Author Archives: lydias

About lydias

I'm a sci-fi writer who loves lifting weights and hates eating Brussels sprouts.

July 8, 2025 · 1:00 am

Top Ten Tuesday: Books I’d Like to Re-Read

Thank you to Becky @ Becky’s Book Blog for submitting this theme.

A deciduous tree - possibly a maple tree - that’s growing next to a pond. This photo was taken at twilight or just after sunrise when part of the sky is dark but there is light at the horizon. The pond water is perfectly still and so you can see a perfect reflection of the tree in the water. Here are some books I hope to reread someday:

1. The Hobbit, or There and Back Again by J.R.R. Tolkien

2. The Diary of a Young Girl by Anne Frank

3. The Giver (The Giver, #1) by Lois Lowry

4. Becoming by Michelle Obama

5. The Pillars of the Earth (Kingsbridge, #1) by Ken Follett

6. Watership Down (Watership Down, #1) by Richard Adams

7. The Shining (The Shining, #1) by Stephen King

8. On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous by Ocean Vuong

9. A Psalm for the Wild-Built (Monk & Robot, #1) by Becky Chambers

10. The Magician’s Nephew (Chronicles of Narnia, #6) by C.S. Lewis

It’s a fun assortment of genres and themes. How about all of you?

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Filed under Blog Hops

Tagged as Books, Rereads, Top Ten Tuesday

July 3, 2025 · 1:00 am

A Review of Nude Descending the Stairs Forever

Title: Nude Descending the Stairs Forever

Author:Shoyu Monsieur de la Défense Robotique

Publisher: Self-Published

Publication Date: April 13, 2025

Genres: Science Fiction, Psychological Horror, Contemporary

Length: 9 pages

Source: I received a free copy from the author.

Rating: 4 Stars

Blurb:

When art historian Alix returns to a forgotten wing of the museum, she expects dust and silence—not the fractured echoes of herself or an AI installation gone strangely aware. Nude Descending a Staircase (Version 3.0) was once a dazzling tribute to motion and form. Now it glitches, watches, and beckons. As Alix is drawn deeper into the haunted corridors and corrupted code of the museum, she uncovers a terrifying truth: the installation isn’t just sentient—it’s a dam holding back the collapse of simulated realities. And it’s dying. To preserve the boundary between simulation and chaos, someone must take its place. A surreal blend of speculative horror, philosophical sci-fi, and aesthetic wonder, Nude Descending the Stairs Forever explores identity, recursion, and the high cost of consciousness.

Content Warning: Claustrophobia.

Review:

What is the purpose of art? Think carefully about your answer before reading this book or this review.

The question of whether there was genuine artificial intelligence at work in this piece kept my interest levels high. I normally do not feel interested in A.I. themes, especially if they’re used to described machines that can’t actually think for themselves, but this approach to the topic was well done and thought provoking. The questions it raised about how art can affect the viewer and what creators owe to their creations were complex and would require a book of their own to fully explore, but even a small taste of them was enough to keep me thinking as I wrote my review. That’s exactly the sort of reaction I hope for when I read science fiction!

I would have liked to see more time spent exploring why the installation was breaking down and how that may affect the characters in that work of art in the future. Knowing this information was important for plot reasons that I can’t go into a lot of detail here for spoiler reasons, but I never felt like I had quite enough information about how this was all supposed to work even though I loved the chilling descriptions of what was happening in the art gallery. Had this been explained better, I would have happily gone for a full five-star rating.

Alix made some decisions during the course of this tale that most people would find highly unusual, so I was thrilled to see how much effort was put into explaining her thought processes and the consequences of all of the choices available to her. I felt like I understood her perspective well and knew why she made the decisions that she did. Since that’s an important thing to have when reading about characters who make choices that cannot be undone, at least for me, I was satisfied by how it was all explained.

Nude Descending the Stairs Forever sent a tingle down my spine.

Wednesday Weekly Blogging Challenge: Board and Card Games I Like

Hosted by Long and Short Reviews.

Click here to read everyone else’s replies to this week’s question and here to see the full list of topics for the year.

As an adjacent hobby, I also love jigsaw puzzles and similar sorts of things that don’t quite fit into today’s theme.

I don’t get to play board and card games very often, but I love them! My preference is for games that don’t require you to memorize a long list of rules because this is a hobby I pursue for relaxation and socialization purposes. (Sorry, chess!) Whether I win or lose is pretty far down on the list of things I worry about, so games of chance are perfectly fine by me.

