Happy AAPI Heritage Month! As usual, I completely forgot about it because I am a bad Asian. 100% NOT me rearranging my publication schedule at the last minute to publish my upcoming White Chrysanthemum review this month instead of in August and pushing up my planned review of The Toss of a Lemon, which I wasn’t even thinking about starting until later in the year. (I’ll try to be more prepared next May. Maybe I’ll even have my Pachinko review ready to go by then, lol.)
Over the last month I’ve started getting into the spring cleaning swing of things, which has included revamping my old Poshmark account so I can start selling some of this frankly upsetting collection of bags, built up over the last several years because I am obsessed with bags:
I am pleased to report that, against my own expectations, I have sold several items very quickly. Even better, the post office is maybe not even ten minutes down the road from me, so it’s easy to run out during lunch and drop off my packages. I knew there was a reason I was keeping so much shipping material squirreled away in my closet. Of course, having unhauled a few bags, I now have to find the time and energy to post the rest, and that is not helped by my need to keep buying new bags. This month saw the arrival of my first (and hopefully last) Portland Leather bag. It’s a sickness, I know, but I really love this bag.
In less personally embarrassing news, I have recently learned that February’s anti-doggie trash can sign was a total fail, because this showed up in my texts a couple of weeks ago:
Maybe the problem is that she can’t read? :’) We’re still looking into it.
April Reading Stats
Books Finished:
- World of Wonders: In Praise of Fireflies, Whale Sharks, and Other Astonishments (B&N Special Edition) – Aimee Nezhukumatathil
- The Great Passage – Shion Miura
- Spy x Family 9 – Tatsuya Endo
- Black Butler 31 – Yana Toboso
- Redwall – Brian Jacques
- The Thursday Murder Club – Richard Osman
- Mossflower – Brian Jacques
- Swordheart – T. Kingfisher
- Mattimeo – Brian Jacques
- Defenestrate – Renée Branum
- White Chrysanthemum – Mary Lynn Bracht
Books Abandoned:
- Skull Water – Heinz Insu Fenkl
Total Pages Read: 3,449
I am somewhat in shock at how much I read this month, but that’s what happens when you put down the phone, turn off the TV, and don’t do anything else you want to get done. (That sounds a bit bitter. But it’s true.) This month’s reading volume can be partially attributed to my ongoing reread of the Redwall series, which has hooked me so hard that that’s all I want to read right now. I have reviews drafted for the first three books and just finished reading the fourth, and overall this reread is going really well so far. As for Skull Water, I picked it up on a day when I had already finished another book and I was tired af, and it got DNF’d at page 16. I’m sure the book is fine. I didn’t love it, obviously, but I didn’t hate it either. I was just slightly bored, and I lost interest in the synopsis. Or maybe it was just the effect of finishing another depressing Korean book that made me want to scream and kill somebody, preferably Corporal Morimoto. IYKYK.
In more positive news, the best finds of this month were The Thursday Murder Club and Swordheart, which were both hilarious in very different ways. Actually, Swordheart was almost offensively accurate in the relatability of its protagonist. It is my new favorite book (or at least the latest addition to my ongoing list of favorite books), and I started trying to force my friends to read it before I’d even gotten halfway through it. Then when I’d finished it I had to go and buy it, because the copy I read was from the library and I really needed one of my own. And look, I know I said last month that Black Butler was on its way out of my heart, but I picked up volume 31 at the same time I was buying Spy x Family 9 and godDAMMIT I’m back in. I am so fucking nosy and I need to know how this ends. I NEEEEEEEEED it. Volume 32 comes out in July. I don’t know if I can wait that long.
