So according to my August schedule, in which I attempt to stay on track with posting and generally fail miserably, I was supposed to have written and posted a Team Work Makes the Dream Work YA wrap up of three ARCs—Like Other Girls, Cheer and Squad—and also have written a review for Under the Whispering Door that was supposed to post at 6am this morning (thank you, auto scheduling thingy).
However, I procrastinated (my book club wrapped its team games July 31st and I was beat), and then I got the living skittles bit out of me by a spider (we thinks it was a spider) while asleep on my bed Thursday night, so today is the day I finally kinda rejoin the living and have any mojo to write much of anything. No, not a brown recluse or a black widow—those bites you’d know what bit you. And no, I did not get cool web-slinging powers and yes I am very upset about that.
But day three of antibiotics and allergy meds and deep cleaning the entire fucking house, and I’m back!
So here’s a little Monday check in!
What I read last week:
A Lowcountry Bride was good, and I enjoyed the audiobook narrator, so double bonus! I’m not generally a fan of workplace romances, but this was fun.
Have you ever looked at a book and gone, oooooh cool this is set in my hometown!! And then you’re like, wait a minute, that name is really familiar? And then you’re like—wait, I’m pretty certain I know her! And that’s my claim to (adjacent) fame. I’m so glad that Michelle is doing well professionally, and my heart broke reading about her mom.
Winterlight is the seventh book in the Green Rider series, a series of which I have been reading since a high school friend put it into my hands freshman year (so like, it’s been twenty years folks and I am facing my own mortality in a way that has 95% to do with the spider bite and like, 47% to do with the gray hairs that keep popping up everywhere and yes that math doesn’t math but whatever). Anywho, this was good and I need to write a review for it because it’s an ARC, but I was left wanting at the end.
Pop Culture and TV
You’d think I would have watched more of the things, but instead I needed a comfort watch and had already rewatched Brooklyn 99 like five times in the past month. I watched Scrubs instead. Haven’t watched it in a number of years since my wife hates Zach Braff, but I won the pity vote and so got to turn it on. And you know what? She now enjoys the show. Parts have not aged well, but overall it holds up.
And after that I just binged a fuckton of home decor videos on Youtube.
Writing
I rewrote a short story (for like, the fourth time), and began editing a rewrite request for another that I have long delayed on…and hopefully the publisher will be understanding.
I have four stories on sub, three of which are overdue according to the Submission Grinder, and one of which is not overdue but the magazine is caught up to the month I submitted sooo…I’m probably going to know this week for a couple of them (one of the overdues I won’t know until September, which is fine).
Currently Reading
Apparently August is the month for thick books, since Winterlight was chonky and Great Circle is also chonky. I’m really, really enjoyed Great Circle, which is both more and less of what I was expecting, but in a good way (minus the pedophilia, which was a surprise and now you are warned). I started it yesterday and read 200 pages because I just could not stop reading it. The timeline is all over the place, the writing is spectacular, and I’m curious how it will end.
I had thought The Secret Bridesmaid was a wlw romance, but it is not (guess who didn’t read the blurb thoroughly). So far it’s good, but I’m not very far in and I need to get on it because I have three other audiobooks checked out and a heap more coming due.
Up Next, Hopefully
These are the audiobooks I currently have checked out. I have been dying to read Six Crimson Cranes and passed on the ARC in favor of the audiobook, but lo and behold it’s voiced by my least favorite narrator. I’m going to listen at 1.75x or faster and hopefully that’ll erase some of her vocal fry and weird angsty dramatizations.
I love royal romance, but for whatever reason Once Upon a Royal Summer ~feels~ like a Christian romance. Nothing says that it is, and I think Teri Wilson is a regular romance author, but we will see. The Lion’s Den is by Katherine St John, she who impressed the fuck out of me with The Siren, and I’m feeling another thriller starring actresses on a boat.
Will I listen to all three this week? Haha, no, not even at 1.75x.
I need to get started on my September ARCs asap, because I still have 10 that I need to read. Yikes.
But I’m super excited for all three of these, for wildly different reasons. I doubt I’ll get to them all this week since I probably won’t finish Great Circle until Wednesday or Thursday, but The Lost Girls should be a quick read and then maybe I’ll get to Iron Widow.
An ambitious plan, but we shall see what happens.
The Suspected Bibliophile 