gemkarita

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

20th June 2017 by gemkarita 1 Comment

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 3 Comments

The Ninth Rain

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! …

Photo Log: Santander 2016

28th February 2017 by gemkarita 2 Comments

Around the same time last year, we went to Northern Spain, somewhat skirting the coast of the Bay of Biscay for a week. We flew into Bilbao, took a bus to San Sebastián and spent most of our time there, then another bus to Santander, before returning to Bilbao to see the city for two days then flew back to London. This post has photos from Santander and a previous post featuring Bilbao, so I’m obviously going backwards — it was a bit easier to sort out the photos this way!

Santander, in case you were not aware, is not part of the Spanish Basque region; it is actually the capital of Cantabria, a different region, but still lies along the coast, and is roughly 2 hours by bus from Bilbao. If you live in Europe, you will be familiar with the bank named Santander and this is actually where the bank was founded, as well as the place for its current headquarters.

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Serial Summaries – Book Edition III: Jan/Feb Mini Reviews + Comment Challenge

26th February 2017 by gemkarita 4 Comments

The last time I did this was back in August — how much do I fail on this? *laughs* At least this is my blog, so I am free to do what I please with it, and this time, instead of listing out the books I’ve read and bought for the month, it’ll have mini reviews of some books I’ve read but don’t have much to say about to warrant one whole post. I mean, surely, you do not want to click on a post that contains a whopping five sentences (or even less) about a book!

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