gemkarita

Books I Planned To Read For the First Half of 2017

4th July 2017 by gemkarita Leave a Comment

Last week’s Top Ten Tuesday (which is sadly on holiday — how will we survive?!) was about the best books you’ve read during the first half of 2017. Unfortunately, I am unable to recall off the top of my head anything that absolutely stands out (I’m blaming depression and anxiety for this). I had to check my Goodreads shelves, and I don’t have enough to make a full list of ten books!

However, I have enough in my TBR list of books that have been published since January of this year here in the UK that I have been planning to read but still haven’t gotten to. (Is this a familiar story or what?) …

From the Publisher’s Desk: See What I Have Done

27th June 2017 by gemkarita 1 Comment

See What I Have Done is the debut novel of Australian author Sarah Schmidt about the famous axe murders in 1892 at Massachusetts, USA, famously thought to have been committed by a woman named Lizzie Borden, who was the victims’ daughter (and stepdaughter, if we want to be really technical). Lizzie was acquitted but remains to be the prime suspect — everyone is convinced she was the murderer, and it remains a subject of speculation more than a century after the events.

Sarah was inspired to tell write a book about this more than a decade ago from a pamphlet she found at a secondhand bookshop. …

Top Ten Tuesday: Book Series I’ve Been Meaning To Read

20th June 2017 by gemkarita 5 Comments

Top Ten Tuesday is a weekly bookish meme created and hosted by The Broke and the Bookish. More information, plus future topics can be found on this page. This week was ‘Top Ten Series I’ve Been Meaning To Start But Haven’t’.

I used to really love book series — some of my all-time favourite books are the Harry Potter books and The Lord of the Rings. The reader gets to keep coming back to that wonderful ‘verse and learn more about the magic rules/systems and the interesting characters inhabiting it. Unfortunately, some series don’t seem to have been originally planned to be such: the first book contains most of the details and the heaviest plot, and you can see the author trying to stretch it out in the following books but absolutely failing.

Here’s hoping the following books aren’t at all like that! …

When You Find You’re Unable to Read or Write

11th May 2017 by gemkarita 3 Comments

Oh dear. I’ve been away for quite a while, haven’t I? It was not by choice. Although, to clarify, I did choose to step away because I could not muster the energy to focus and think in order to produce something worth publishing online. All of my energy was getting drained by trying to keep it together, which then devolved into trying to maintain the appearance of holding it together while half of my brain was a jumbled mess.

Bear with me with this post — I swear I did not write it to coincide with Mental Health Awareness Week. I’ve had this on my queue for a while, second-guessing why I should be sharing something so personal, something that is trivial in the grand scheme of things. It was primarily a cathartic exercise. But I found it funny that coinciding with this week is a personal lesson that mental health is not like being struck down with a cold — you take your meds, let it do its job, then you’ll be good as before after a few days.

Uh, no, Gemma, mental health and mental illness is more complicated than that….

From the Publisher’s Desk: Nine Reasons to Read The Ninth Rain

2nd March 2017 by gemkarita 4 Comments

High fantasy (or epic fantasy) and science fiction — these two genres are not well-populated by female authors. Or it seems like it because I’m sure it’s not for lack of trying. Most of the fantasy I read nowadays fall under the young adult/new adult bracket, and I find most lack the complexity of a typical high fantasy/science fiction novel. I can barely name authors that are not of the Robin Hobb/Ursula Le Guin/Tamora Pierce/Margaret Atwood variety — Becky Chambers is the only one that comes to my mind. I am probably speaking from the point of ignorance as I don’t delve that much into the genre, but I’m sure it is also not incorrect to say it is very hard to break through and be a household name in the genre if you’re female.

So when I saw The Ninth Rain at the Headline Bloggers’ Night I immediately grabbed and latched on to a copy of it! …