Hey y'all.
Well this is damned frustrating, I realized in advance that it'd be hard for me to make many posts in November (two trips and studying for a big test) but then not only did my work hit the holiday rush craziness two weeks early (which just leaves me exhausted once I'm home) but Trump won the election and frankly my anxiety and depression have been through the roof ever since.
So it's just been hard to organize my thoughts and do anything, even beyond writing reviews it's just been tough to focus. But here's my plan for the rest of the year: 12 Days of Anime starts up in a few days and I'll be posting here and at least one post over on The OASG as well. Because dammit y'all, I started working on these ideas in JULY, I gotta do this. After Christmas I'm not sure, I mean the plan is still "get back to blogging" but little fuzzy on the details right now because I'm that exhausted all the time.
In the meantime, while I have plenty of books on my to-review list I've actually also read quite a few lately where I don't have enough thoughts on them to review but I still wanted to talk about anyway. Like The Arm of the Starfish by Madeleine L'Engle where for me the greatest problem was that it's a bit of a conspiracy story but centered around a 16-ish year old boy who just acts completely opposite of how I would (surprisingly enough the story has aged well which surprised me given that it's a story about science and at least fifty years old!). Not a bad book but one I just don't have a lot to say about, unlike Neil Gaiman's Ocean At The Edge of the Lane which I feel like I lot to say about but I'd rather do that as a group discussion since I'm sure there were nuances and allusions in the story that I missed and I don't want to review a story if I actively know that I missed some parts of it. Speaking of more fairytale-esque works, I read Briar Rose by Jane Yolen in a day and, while this was good, I think it needs to be my last read on Nazis/the Holocaust in a while, it's just really distressing in an unproductive way for me and I honestly probably would have put it down earlier if, uh, it hadn't been the only book I brought with me to the emergency room.
Other works have been more banal, like a series I won copies of from Tor, Between Two Worlds by Emma Newman which was frankly just a slog to get through the first book and then it didn't even have the decency of having a real ending and nope, not even a cliffhanger will make me continue with what felt like another tired mash-up of Victorian ideas and magic. I've also been trying a lot of more literary fiction lately, like Life After Life, Swamplandia, and Tell the Wolves I'm Home and by and large they just aren't sticking. Really, literary fiction is weird, it wants to be all ~realistic~ with ~deeper meanings~ but then has really weird set-ups to achieve that second part which kinda defeats the first part....
I am hanging in there, I'm also rather pissy that I never seem to have the time and energy to return to blogging. But since I don't know when the day will be that I have more time and energy I don't want to stop in the meantime because I'm afraid that day may be years off. I'm working on it though, I'd like to get there soon.
