Tagged was my first read this year. It's a difficult book, & unlike Blue's other full books, it's not all ages: it's a graphic novel w/ explicit on-page BDSM sex. Blue's author's note is extremely helpful in understanding the comic, which I think is underdeveloped & too fragmentary, but it also makes sense that it is. I wouldn't suggest it to straight people at all because it's very much written for a queer audience. #SundayFunDay @BookMarkTavern

I didn't add up my word search numbers. It ended up being a very hectic and stressful holiday season, so I didn't post much on Litsy or read half as much as I'd hoped. This is mostly just the ridiculous number of bingo cards (55) I added my 22 books to, as well as getting to include audio editing time to my Twitch read-along books. I only got 2 full bingo boards. 😂

#wintergames #wintergames2024 #xmaschachas #christmaschapterchasers
@StayCurious

The #MRC2025 is finally here! Read 12 books in 2025 using the prompts. Tag me if you read a book for it!

There are more graphics and links to a Google sheet and StoryGraph challenge on my blog https://harpgriffinbooks.wordpress.com/2025/01/01/happy-new-year-2025/

Background image courtesy of Victorian era William Morris & Co.

@LitsyEvents

The #FRC2025 is finally here! Read 25 books in 2025 using the prompts. Tag me if you read a book for it. I review all the books participants read each year when the prompts overlap with the URC.

There are more graphics and links to a Google sheet and StoryGraph challenge on my blog https://harpgriffinbooks.wordpress.com/2025/01/01/happy-new-year-2025/

Background image courtesy of Victorian era William Morris & Co.

@LitsyEvents

The #URC2025 is finally here! Read 52 books in 2025 using the prompts. Tag me if you read a book for it. I review all the books participants read each year!

52 makes for terrible bingo cards, so I don't make those, but there are more graphics and links to a Google sheet and StoryGraph challenge on my blog https://harpgriffinbooks.wordpress.com/2025/01/01/happy-new-year-2025/

Background image courtesy of Victorian era William Morris & Co.

A couple days late posting this. Everything in November was good except, weirdly “Love Is All You Need“. Don't let the cover fool you, it's not queer. Also, I hated half the quotes. Oh well.

The tagged book is the latest pdf-only book I'm transcribing.

What I really wanted to tag is The Oak & the Ash, which is a lovely queer historical romance focusing on working class men and the gentry are sympathetic villains.

I actually made this bingo for a video game scavenger hunt* and then I thought “you know, it would work for Litsy/books too“, so I thought I'd share it. #wintergames2024

*It's an Advent Calendar style item hunt. We need to find items (not UI elements) in video games from fresh save files. Games can only be used once by anyone participating, so it's both cooperative and competitive. We all made bingo boards to try to predict this year's items. 😂

I actually really am super looking forward to reading the Dickens classic on stream again this year. It was so much fun last year and made me realize that I'd been made to read Dickens wrong - read him aloud, to listeners. What was always a slog became a joy. I haven't decided if I'll try reading Dickens' own presentation version. Illustration of Fezziwig's Ball by John Leech.

#wintergames2024 #xmaschacha #earlybirdpoints @StayCurious

I see all these fun “have people pick books for you“ games but other than my obligatory books (stream reading or epubs I'm making), I'm a huge mood reader and also how do you even begin to tackle my monster 1043 books on Storygraph alone? Especially as I find their filters kind of useless (eg pages starts at 300 or less???). And I have 3 or 4 TBRs at this point...

#wintergames2024 #xmaschacha #earlybirdpoints @StayCurious

🌲 We have 4+ trees, so both!
☕ I like both, but egg nog is hard to find here, so hot cocoa it is!
🎊 Eve is traditional, but so is 12 days and we'll have maybe 3?
🍖 None of these! We have tourtière and cipâte.
🏠 We'll be doing dinner parties around the province?
❄ Snow, I'm fairly far North, eh? 😆

#ThisorThat #XmasChaCha #WinterGames2024 #EarlyBirdPoints @StayCurious

This is my WW1 memoir for Twitch this month in honour of Armistice Day. It's not my favorite of non-combatant WW1 memoirs, but it's still interesting to see the perspective of a 56-58 year old gentleman volunteer (his father was a Sir!), with 4 children at home, including his eldest son (17-19, yes, he served). Also, as a francophone, I relate so much to his rants about French “Administration“.

