Saturday, April 29, 2017

Readathon is go!

Just a quick note to say I'll be participating in the Dewey's 24-hour readathon today. All the action will be on my Instagram @omgeegollygosh so please come say hello! Happy reading!

Wednesday, April 12, 2017

Life update, aka I accidentally didn't blog for two months

Oh gosh. I knew it had been a long time since I'd updated last but two months?? Really?? Oh well.

As usual life got a bit away from me. But my days of juggling a 30 hour week uni work load and a 30 hour work week are soon to be over! I'm currently off for Easter, and when I head back I only have one more uni essay to do before my dissertation, which as a part-time student I get an entire year to complete. So, in theory I should have a lot more time to do bloggy things as well as human things like clean my house and sleep. In theory, anyway.

I've been studying some great books at uni. We did a section on race in contemporary American fiction and read Paul Beatty's The Sellout, Colson Whitehead's The Underground Railroad, Claudia Rankine's Citizen and Ta-Nehisi Coates's Between the World and Me, all four of which were wonderful and I wholeheartedly recommend. We've also been doing posthumanist stuff and feminist stuff and seriously, I love studying literature. I'm sad this is my last semester of actual classes. I'm going to miss it so much.

I haven't been reading all that much outside of uni, to be honest. Bits and pieces, which has meant I'm currently in the middle of *counts* six books, which is... something. Shall I talk a bit about them? Why not.

1) Girls on Fire by Robin Wasserman: I picked this up purely for the hype and I'm glad I did. It's about the nineties and high school girls and some seriously messed up shit is going on. I'm nearly at the end and currently asking myself why I'm not finishing it right now, omg.

2) Symptoms of Being Human by Jeff Garvin: I saw this randomly on a friend's instagram and instantly bought it on the basis that the main character is genderfluid and I don't think I've ever read a book where the main character is non-binary before. Honestly that fact was really enough for it to score major points for me, but I'm really loving it. Riley is a congressman's kid, just started a new school, trying to be invisible while their new blog about being a genderfluid teen goes viral. I'm loving the characters and finding it so relatable. I'm just over halfway through but I'm already pretty sure it's going to be one of my favourite books of the year.

3) Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? by Philip K Dick: Right I'm like less than 50 pages in, so I don't have too much to say about this so far. I basically picked it up because I've been trying to read more classic SF. I'm really liking the worldbuilding and everything so far.

4) Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes: I seem to always have one doorstopper on the go. Well, this is allegedly the first ever novel and supposedly one of the greatest, so I had to give it a go. It's pretty funny so far, though I'm super intimidated by the sheer length of the thing.

5. Redefining Realness by Janet Mock: I'd never heard of Janet Mock, who is a writer and TV host and trans activist and all sorts of things, until this book got lots of hype when it came out a couple years ago. It's her memoir and I'm really enjoying it so far.

6. Everything Everything by Nicola Yoon: Another book that I picked up because of the hype. I'm torn two ways about this: I'm not a big fan of teens meeting and ~~inspiring each other~~ and ~~falling in love~~ as this book basically is, on a surface level at least. That said, I'm enjoying the writing style and the format with the illustrations and I'm somewhat invested in the characters. So I'm reserving judgement so far.


So, yeah, that's basically what's going down in my life right now! I'm off to Brighton next week which I'm super excited about, and hopefully I'll get lots of reading and relaxation done there.