mira grant

Speculative Chic Round Up: Week 1.5

~ Shara ~ Leave a comment

fifth-season_0I don’t intend do to this every week, but it’s been a week and a half since Speculative Chic launched, and I wanted to give you all a chance to see what kind of awesome my contributors have been publishing. So, if you haven’t yet started following Speculative Chic (the best way is subscribing through email/Wordpress), here’s what you may have missed:

Welcome to Speculative Chic

Sound Off! Ghostbusters

My Favorite Things: Soundtrack Love, Fairytale Dectectives, and Awesome Aps

You Can’t Kill The Truth: Re-Reading Mira Grant’s Newsflesh Series Part One: Feed

51OXCIqV26L._SX277_BO1,204,203,200_Broken Earth, Broken Characters: A Review of N.K. Jemisin’s The Fifth Season

Welcome to the Bookstore

Dear Sherry: Scared to Share

As you can see, we’ve already got a lot of content to sift through, and that’s not going to change! Excepting weekends, you can expect to see at least one new post daily, and the content varies from fangirling, commentary, reviews, writing advice, and the inner workings of bookstores. And it varies week to week!

So if you haven’t checked us out yet, please do! Feel free to like posts and comment on those that catch your interest: let Spec Chic’s authors know how much you appreciate their work!

ghostbusters2016

A Few of My Favorite Things: Books 2015

~ Shara ~ 4 Comments

I think there’s always a part of me that will miss having a book blog. After putting together December’s Culture Consumption, I started wondering… what WERE my favorite books of 2015? To figure that out, I pulled up my Library Thing account and started sorting by date finished, and then I started looking at the ratings. Anything four stars or higher got written down on the appropriate list: a full five stars are listed as favorites, and four and four-and-a-half stars were honorable mentions.

Why Library Thing instead of Goodreads? Because LT allows for half stars, which means when I’m rating on Goodreads, I might round up or down depending on how I want the rating to look on that site. LT is a more accurate reflection of my thoughts.

I also did not include a few of the fun, children’s type books on the list. I’m a sucker for Jeffrey Brown’s Darth Vader series, and Simon Tofield’s Simon’s Cat books are adorable. So they didn’t get counted.

Before I review my favorites and honorable mentions, I did want to make a few points:

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Culture Consumption: December 2015

~ Shara ~ 7 Comments

Good-bye, 2015, and hello, 2016!!!! While 2015 was a better year than 2014, I’m still glad to have it behind me. I may or may not talk about the reasons why in a later post, but what I will talk about are the goodies that were consumed before the year wrapped up. I may also do a separate post of favorites later, but again, we’ll see if the mood strikes.

So, let’s see how I ended the year, shall we?

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I Don’t Read as Quickly As I Used To

~ Shara ~ 3 Comments

Once upon a time, when I was but a humble book blogger, I could tear through books like a knife through butter. At the height of my blog, it was nothing to post anywhere from 2-4 book reviews per week, nothing to read 100+ books per year. I miss those days, sometimes, when my free time was spent absorbed in fictional worlds, admiring the craft that made those worlds and the people who populated them so vivid and real.

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Culture Consumption: December 2014

~ Shara ~ 6 Comments

Ah, 2014 has finally ended, and with that, I say good riddance! At least the stuff I was reading and watching was thoroughly enjoyable, so let’s see where December ended up.

Books

My goal for 2014 was to read 50 books. If you don’t count the novellas/novelettes/short stories, then I fell just shy of that goal. However, if you include those (some of those novellas were pretty hefty!), then my total for the year was 95, which is more on course for what I was reading back in my book blogging days. Still short, but considering the kind of year this has been, quite respectable.

44) Symbiont by Mira Grant
45) Authority by Jeff VanderMeer
46) The Goblin Emperor by Katherine Addison

Short Fiction

45) The Ninety-Ninth Bride by Catherine F. King
46) The Astronomer Who Met the North Wind by Kate Hall
47) The Awakened Kingdom by N.K. Jemisin
48) Snakes and Ladders by Seanan McGuire
49) White As a Raven’s Wing by Seanan McGuire

Comics

It utterly amazes me at the number of comics I read every year. Seriously, I added it up, and I read a total of 283 individual issues this year. There’s definitely down from previous years, but the way the issues have piled up is overwhelming, and I still have a very large TBR comic pile. There’s some series that are ending, which is good, and some series I’m pretty close to quitting. That said, I’d like to be more judicious and selective in the my titles for 2015, and keep it to the stuff I’m really into.

Individual Issues:

Batgirl #37
Black Widow #12
Black Widow #13
Ms. Marvel #10
Sex Criminals #8
Sex Criminals #9
Sleepy Hollow #2
The Massive #29

Movies

My husband and I had an epic Harry Potter marathon in December, which was a helluva lot of fun, because it’s been a while since I’ve seen these and it was a lot of fun to go back to the start, knowing how the series ends, and see all the little clues I missed the first time around. I look forward to do the same with the books, but that’s a marathon for a much later time.

Total movies seen this year? 14 total in theaters, and 61 in the comfort of my own home.

In December, we watched the following:

A Christmas Story
Elf
Guardians of the Galaxy
Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets
Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part One
Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part Two
Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire
Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince
Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix
Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban
Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone
Home Alone
Palo Alto
The Hobbit: The Battle of the Five Armies (in theaters)
The Hunger Games: Mockingjay: Part 1 (in theaters)
Total Recall (1990)

Television Shows

We didn’t finish and seasons this month, but we completed a total of 46 seasons of stuff. Damn, that’s a lot of television, but when you consider a nice portion of those to be marathons of Mad Men, Breaking Bad, and Friday Night Lights, it takes up a good portion, and most of the television we watch is during the fall to summer season, so it’s an episode a week for a limited number of shows. Still, those seasons do add up, don’t they?

That’s it from me! Also, feel free to share whatever 2014 stats you’ve got! How many books? How many movies? What were your favorites? Lay them on me!

Cheers!

Culture Consumption: August 2014

~ Shara ~ 8 Comments

It’s that time again! Amazing how fast the time flies, but once more, it’s time for another Culture Consumption. As always, I’ll post a list of what I’ve read/watched over the past month, and in some cases, provide some commentary. If there’s anything you’re interested in or curious about, don’t hesitate to ask me in the comments, and I’ll be happy to talk further!

August was actually quite productive. Some of it is due to vacation, and the time I spent in the airport and on the plane reading, but I also spent a few weekends where I said f*** it to the dishes and sat down and read like a fiend. Also, good shows too!

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