October reading roundup - doesn't include short stories outside of anthologies. Nothing was egregiously bad this time, though a few weren't half as good as they could have been.

The tagged book is easily my favorite, and I had to add it to Litsy. Absolute catnip for me - queer, disabled men in WW1 dealing with their PTSD without sounding like a modern therapist, and talking literature. The cover is not quite right but it could be worse.

Final #HauntedShelf points check in for Team #Flerken

9380 points! I did not read as much as I had hoped, and most of my bingo boards have single lines finished, with only Body Count Bingo getting a blackout, and only after I decided to count short stories individually. I did not, in fact, catch 'em all. I did much better in Pokemon Sleep this month. 😂

@PuddleJumper

Trying to catch up points and posts for #HauntedShelf for team #Flerken!

2 words, R for @texreader's #HalloweenAtoZbingo 22 readathon or bingo squares including #BodyDoubleReadathon and #CozyReads #31by31 plus 1 medium #PumpkabooHunt and a move on the #promptmaze, a book cover...

Book rec: chilly night, paranormal, jump scare, snuggles, series. Read The Forgotten Dead first! It's actually a CHRISTMAS book if you want spooky for December. ;)

A this or that for @Eggs #WondrousWednesday this week!

Coffee, though I do like cocoa, too.
Green! So vibrant!
Spooky - at first I thought funny, but I bounce off so much pure humor.
Tangible book - I listen to audiobooks to make more hours in the day, but physical for enjoyment.
Halloween - we get a whole season out of it!
Gloves - just practical!
Low-key - I like parties but not that often.

Not my first read of #HauntedShelf for team #Flerken, but the first one I've finished figuring out points for. 😂

13 words, D for @texreader's #HalloweenAtoZbingo 21 readathon or bingo squares including #AfterDarkBingo #BodyCountBingo #GottaCatchemAll and #31by31 plus 1 medium PumpkabooHunt and a move on the #promptmaze and a book cover (mist), plus it's a spooky book from my TBR.

Oh, and I absolutely think more people should read this book. 😁

I just wanted to tell all of you that I'm not dead and I'll be back to #hauntedshelf shenanigans after the weekend. Technically, I was up to bookish things, as I've been on literature-focused panels with authors, publishers, and scholars: Gillan Polack, Juliet E McKenna, Nick Hubble, Vanessa MacLaren-Wray, SL Dove Cooper, Cheryl Morgan, and Kat Dodd. Tomorrow I'll be adding AK Faulkner and Theresa Jean Tanenbaum to the list.

September reading! The tagged book has 0 historical accuracy and 10/10 (ace!) vibes and I manually added it.
👍 The Good: Madman's Library, Princess Princess Ever After, Viscount Debacle, Rescue Cats, Snow Fairy, History in Flames, Ducks, Dewdrop

😐 The Meh: Crumbs, Mr. Jones, Skip&Loafer, Mushroom Color Atlas

☠ The Bad: Ink in Water, The Girl Who Drew Butterflies, Heartbreak Diet, Asterios Polyp, Footnotes from the Most Fascinating Museums

1. You think I'm planning anything? There's a whole series of Jordan L Hawk's I haven't read yet, so that? Probably?

2. Naw, not since I was a kid. Now it's just raking season.

3. Pumpkin Spice lattes and cider donuts, neither of which I'm going to find around here, alas. Well, the latte I can fake by spicing my coffee. 😂

