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Well, friends, it’s been a year! I don’t know about you, but my reading habits really changed in 2020. I started off reading a lot, as I was travelling and researching a novel, and then – well, you know what happened. For a few months I found it hard to focus on reading at all, and then I flipped around and was entirely losing myself in books, chain-reading novels as a way to escape from reality. That settled down as…

Happy end of NaNoWriMo! Congratulations to everyone who finished, everyone who thought about starting, and everyone who landed somewhere in between. I’ve finished NaNo six times, and I’ve loved it every time – and the most important thing I learned from it was that, for me, a finished NaNovel is absolutely nothing like a finished novel. It’s not even like a finished first draft. The time will come for you to edit, rewrite and polish. Right now it might seem…

It’s a short, sweet list this time, friends: My Darling From the Lions, Rachel Long – Delicious, brutal, beautiful poems. I always struggle to review poetry because my thoughts basically boil down to “don’t like this/don’t get this” or “really like this”. Anyway I really like this. One of my best of the year. Mexican Gothic, Silvia Moreno-Garcia – This book is mood: atmosphere, texture, colour, smell. It’s so vivid I feel like I lived in it. It’s more than…

Well, friends, we’ve passed Day 100 of Coronavirus quarantine, and it seems I’ve spent all 100 of those days escaping into fictional worlds. I’ve read over 50 books in the past two months: a mix of queer romance, short horror, and how-to-write books. I can’t really explain why those are the genres that are calling to me, except that maybe the world feels full of horror right now, but also full of love. I want to confront horror and lose…

Well, friends, it’s been a month. In the last post I said I’d read a lot – over 50 books – and that’s the case for March and April too, where I read 45 books. For January and February, this high number was due to a lot of travelling, and of course now it’s because of the exact opposite! I’ve been doing a lot of comfort reading, and I’m also finding it hard to concentrate. So one thing that links…

I’ve read a lot of books so far this year – over 50, mostly due to travelling, being stuck in bed with a cold, and finishing up a lot of books I’d half-read last year. However, this list is a little shorter than usual, with only eight books I want to mention. Perhaps reading so much really highlighted the exceptional ones – or maybe it’s that I read too much, too fast, and the usual grammar of fiction began to…