As far as publication goes, I’m feeling really good. In fact, I’m feeling so good that I’m experimenting this month with a twice-a-week publication schedule, because I am currently scheduled through September and I do not like content backlogs. It isn’t actually that many posts, but the once-a-week schedule is driving me nuts because I have been generating new content at a faster rate than I anticipated when I first established my schedule and it has to sit in the queue for literal months before it actually gets published. The slowness of my own schedule is so frustrating, and I usually start itching to publish around the mid-week mark. At this rate my posts from this year are going to start running over into next year, and that’ll push next year’s posts into 2024, and so on. I didn’t set out to post twice a week when I first set my publication schedule, but I didn’t really think I could even post once a week for as long as I have, so I’m hoping this will be sustainable in the long term. (That being said, a couple of my Wednesday posts will be cheaty life-update-themed posts to make my reading content last longer, but, hey, posts are posts.)
Therefore, I plan to start publishing every Wednesday and Saturday for at least the month of May, and possibly indefinitely. Going forward, the reading summaries and life updates will be separated into their own posts, and they will be the first two posts of each month. Was this mostly an excuse to zero out my publication schedule and start redoing the dates? Yes. Did I have to zero out the entire column of dates because the numbers were confusing me while I was trying to reschedule every post? Yes. Have I now redone the whole schedule three times because I keep changing things around? Also yes. But I think it’ll be better for my sanity if I don’t have 9000000000 unpublished posts in my drafts folder, and it’ll also be better able to accommodate unscheduled posts, such as the ones I tend to make during Handmaid’s Tale season. I must say I thought I would run out of content faster, given that I just doubled my number of planned posting dates, but I did also add a few more posts, so it only eliminated about a month’s worth of planned content. Welp, mathematically it works out somehow, and I still have enough content to see me through mid-July.
Currently Reading
Mariel of Redwall
Brian Jacques
Current rating: 5 stars. I love this series, and, somewhat surprisingly, I am loving this book. Some of my plans for this weekend got unexpectedly canceled, so I’ll be spending that extra time on Mariel. This is good, because Redwall books are addicting and I need to know if Pakatugg is as bad as I remember him being.
April Hauls
I haven’t been to the library in a hot second but have concluded that I need to visit more often because they have shopping baskets omg I wish I’d known that sooner.
And I’d forgotten that they did this, but my local library regularly holds book sales. I only found out about this year’s sale because I happened to see the banner in the garage when I went to pick up Swordheart, but I’m so glad I did. The books were $4 a pop, and I regret nothing, not even the Japanese book that was too pretty to leave behind even though I can’t read a word of it. On the other hand, maybe this’ll get me motivated to finally learn more Japanese than just greetings and curses.
Then I found out about another book fair, hosted in a brewery by Rudolph Girls Books. Their selection was a bit smaller and more expensive than I was hoping, but it was only a pop-up fair, so I can understand the size of their stock. I still got some great books, most of which I’ve been wanting to read, and I replaced my previous edition of Animal Farm with a much nicer one, and I even picked up some new fridge magnets. (The bottom two books in the photo are from Barnes & Noble, and were grabbed when I went looking for presents for other people. I mean, I did still find presents, so it’s mostly a win.) The people who were working the fair were very friendly, 10/10 would recommend visiting if you happen to be in the area.
And then these were the very helpful directions my GPS gave me when I was ready to head home, documented here for posterity’s sake.
And, since the actual Rudolph Girls store is in Westminster and that isn’t too far from me, I paid them a visit today and did not regret it. Their store is charming, and they had even MOAR fridge magnets. I swear I’m going to bankrupt myself buying every magnet they sell. As an unexpected bonus, they also had a copy of the one Margaret Atwood fiction book I have neither bought nor read. I’ve seen the title floating around but didn’t realize it was a full-blown book – for some reason I had it in my head that it was a short story – so this was a very pleasant surprise, and I am excited to read it. Also I should note that I have not yet read Parable of the Sower, but I swear I’m going to. I bought the sequel just to make sure I’ll be prepared when I finally do pick it up. 😀 As the icing on the cake, I found a handful of reading challenge slips by the register and took one because I love a good challenge and there’s going to be a raffle at the end of the year, to which I naturally said say no more.
Currently mulling over whether to cheat and check off books that I read before I started the challenge, though my good side might win out. Guess I’ll find out soon enough.