4. I'm gonna catch so many pokemon and post so many bingo board blackouts. I hope.

#HauntedShelf #Flerken @PuddleJumper

For my #HauntedShelf #LetsGoPoints book rec, I just HAVE to get folks to read this horror romance by one of my faves Jordan L. Hawk. It's genuinely creepy (and for me, scary because I'm not much for horror) despite knowing there's a HEA. For the bingo boarders, you get: a gay trans man, a former defensive tackle love interest, ghosts, a seance, haunted houses, a taste of dark academia, and the rest is spoilers sorry! @PuddleJumper Team #Flerken

I need to snag some #LetsGoPoints for Team #Flerken for #HauntedShelf so let me promote the sign-up sheet to my tiny followers list, even though I strongly suspect almost all of you are participating already. 😂

Come pick up my slack this October, because the first week is definitely not going to go well for me (I gotta run Dublin Octocon first!).

https://forms.gle/EYiyBXSKoybhkKDX6

@PuddleJumper

I couldn't join any of the mini-TBR games for October because of the state of my TBRs. Storygraph has 1027 books, OpenLibrary has 818, and Libby has 717. There's SOME overlap but not nearly as much as you'd think. If I had any idea how to narrow these down for someone else to pick books from, I'd be making more progress on them haha.

#Flerken #HauntedShelf @PuddleJumper

I was hoping to squeeze in 3 more books to have 20 for August, but insomnia and migraines have not been cooperating.

Didn't like the majority of books here. Sheets was terrible.

Fighting for Yes, Seen, Dice, and Rosie Revere were fine.

A Psalm for the Wild-Built was a way overdue finish that was good. The Mysteries is absolutely not what I expected from Bill Watterson emerging from over 2 decades in retirement or whatever he was doing.

Saw this one via @willaful and decided to pick one of my Twitch reads (I usually have 6 or more books on the go at once!).

🐉 It's nonfiction about fossils - Mantell was a country doctor and a paleontologist. He discovered and named Iguanodon, as well as 4 of the 5 genera of dinosaurs known in his lifetime!

📚 I'm un/self-employed, streaming and making epubs of public domain books for now.

#whatsyourjobmonday @cupcake12

1) Read 📚
2) Laundry ✨
3) Read 📖
4) Chocolate! 🍫
5) Both - pen for writing, pencil for puzzles and drafting 📅
6) Ask questions 🔍
7) Be one - never meet your heroes 😂
8) Fish 🐟
9) Neither - except used book stores! 🏪
10) Snowy ❄

#WondrousWednesday @Eggs

For once I've remembered to post for #Hyggehour which I spent getting increasingly annoyed at the tagged book's errors. Dr. Rip may (hopefully) know his science, but he's an insufferable pedant and he gets history and etymology woefully wrong. Also, victim-blaming the 2004 and 2011 tsunami victims sure is a choice! Don't worry, the hate read was nonetheless cozy haha.

@TheBookHippie @Chrissyreadit @jenniferw88

1. Apparently Yoko had not been listening to the man from the start.
2. Call me Ishmael.
3. Piping down the valleys wild
4. The one thing everyone in Wychcomb St. Mary agreed on was that Mildred Hoggett was up to no good.
5. This is Oscar Fox with Outfoxing the Paranormal!

#firstlines @monalyisha

1) I read daily, anywhere from a single page to hundreds. It's really random and depends both on the book and my health. I once read a 700 page equivalent manuscript in one night.
2) “Sheets“. I knew I wouldn't like it, but I didn't expect to be furious. It's AWFUL.
3) Tagged. I read classics for fun and on my stream so I just picked the most recent full book that I'm not likely to take the time to review.

#wondrouswednesday @Eggs

July reading went better than June. I tagged the book I've been streaming, which is a wild ride from 1755 that I'm transcribing for epub so everyone can enjoy.
Don't read: The Girl from the Other Side, The Witch Boy, and Made in Korea. The latter two the authors mean well but oh boy, no no no.
Everything else on here was okay to good, nothing really amazing though. I disagree with everyone that The Haunted and the Haunters is better unabridged.

