anarchy by books.

Figured it was about time I stuck a finger up from the back row and announce that this blog has not, in fact, died a death. Life’s busy, people. So, so busy, but I am reluctant to draw a line in the sand and go – Cover to Cover is no more. Not happening. I still read! More this year actually (more about that below) and I have very good excuses for not bombarding you every 2 days or so. Instead, I seem to keep a steady once a month schedule. A steady drumbeat. That’s all you’d want to hear from me anyway.

This year, through some weird divine intervention, Queen Timy set her sights upon me and asked me to join Team Asylum for the 9th SPFBO competition. I’ve done quite a bit of reading and reviewing and we’re currently at the SemiFinalist stage, hoping to announce our team’s Finalist in October. Hop on over to Queen’s Book Asylum to find out all about our team’s titles and how they did. Mark Lawrence has a dedicated and very statistical page up about this year’s titles HERE.

As a personal SPFBO 9 update – I am about done reading through the SemiFinalists Team Asylum has chosen. I need to finish up A Dagger in the Winds by Brendan Noble and then it’s on to Eleventh Cycle by Kian N. Ardalan.

Let me now tell you about my July, 2023. It was one of those months I didn’t post anything. This is because my husband has collective leave form work for a month. Every year, 3 weeks of July, 1 week of August. So, what did we do? Well, there isn’t much to tell. We packed up from the apartment and drove out to my parents house, the house I grew up in. My kid loves it there with the big garden, lots of stuff to do. So, every morning I woke up, I made some coffee, sat on the steps outside and watched the kid play in the sandbox. Days went by in a very relaxed manner. Husband was mucking about with his motorbikes until there was no daylight. It really felt like a holiday. I did nothing. I mean- nothing.

But can I just take a little side note here and mention that the word ‘husband’ is really weird? I feel like some posh Brit or Beverly Hills housewife. It’s a weird word. That got me thinking about the word for husband in Estonian: abikaasa. It directly translates to ‘help mate’. And this in turn took me to etymology of the word husband…

From Middle English husbonde, housbonde, from Old English hūsbonda, hūsbunda (“male head of a household, householder, master of a house”), from Old Norse húsbóndi (“master of house”), from hús (“house”) + bóndi (“dweller, householder”), equivalent to house +‎ bond (“serf, slave”, originally, “dweller”).

https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/husband

Go figure… Anyway. Back to books…

Last weekend we took a little trip to visit a lady that used to work with my mom. Work and party. Friends, they were. Said lady had not seen me since I was 2 years old but as a babe, my mother always took me to work with her and there I was entertaining the ladies at the office. Anyway, she kept inviting us over once she heard I had settled back in Estonia. We went. It was delightful. She lives with her husband in a huge old style farmhouse which they have done up over the past 20+ years. The house is in between forests and fields, at the edge of a nature reserve and next to a river. There are only dirt roads leading to it. It was vibing to high heavens! I loved it. This is the exact kind of seclusion I am aiming for in the future. As we were swiftly getting through some seriously lovely Armenian pomegranate wine, I saw a stack of books on the sofa. I asked which one of them was a bookworm. She is. I left there with a box of strawberry cake, head buzzing from wine and a big pile of books, with a promise I would return in the near future and bring along some fantasy from my own collection for her to sample. But… can you tell she’s into B.A Paris? 😀

I truly believe that there is a correlation in between the volume of books being acquired versus the time one has to read said books. If I was a chart kind of person the highest point of the line would connect the biggest amount of books bought with the least amount of free time.

It is so. It is Murphy’s god damned law. It is defiance and anarchy of the bookworm to start getting even MORE books the less time they have to read. It’s resistance. Papery resistance! But also, digitally… Because check out all these Kindle books I have also steadily been adding to my TBR queue…

I think the best title from the above batch is – Liches Get Stitches? Yeah, I can’t wait to read that one. I’ve got 2 titles by Trudie Skies, 2 titles by Phil Williams, 2 titles by Patrick Samphire. I’ll be new to Garth Nix with The Left-Handed Booksellers of London.

The very last 2 books I got were Up to the Throne by Toby Frost and Ashtrays and Kittens by P.A. Sheppard

So, that’s me…

Do pay a visit again soon as I have not one but TWO author interviews in the works presently. For a little sneaky preview of the interviews:

I’d like to hope that the magical symbiosis I devised between archery and the ancient yews might qualify!

P. J. Richards

I think we all have those moments where we start questioning everything we’ve ever done, and wondering if we could’ve done things differently/better.

Steve Pannett

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What have you been up to? Any books here that caught your eye? Perhaps you’ve read some and you’d like to advise me to bump them up to the top of my TBR?