Category: Books

Here’s my Goodreads year with covers and links to my “reviews” (I have become worse at reviewing books every year, and occasionally it’s just something like, “excellent read”, useless for both anyone looking at the reviews, and me looking back in future years with no memory of that particular novel). My goal was to read…

The Chalet School books are a series of 59 children’s novels by Elinor M Brent-Dyer, published between 1925 (with The School at the Chalet) and 1970 (finishing with Prefects of the Chalet School). I had several of these books when I was young, and read as many of the others as I could find in…

My reading mojo officially returned in 2015, for the first time since having a child in 2012, and I finished 86 books. This comes just in time for me to have a second child during 2016. Hopefully Baby No. 2 is less of a shock to the system and it won’t take me as long to…

I finally reversed my downhill reading trend! I read 85 books in 2011, 61 books in 2012 and a mere 24 books in 2013. What the hell happened in 2013 – I think I watched a lot of TV. Anyway, these numbers are finally on the rise again as I read 66 books this year.…

Tansy Rayner Roberts writes very convincingly about the wonders of regency romance, and Peter M Ball is very convincing about Anna Cowan’s Untamed. I read both Untamed and Courtney Milan’s The Countess Conspiracy and enjoyed them very much – both very well written, engaging, feminist romances. Untamed struck me as a little more experimental with…

I read less in 2012 than I have in a long time, for obvious reasons – infants are not conducive to uninterrupted time with a book. 61 books in total – in comparison, I read 85 in 2011, 70 in 2010, 135 in 2009 and 183 in 2008. Apparently you get less free time that…

Tansy is celebrating the Children’s Book Council of Australia’s Book Week by writing about her childhood in books, and invited others to join her. I was in dire need of some sort of impetus to do some writing – sleep deprivation does not assist with any sort of creative venture. My mother has kept a…

The evenings are getting quite chilly (well, chilly for south east Queensland) and we’ve been lighting the wood stove, much the cats’ delight as they lie as close as they can to the heater without actually bursting into flame. I recently raced my way through Mira Grant’s Blackout, which is the final book in her…

Secondhand I visited the secondhand bookstore in Mapleton with Naomi on the weekend (I find it terribly hard to just walk by secondhand bookstores without even taking a little look) and bought a few things: – War Crimes by Peter Carey, which is a collection of short stories I read last year and loved. I’m…