1) It was the name of a character that's spoken only once across 9? novels in a web-published series from the early 2000s. I'd been using it for a while as my preferred name as well, but I've got a new one of those that fits better.

2) Puzzles, laundry, minor repair work (eg fixing christmas light strings), rote data entry (like finding word counts for books on my for-stream list)

3) Tagged! Thanks Librivox!

@Eggs #WondrousWednesday

1) No. I'm very unlucky so I think placing bets would be cursing whoever I wanted to win. I don't gamble in any way.

2) This book is so good. I hate baseball and NYC and I don't usually like historicals set this recently, but Sebastian is just that good.

#Two4Tuesday @TheSpineView

Yes, I have absolutely been perusing old Regency pamphlets and laughing at credulous bloggers and historians alike. A number of them seem to think this, like the “Description of the Mermaid“ of the same year, was an advertisement. They clearly haven't read it, because it's a classic very dry Regency satire of the former. Both Cruikshank brothers illustrated the mermaid, adding to the confusion.
I'm currently transcribing this for e-pub. 🤘

Didn't read much in June because I've been bouncing between actual migraines and just bad headaches, and reading is one of the things I have a hard time doing with migraines. I hated Abandoned, Killer Fashion, and Ships. The two comic memoirs were not great but I didn't hate them. The Girl from the Sea was fine. But I absolutely LOVED Tramps & Vagabonds. I'll be looking to see if I can get more Gray not on Amazon, because it was so good.

May Reads!

I tagged the Queer History book because I rarely see Canadian queer history featured. It was a great book. Most of these books deserve an entire review of their own. I technically haven't finished A Sense of Shifting as of this post, but it balanced out the image. I hate baseball and Cat Sebastian still delivered.

The Monk and the Mermaid was okay, Star Trek Cats was for Trekkies only, and Ancient Egypt was a surprise disappointment.

49/100 although some I might have forgotten? So many of them I absolutely hate on here. So many. The horror and action films used to be on cable a lot, so I saw them thanks to life on the road staying in hotels.

I guess my top three would be
The Muppet Movie
Fiddler on the Roof
Blazing Saddles

#TLT #ThreeListThursday @dabbe

1. I got to visit the British Library in 2019, which was basically everything I hoped for. But I ALSO visited the Chester Beatty in Dublin 3 times in that same year, and got to view texts I never dreamed of getting to be in the same room with, some of them thousands of years old.
2. Library! I currently have 4 physical library cards I use digitally, as well as 2 virtual libraries.
3. 😅 I have 10 books in progress.

#WondrousWednesday @Eggs

@dabbe's #TLT this week is 80s movies. I only marked films I was absolutely certain I had actually seen and hadn't just absorbed by osmosis, for 104 of 187, or 56%. Since outside the Ghibli films I honestly don't like most of these, I blame cable t.v. in hotel rooms for the vast majority of my score. I tagged something Castle in the Sky related just because I have a fond memory of the singer from the film visiting my college class.

I did much more reading in April than this looks like, but it's all either re-reads or unfinished yet. May will probably be hard to fit everything into! At least that's the hope. The Phantom Coach was my favorite Twitch read this past month and I think I'm going to go look for more of her fiction. Both the modern books were mildly disappointing. Also, I've developed a taste for Regency pamphlets, satirical and serious both. I need more!

I re-read this to decide if I could read it on stream. I cannot. It's not just that this book is BAD. That's fine; my chat would have a great time with a bad book. No, it's that it's incredibly, irretrievably RACIST. Some books I quietly remove the slurs so we can read them but in this, the plot is fundamentally racist. There's no way to “fix“ it to not be so deeply harmful. So I'm not going to read it for an audience.

This was a cute children's book about skunks, written back when skunks were still farmed for their fur and killed as a nuisance animal. There's some casual racism in it (all the animals are simply named their species except... Crow. Just guess). I read it because my Twitch chat requested it, but I only realized after that it's not public domain in Canada thanks to the new NAFTA agreement (yes I will die made about it).

