Tag: Deep Wheel Orcadia

Top Ten Tuesday: Top Ten Quick Reads/Books to Read When Time is Short

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Well, it has certainly been a week this week: we have just had the landlord around for a property check, during which he chose to give notice to quit the property by the end of May... which feels very close at the moment. And there are not that many homes available in the limited areas in which we are looking in order to avoid disrupting our daughter's schooling too much... And today, out of the blue, I discover that my boss has been suspended pending investigations... So, the chance to reflect on short book, books to devour in a day, or when time is short, feels rather fitting! Many thanks to Jennifer @ FunkNFiction.com and Angela @ Reading Frenzy for submitting this topic. I may not have managed to keep all of these under 150 pages but the Claire Keegan's - real gems of tiny novellas - are so short my average is probably about that level! And there are a couple of series here, all of which fit the criteria really... so I have only added the first book in each series.

Top Ten Tuesday: New-to-Me Authors I Discovered in 2023

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Is it my imagination or are the days starting to stretch out a little bit again? It's still pitch dark on my morning runs but I don't feel that I am both driving to and home from work in the darkness! And this week's theme is a lovely one, a celebration of the books I have read in 2023 - which already seems a very long time ago and we have not yet finished January! - from authors I have not come across before. We all have those familiar favourite authors, don't we? Those writers who we just know we will feel welcome and comfortable and familiar with, even in a new book - and that is a wonderful thing! And alongside that, it is a joy to uncover a new author whom we might also fall in love with, possibly with a weighty backlist to enjoy, potentially with a future of more books to come. It is also a feature that I track on my reading spreadsheet - I am such a geek! - so I can easily share my full list of books by new-to-me authors, of which there were 22.

Top Ten Tuesday: Favourite Books of 2023

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Birnam Wood is on the move... Five years ago, Mira Bunting founded a guerrilla gardening group: Birnam Wood. An undeclared, unregulated, sometimes-criminal, sometimes-philanthropic gathering of friends, this activist collective plants crops wherever no one will notice, on the sides of roads, in forgotten parks, and neglected backyards. For years, the group has struggled to break even. Then Mira stumbles on an answer, a way to finally set the group up for the long term: a landslide has closed the Korowai Pass, cutting off the town of Thorndike. Natural disaster has created an opportunity, a sizable farm seemingly abandoned. But Mira is not the only one interested in Thorndike. Robert Lemoine, the enigmatic American billionaire, has snatched it up to build his end-times bunker - or so he tells Mira when he catches her on the property. Intrigued by Mira, Birnam Wood, and their entrepreneurial spirit, he suggests they work this land. But can they trust him? And, as their ideals and ideologies are tested, can they trust each other?

Top Ten Tuesday: Books That Defied My Expectations

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The new school year has now begun and summer is over: my daughter has had her first day at her new school, a slew of paperwork has been thrown at me at work, another heatwave has (somewhat gently) gripped the UK. And the backlog of reviews on my blog is continuing to grow: finishing two books last night was both satisfying and a little overwhelming! This week's theme is also one that deserves a little thought: books that defied my expectations, Submitted by Sia @ everybookadoorway.com, which is glossed as books you thought you would didn’t like that you loved, books you thought you’d love but didn’t, books that were not the genres they seemed to be, or in any other way subverted your expectations! Sometimes, it's great to get a book that does exactly what you expect: a favourite author, a favourite genre, a title like The Kaiju Preservation Society or The Southern Book Club's Guide to Slaying Vampires which really do give you a heads up about the content. But this post celebrates those that unsettled and defied my expectations.

Book Review: Deep Wheel Orcadia, Harry Josephine Giles

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An undeniably beautiful and lyrical piece of science fiction poetry but, for me, the beauty of the language and the translation came at the expense of vivid charaterisations; there was an ephemeralness about the characters, a transparency, that was perhaps deliberate - how small we are in the vastness of space and time and Light is, after all, a familiar science-fiction trope - but left me wanting more of the humans.

Top Ten Tuesday: Books I Hope Santa Brings This Year

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Anyway, this week's Top Ten list is, seasonally enough, books I wish Santa would leave for me... which is a little tricky: I do tend to treat myself to books far too often and my wife refuses to buy me any, arguing that I'll already have read them! Which is true, but somehow misses the point: someone browsing a bookshop and thinking of me is a gift in itself regardless of the book finally bought; and books that I may have electronically or in audiobook format I will still enjoy as a physical copy too!