Anniversary Post: The Secret Life Of A Book Blogger Tag 🎂

So, today is one year since I made a blog and started posting. Time sure flies – I never thought I’d be able to keep it up for more than a couple months, but here we are. I was a bit at a loss regarding what to post – top 5? Discussion? Giveaway? What does one do? But this seemed perfect.

Thanks to Sam @ Fictionally Sam for tagging me!

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2019 r/Fantasy Bingo Challenge: First Impressions (2/2)

This is the second part of my r/Fantasy Bingo Challenge first impressions breakdown, containing my opinions and recommendations for squares 13-25. First part can be found here.

2019 r/Fantasy Bingo Challenge: First Impressions (1/2)

So, here it is! The long awaited new Bingo card!

For those unaware, this is a yearly challenge run by Lisa (Way Too Fantasy) that takes place on the r/fantasy subreddit from April to April. Official announcement with rules and resources here, but in essence, the goal is to fill as many rows, columns, diagonals (most try for a full card, the more adventurous of us for two…or three…) without repeating authors. You can use one reread and substitute one square for a previous square, but the main aim is to read widely. I have been participating since the beginning and it remains my favourite challenge.

While I did two cards for the last two years, this year I will be cutting back to one – it’s a decision I made months ago when I was frustrated with how limiting a 50-book challenge felt, but the difficulty only cemented it.

And from a first look, this card is more difficult than the last – there are far more niche subgenre squares like slice of life or LitRPG, plus there’s an unusual number of them that are…very much not to my taste. I’m not a new reader anymore, I know what I like and why. My personal rule is not to force myself to read books just because they fit a square and try my best to find something I’ll like at least a little for each square. This year, it might be a bit more challenging. But then, it is a challenge.

Because the post turned out so long (nearing 4-5k words), I split it in two. Here is the first part, dedicated to squares 1-12.

2018 r/Fantasy Bingo Challenge: Conclusion and Thoughts

The r/Fantasy Bingo Challenge has been my favourite reading challenge ever since its beginning in 2015. The squares are a nice mix of easy and challenging, designed to make you read more widely and explore the parts of the genre you may not have read before. With a new card coming out tomorrow and having to update my Bingo challenge page, I’ll be archiving the 2018 completed cards as a post.

This year, like the last one, I’ve been trying for two cards. One unrestricted, one focused on underrated books, with the additional criteria of at least 50% female authors over both cards. I have certainly succeeded as far as the second goal goes, but a card made entirely out of underrated books has been…difficult and I had to relax my criteria a lot.

Aside from that, my main rule is “don’t force yourself to read a book you know you won’t like just because it fits the square”. Over the years, I got a lot better at this – this time, there was only one such book.

Some statistics

(because who doesn’t love statistics?)

• 30.5 (61%) squares were filled with female authors, 19.5 (39%) with male authors. For comparison:
  • in 2017 when I did a women-themed card the ratio was about 77.2% female to 22.8% male (38.6 and 11.4 squares)
  • in 2016 it was 37.6% female, 54.4% male, 8% unknown (9.4, 13.6 and 2 squares)
  • in 2015 it was 38% female and 58% male (9.5 and 14.5, short stories square unknown)
• 11 books (22%) were self-published
• 5 books and 2 short stories (10.8%) were written by authors of colour. This is one area where it could be better.
• 12 (24%) of the books were paper copies, the rest were ebooks. 5 of those ebooks were ARCs.
• 33 books and 2 short stories (66.8%) were by authors whose books I haven’t read before – as far as making you read new authors goes, I declare Bingo a success
• Only 12 (24%) squares stayed the same as they were on April 5th, in the earliest version of the plan I could find.
• 32 (64%) books were part of a series
• There were 8 times I had to find a replacement because I DNF’d the book I originally planned, probably a new record

Now onto the cards themselves. Whenever possible, I linked to my review of the book.

2019 Big Webcomics Catch-Up: Tapas, Part #1

Introduction and index here

Previous post: Introduction – Next post: Tapas, Part #2

Tapas (formerly Tapastic) is one of my favourite platforms for webcomics. Before I finally set up an RSS feed and stopped relying on bookmarks last year, I had two big problems: discovering new comics to read and keeping track of which comic updates when, which are active, and so on. I could never remember for more than a couple. So stumbling upon a site that had many comics in one place, some sorting, and alerted you when they updated? It was a fucking godsend.

Since I followed so many comics on there, I will be splitting this part of the catch-up into three posts, last one of which will be dedicated to comics that have stopped being active before I fell off the wagon last June. Comics from my RSS feed (there’s even more of those) will be split in a similar way. There will be separate posts dedicated to complete comics, favourites, etc as well.

Now, onto the comics themselves (in alphabetical order).

A to Z Book Tag

I saw this over at Realms of My Mind a while ago and it looked fun, so here we go!

2019 Big Webcomics Catch-Up: Introduction

Post index:

Introduction (you are here)
Tapas, Part #1 (Bad Bad Things, Cupido, Desert Rose, Finding Home, The Firelight Isle, Fisheye Placebo, Fox & Willow)

Webcomics used to be one of my favourite forms of entertainment. I first got into them around 2010 or 2011, with Romantically Apocalyptic, Shadowgirls, The Phoenix Requiem, and probably a few others – though The Phoenix Requiem is the only of those early comics I’d still recommend and even remains one of my favourites to this day. I never had enough. It was quite hard to find new things to read, lots of sorting through crap, lots of artists who went on a perpetual hiatus and comics I lost my patience with for other reasons, but eventually, I accumulated about 80 that I followed. Not all of them were favourites, not all of them necessarily the best, a few will likely be DNF’d in the next few weeks or months or years, but it’s the current state of my list.