a pound.
Oh, and hot water.
Hot water has been a weird godsend. I always thought that sounded disgusting. As long as it’s a decent water that doesn’t have a bunch of funky minerals or chlorine in it, it’s rather comforting to drink if I’m trying to avoid adding sweeteners to coffee or tea (I’m a super taster, which means I taste bitter flavors really well and that makes some things incredibly offputting. That means coffee and tea is just not worth it unadulterated). I add a bit of lemon sometimes. I’ve found at family’s house, I just used bottled water because their well water is sulfurous which is disgusting hot, but bottled water is really neutral.
Book five in the Sea Haven Sisters series by prolific romance writer Christine Feehan, Fire Bound follows the life of Lissa, a fire elemental and trained assassin and her developing love of Casimir.
Alright, dust of the hands, that’s a wrap folks!
Sorry.
It’s alright. I’ve been reading Feehan since 2004 and enjoyed a great many of her books. Dark Destiny was my first, and I’ve read Water Bound about three times.
But, I think the years have affected the writing. Outside of a very good standard formula that makes it easy to expect long sex scenes, quick burst of action, and minor character development to justify the static world build, the books are what they are: Walmart popular. And it sells, because it’s guaranteed what you’re getting. Hot characters, detailed spice, a happy ending.
The style has shifted, though. The early Dark series was softer in tone. I don’t know how to pin point it, but the recent years have been leaning harder into dom/sub territory mixed with a certain level of crassness. I noticed the frequency when her motorcycle series came around. It feels like she can’t quite split up her styles anymore. She can’t differentiate them outside of the minor magic rules.
I would love to see what those early 2000s held. To feel that style in her writing again. I keep going back to reading her books, but keep feeling disappointed. I like a good spice scene. I eat that up. But anymore, I’m just flipping through the chapters, jumping paragraph to paragraph – speed reading so I can have the plot. At least she’s taken to giving the female characters more time to develop to orgasm rather than just depending on the characters to poke them a couple times and use that as justification for a spectacular outcome.
One would ask why I keep going back to read her work if I don’t have rave reviews. Easy – I know what to expect. Sometimes that’s what I’m in the mood for. I don’t like chancing wasted time of writing that might be frustrating if I’m already struggling to fit reading into my schedule.
Is this one I want on my shelf? Nope. I rented the ebook through Libby and enjoyed it for an afternoon. I own Water Bound as an ebook and am happy to leave it at that. Fire Bound is just a bit more repetitive than Earth Bound in making sure the reader knows what is going on up front. That isn’t a bad thing if you read your series out of order, but for those reading in order, the amount of ‘what you missed’ needed to be taimed.
Also, her editor is getting lax on catching typos. And the over used words and repetitive words. Its a cheap paranormal romance. I shouldn’t be all that judgy, but still – the number of times ‘velvet’ was used for a particular chapter was grating.
Suggest it?
Yeah, sure. Enjoy. Maybe you’ll find it a fun little diversion.
Savvy Estate Planning is true Horror Genre. This thing gave me legit nightmares. And maybe one really solid panic attack. And I now have an estate planner.
This book I am quite tempted to buy for all of my in-laws. I did actually buy it for my mother-in-law when she asked Wren and me to help in talking to an attorney about a trust. My folks have a will and trust set up. They did that back in the first year of Covid. But I didn’t think too hard about what that meant until MIL asked. So, I did what I do best – academically panic. I mean research. I wanted to know what it meant to talk to an estate attorney, and what would be expected in this kind of meeting. I had exam anxiety is what I had.
So, I went looking for a book, any book, on estate planning to get me started. This one had a decent number of good reviews on Amazon, so I used some extra points I had lying around and picked the ebook up for free. I got half way through it before having a physical copy sent to my mother in law. When I got to her house later in the week, I kidnapped it and filled it with lots of highlighter marks and sticky tabs for her to use more comprehensively.
Good lord, I wish more people read these types of books and took care of their family through Wills and Trusts.
Was the editing clean? Yeah, I think so. There weren’t any glaring typos that distracted from the horror stories of folks stuck in probate. I didn’t notice run on sentences when I learned that 18 year olds really do need Power of Attorneys so their folks can more easily bury them and get their car out of the impound lot when they die in a drunk driving incident. I couldn’t pin point if there were repetitive sentence structure when I found out that you can’t just let your family divvy up the guns from your gun safe when you die, because what if Jr. takes weed – that would make it a felony for him to end up in possession of your favorite antique pew-pew.
So, is this one of those ones I’d just suggest picking up used or at the library?
No.
Absolutely not.
This is one that I would say keep a physical copy around – maybe let it haunt your bathroom if you need terrifying reading during your long morning constitutionals. Highlight it. Tab it. Note the margins to heck and gone. Use the damn checklist. Save up and get yourself a trust and a will. Do it. And know you’re doing one of the best things you could for your family.
Seriously, though. You need the book, and your ma, and your grandpa, and your little sister. I’m not being sponsored to say that. It is the most necessary horror book you will ever read.
Naomi Moriyama and William Doyle brought out the original copy of Japanese Women Don’t Get Old or Fat in 2006. Since then, there have been several re-releases with new covers.
I have had medical issues for quite some time, and that has impacted my weight. I also have an issue with eating food when I am in pain as a bid for dopamine rather than medication. This has forced my weight to balloon well past healthy. I’ve done every free diet under the sun (i.e. I haven’t tried weight watchers) and came to a conclusion that none of them fixed my issue. Some medication actually fixed my issue. Now that I have pain under control, I wanted to try again. Knowing that Raw, 80/20, vegan, vegetarian, pescatarian, the fruitbat diet, etc. etc. just wasn’t for me, I wanted something practical.
Having heard from so many people on Youtube Shorts that moving out of the US let them drop weight, I wanted to know more. Outside of a lot more walking, what was different? Quality of materials? Alright, I just shimey around my budget and buy better quality food…though that’s rather expensive. Unless you’re buying smaller portions of said quality food…hmmm….
Reading this book and another one, the key that both books kept coming back to was the same – smaller portions. You’re not denying yourself the tasty things, but you’re getting a better concept of your portions and keeping to them.
This seemed intriguing. Could American portions – even the food pyramid portions – be too big? I don’t know. This lady isn’t a dietician, or a nutritionist. (Then again, every dietician and nutritionist I have been to has been well into the medically obese category, so it never felt like I was talking to someone who actually knew how to implement the American Food Pyramid to their benefit) But, if there was a cultural understanding of variety in smaller portions that actually works, I was willing to make a go of it. Goal was not to end up with an eating disorder, but also get the weight off.
I think it’s working. I don’t have the scale where I can get to it easily, so everything is based on the clothes I have in my closet. My jeans are fitting more comfortably, and I was able to get into one of my favorite Henleys – which had grown too tight in the arms since last winter. So, I would say smaller portions isn’t a bad place to start.
This I got out of the first half of both books. Quite a bit of this book is dedicated to recipes – which is a little difficult to utilize on a phone for me personally. So, this book might be more advantageous as a physical copy for folks who don’t like flipping through an ebook. I didn’t want it on my actual shelf because I don’t want that title perpetually staring at me.
The editing is clean. The writing comes off as a thesis with statistics and data points. This might be off putting to some, but I appreciate the author’s dedication to backing up her sources when diet and nutrition are not her area of expertise. Her area comes from a cultural background.
Would I suggest you go out and add this to your shelf immediately?
Not really. I’d suggest rent if you can, or find a beater copy at a garage sale. It’s alright as one of those self-help books, but it’s not quite worth dedicating shelf space after you get the concept of “smaller, but filling portions gets you where you want to be” down pat.