Read this for my Twitch, and I'm really happy to have re-read it as an adult. Not only did I get to make it scary for someone who didn't know the story, but I know far more about Victorian repression, anti-gay laws, and queer subtext than I did as a small child. It's one of the only books Stevenson intended to be read as an allegory, and while he wasn't gay himself, there's definitely a queer interpretation available here.

I almost forgot to post my monthly round up! Lots of short reads. I tagged Styles because I didn't want to tag something I already had and none of the other books really stood out. Or well, if they did, it was for the wrong reasons. The Pride activity book was actually terrible! The meditation book was ableist, classist, and uninformative! The rest were basically fine, though Sam is My Sister was definitely inferior as a trans narrative.

Oh, this one is too easy for me. I read almost every book for my Twitch streams three times: once before going live with it, once on stream, and once when I listen back to it to create the highlights!

📘 I've tagged Shadow-shapes because I'm still working on those annotations (aiming to publish by Armistice Day 2024).
📘 Lord of the Rings ofc!
📘 Cat Sebastian's The Soldier's Scoundrel is my most recent fun reread.

#TLT #ThreeListThursday @dabbe

I always see #wondrouswednesday by @Eggs and then fail to do it because I can't think of an answer to one of the questions. Not this time!

🐣 KJ Charles, Cat Sebastian, Nghi Vo, and Jordan L Hawk!
🐣 I'm really bad at favorites, but I've always loved poetry and John Keats (tagged) is an easy one to claim. Most of the Romantics, really.
🐣 You see answer one? Ditto! Cat Sebastian and Nghi Vo most of all, with fewer misses in mid-series for me.

Yes, I'm reading random Georgian satirical pamphlets. I'm actually trying to trace a long chain of anonymous plagiarism, after a snide remark in Derenzy's Enchiridion about a cravat pamphlet. This one came much later, and is stolen from a French satirist. But that's okay, because I think he stole it from an Englishman before him. Anyway, it's all very silly and yet still has real and interesting insight into 1820s men's fashion.

Just started reading this on my Twitch channel. Glad I read it before starting, I needed to remove some blink-and-you'll-miss-it racism that could be excised without harm to the book. I think it would be creepier reading it in the Victorian era, but on the other hand, there is absolutely no subtlety about the lesbian relationship. It's not coded at all, it's just right there on the page. As I told my chat, “yes, this is a kissing book!“ 😆

I've been a little absent from here, just didn't have time to post! I've been working on my back log of kids' lit, as well as my usual assortment of review blog reading, random very old books, and queer romance. I've tagged an interesting collection, but tbh, the real highlight this month was Sailor's Delight. Don't let the ridiculous cover fool you - it's 0 spice, 99% pining, and EXTREMELY Jewish. Takes place between Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur!

Yeah, I'm a bit meh on this Dumas book. I'm reading it for Twitch for Black History Month (Canada) because it's one of his shortest works. The trouble with this book is that it's a slow burn, with 13 long chapters of build up to all the action in the last 7 chapters. It's hard to get invested in the tragedy of Lucien and Louis. My viewers are enjoying it, surprisingly enough. It's the forgotten basis for a pile of SFF stories, too.

My January (tracked) reading. I'm chipping away at my backlog of modern children's books (I try to know what's out there to gift to friends' kids and also for fast URC solutions haha). The only book here I DO NOT recommend is “A River's Gifts“. It plays fast and loose with facts and assumes children are too stupid for nuance. It's also not written by Klallam people and it shows. The two queer romances are both @willaful's fault, thank you. ❤

I first read the 14th edition (1879) years ago, and own the Dover edition. I'm now reading the 1st UK edition (1841) on my Twitch because one of my friends is developing an age of sail themed game and wanted to research but felt overwhelmed. Dana's text is dense but concise and precise. His legal citations are thorough. The structure is a little odd - landlubbers may need to skip to the glossary in the middle before reading the initial chapters. ⚓