another power outage re-read. i distinctly remember picking this up in a hotel rec room during a family trip away when i was like 13 and to be honest, i think i accidentally stole it. anyway. this was a gateway to my weirdest niche book series that i enjoy; a norwegian crime series called the INSPECTOR SEJER series. this is the first book of many, i think it's a little lackluster in comparison to the newer ones, but it's an important starting point to establish the grounds of how the series works. good ol detective crime drama, i'll be going through as many as i can before my power is restored.

re-reading some stuff on my shelf due to a power outage this weekend and this was one of the first i grabbed. i liked it when i first read it, it's okay on my second re-read. it's kind of an overly pretentious watered down version of THE SECRET HISTORY and lacks the characterisation to make it as good i fear

i got this as part of a blind book event that my local bookstore does - they wrap up the books, write a very short summary and the genre on the cover, and you buy them based on that. this one had promised a book about a haunted hotel and it's stories that spanned over centuries, which sounded right up my alley! i was a little disappointed, i have to say. it's a series of interconnected short stories about people and their experiences with the house, but unfortunately, the repetition of each chapter (setup: someone who's just having a horrible time. narrative: they are at the hotel and it's unsettling. conclusion: something spooky happens in the final page) just ended up boring me and i found myself just waiting to get to the last few pages to find out what the spooky bit was supposed to be. little too ambiguous and i didn't love the prose, ultimately this just felt like a bunch of short stories about women going through horrible things and also there's a hotel there sometimes

ok. i have two copies of the odyssey; my fagles translation, which i have had since high school and am deeply attached to, and then some new translation i have never heard of before that i picked up recently from a bookstore. before digging into the new one, i just wanted to go back to my fav translation first and revisit it! i personally think this is the best translation of the epic, i also do like his translation of the iliad as well, and though i never did read the aeneid, he did also translate that one as well. i feel like it keeps the essence of what the original is, while still being very easy to get into as a modern reader. it's an easy read, i like it. the excessive use of "wine dark sea" and "dawn's rosy-red fingers" used to annoy the hell out of me but they're just endearing to me now. i love this book very much! if it sounds like something you also would enjoy, the pdf is free on internet archive, and for those with spotify premium, it's included as an audiobook narrated by sir ian mckellen!

this is a short japanese novel about a man who finds he is dying of brain cancer, and the devil offers him a few more days of life if he sacrifices one thing from the world for each extra day. devastating little book, but i do think the translation into english really took away a lot of its impact, unfortunately. it was a bit of a clunky read, but that is not uncommon with this kind of thing. this was a really nice book otherwise though, i do love narratives about human connection and explorations of greif. short, simple, sweet.

this was a wonderful little book. i'd never heard of it before, but i came across it at my local bookstore recently. i absolutely adore older sci-fi, stuff from the 50s and 60s is some of my favourite. it all has a very star trek feel to it, which i adore. this was such a cool take on aliens - not little beings or creatures, but a sentient ocean - which is easily one of my favourite depictions of alien life forms. i almost wanted to tag this as cosmic horror, in a way, but i felt like it would discredit the actual space-y scifi worldbuilding that went into this. great book! thoroughly enjoyed.

yes. the reddit nosleep books. i love this series, followed it all throughout its nosleep days and the bought them all when they were rewritten and published as books. i just never got around to the fourth one, so i re-read them all this month! very good and fun and enjoyable, though i am heavily biased. they have a certain JOHN DIES AT THE END energy to them, but just a little more modern and not written by cracked.com writers who peaked in 2010, yknow?

initially i picked this up because in my head, this was candle cove adjacent, i guess? i'm a simple woman and i love a spooky forgotten tv show story. i enjoyed most of it! i got through it pretty quickly, actually; it was engaging and kept me interested for the most part up until the final stretch. i know the horror is the real life that we all experience, but sometimes y'know, it's okay to build up a spooky creature that seems cosmic and beyond comprehension and not turn it into a metaphor for the realities of religious cult brainwashing. it was fun in the first half but by the end i kind of just wanted to get it over with so i could mark it at finished.