I had an assignment yesterday, and all I wanted to do was write a blog post. Now it's handed in, and my motivation is flagging. Still! I did have all that time to think about what I wanted to say, so here goes... I remember first reading Harry Potter. I believe it was 1999, my parents were in the UK and when I went to visit they had Harry Potter, which was being reviewed at the time in the papers. But I hadn't really heard of it before. To my family, children's and young adult fantasy is pretty standard reading, and it was pretty natural for us to all read any book that came into the house. So, enough of setting the scene, I read Harry Potter and the Philosophers Stone and I really enjoyed it. It had a great world, and it was a lot of fun, the language was so bubbly, it had a great humour to it and the story was a great adventure. But then the trouble started- I read the first review. And here follows the account of my continuing encounter with People's Reactions to ...
Happy new year! As is tradition, my round up of reading for the year that was. In total, the number of (new to me) books that I read in 2024 was 83, up again on last year. When I was doing my 20 year book stats I got curious about re-reads- what would be my most re-read book? So for this year I can tell you I also reread 9 books, these were mainly childhood favourites that I read to the kids, as well as the complete Scott Pilgrim and Vera Wong's Unsolicited Advice for Murderers , which I just read last year but saw in the library and thought "why not read it in physical copy, since I read it in eBook form last time?" But as usual my list will not include rereads. And I got to read my kids The Railway Children , which was a joy for all of us and also made me cry. Anyway, let's get into it! Shortest book was The Great British Bump-Off by John Allison at 112 pages- I have been reading his comics since I discovered Scary-Go-Round in my uni days and they are always a t...
As I wrote back in January , one of my challenges to myself this year was to read a book from every continent ( author's nationality + setting of book + language originally published in must all be from the same country in that continent, although I will read them in English) . Since we're now almost halfway through the year, it seems like a good time to report on my progress. I'm actually quite pleased with my progress, but not quite finished with this challenge yet. Here's what I've read so far: Africa : Song for Night by Chris Abani (Nigeria). On the recommendation of my friend Duncan . While all the reviews for this say it's set in 'an unknown country in Africa', the tribes mentioned in the book are both from around Nigeria, as is the author... so I'm calling this Nigeria. Not entirely happy with this one as a representation of Africa though. I do feel this is perhaps written for Western audiences... which wasn't really the point of this...
My braiiiinnnssss...
ReplyDelete