Year of the dog

I grew up with cats. I love cats. But I have always wanted a dog.

Last year, the stars finally aligned: my partner and I had moved to a house with a garden. We had jobs that would let us work from home. We had enough disposable income that we figured the dog would have to work pretty hard to bankrupt us (this assumption would be tested). So we decided to join the legions of pandemic pet-getters.

Enter the dog.

I read 9 self-help books during the pandemic and now I am a completely perfect person

Since March 2020, I have read 9 books that could fall into the category of self-help. In one way or another, these books have promised to make me a master of my own existence. I should be in control of my life, with a well-prioritised routine, a clean house and even cleaner sleep hygiene.

So, about a year later, am I now a smiling, well-oiled machine living my best life? Hahahaha! No! Absolutely not! But I did learn at least one useful thing from each of them, so I will present these things here and save you the time of reading everything else surrounding them.

My year in books: what I read and what I loved in 2020

Is 2020 done yet? No? Maybe this blog post is just wishful thinking then. But I’m planning to coast to the end of my reading year on a gentle sea of escapist froth, and so don’t think I’m likely to read anything else that would make me change my overall assessment of the year’s reading, so let’s do this.

Here are the books I loved the most, the book I liked the least, and just some general thoughts about how reading kept me going during this garbage year.

5 really chill YouTube channels that help me calm the heck down

Oops, I haven’t done a blog post that wasn’t about books in 6 months. This blog wasn’t supposed to be a book blog (although the October reading update is coming) so uhhhhhh… here’s a post about something else I like to do, which is hide from my problems by watching YouTube.

Recently, like many people, I have been a teensy weensy bit stressed. So sometimes it is nice to just make a cup of herbal tea and settle in to a cosy video. Here are some channels I have been liking a lot recently. Some are vlogs, others are more focused on hobbies of which I have little-to-no experience, but they all generally deliver the cosy vibes that I really crave at the moment. Also most of them involve cute pets, which is a benefit to any parasocial relationship.

My month in books: September 2020

This blog post is very late, but I promise I did indeed read some books in September. 10 of them, even. And one of them was a new candidate for favourite book of the year – I’m just gonna cut to the chase, it’s In the Dream House by Carmen Maria Machado and it’s amazing – so I’m extra sorry to have withheld this valuable post from you.

This was a month of two halves: a lot of heavy capital-L Literature to start, and then a whole bunch of sci-fi (with a rom-com breather in the middle).

My month in books: August 2020

I am really into reading at the moment – writing, not so much.

Here are my thoughts on the 9 books I read this month, including two that will definitely be on my list of favourites for the year.

My month in books: July 2020

I feel more excited to write this blog post than I have in some time, because I really loved a lot of what I read this month, and I want to share it.

There’s a Victorian pastiche with cannibalistic dragons, a chapter that saved 16 hours of my life, and a romance that finally dares to ask the question: “What if Jonathan Franzen was hot?”

I hope at least one of those sounds intriguing. This will also be a long post, because I finished 9 books in July. Let’s go!

My month in books: June 2020

How is another month gone already?

June took me on literary trips up the Amazon River, onto a spaceship bound for an alien university, and behind the scenes of Palo Alto.

My month in books: May 2020

I ended up with quality over quantity this month – four very good books, which made me think about sleep, racism, cruelty and parenting. And also about flying, man-eating bears.

Zombiesaurus will give you light in these dark times

Zombiesaurus, also called The Jurassic Dead, also called Z/Rex: The Jurassic Dead, is available to stream on Amazon Prime and has a 2.8 on IMDb. The provided summary is this:

A crazed scientist, along with the dreaded axis of evil, attempt to bring chaos and destruction to America with a plot to unleash EMP blasts, toxic zombification gas and the ultimate undead killing monstrosity — the Zombiesaurus Rex!

So what more do you want from an evening’s entertainment? I certainly can’t think of anything else. So I have watched this movie and now I am here to tell you all about it.