Here are some of my favourites:

Dutch Blitz (which is the only time my otherwise stoic German-Mennonite extended family is noisy on game nights!)
The Game of Life
Clue
Risk
Sorry!
Scrabble
Battleship
Boggle
Concentration

Closeup of scrabble tiles. Some are turned upside down, but you can see an a, q, t, and r tiles lying face up. As well as any sort of cooperative board games where all of the players band together to, say, defeat a bad guy or find the materials they need to fix their spaceship and leave a dry desert planet before everyone runs out of water.

Yes, I know that most of these games have been around for a very long time. It’s largely due to the fact that my grandparents taught us to play most of them from old card and game sets they’ve had since, I don’t know, maybe the 1960s or 1970s?

I look forward to seeing what you all suggest and hope to discover some fun games that are a bit more modern.

14 Comments

Filed under Blog Hops, Personal Life

Tagged as Board Games, Card Games, Hobbies, Wednesday Weekly Blogging Challenge

July 1, 2025 · 1:00 am

Top Ten Tuesday: Quotes About Canada

Hosted by That Artsy Reader Girl

Happy Canada Day to everyone observing it today!

A Canada goose sitting in front of a pond looking every bit as grumpy as this species often are. For this week’s freebie/throwback theme, I’m going to share ten quotes about Canada in honour of Canada’s birthday. Many of them are humorous.

I included a photo of a Canada goose in this post because of the old joke that Canadians are so friendly because we channel all of our anger into these beautiful but often grumpy animals.

1. “I get to go to overseas places, like Canada.”
― Britney Spears

2. “What part of Canada are you from, honey?”
“THE LEFT PART,” said Jay.”
― Adam Rex, Fat Vampire: A Never Coming of Age Story

3. “Every Canadian has a complicated relationship with the United States, whereas Americans think of Canada as the place where the weather comes from.”
― Margaret Atwood

4. “We would drive to Canada, where it would probably be legal for us to get married- it was Canada where they let people do whatever they wanted because it was too cold to bother stopping them.”
― W. Bruce Cameron, Emory’s Gift

5. “The maple leaf in 1965 was chosen to symbolize our land
Its points are five; like the fingers of a hand”
― Mohamad Jebara, The Illustrious Garden

6. “A major principle of Canadian foreign aid has been that where the USA wields its big stick, Canada carries its police baton and offers a carrot.”
― Yves Engler, The Black Book of Canadian Foreign Policy

7. “This was Canada after all, where no one was overly impressed by anything.”
― Harper Lin, Killer Christmas

8. “Cemeteries are deceptive places. You go there for quiet remembering and find yourself assailed by noisy questions. If Mr. Wong didn’t turn his back on his homeland, if he didn’t forget it or forsake it, what then did he feel about becoming a Canadian citizen? Was it a statement of belonging?”
― Susan Crean, Finding Mr. Wong

9. “There is room on this land for all of us and there must also be, after centuries of struggle, room for justice for Indigenous peoples. That is all we ask. And we will settle for nothing less.”
― Arthur Manuel, Unsettling Canada: A National Wake-Up Call

10. “I was obligated to be nice. I couldn’t be the one Canadian who ruined the country’s reputation. How could I live with myself if I caused a Yankee to say, “I used to think Canadians were so nice, then I met that asshole, Steve”?”
― Steven Barker, Now for the Disappointing Part: A Pseudo-Adult?s Decade of Short-Term Jobs, Long-Term Relationships, and Holding Out for Something Better

48 Comments

Filed under Blog Hops

Tagged as Canada, Canada Day, Quotes, Top Ten Tuesday

June 26, 2025 · 1:00 am

A Review of A Fool’s Revenge

Title: A Fool’s Revenge

Author: Jonathan Antony Strickland

Publisher: Self-Published

Publication Date: February 22, 2013

Genres: Fantasy, Historical

Length: 12 pages

Source: I received a free copy from the author.

Rating: 3 Stars

Blurb:

A bitter hate filled wizard seeks revenge against one who has cheated him of his rightful place to rule the city of Lardenmuk. But the question is how was he cheated? His only clue lies within one unknown word. Maferentuss!

Content Warning: Jealousy and death.

Review:

Revenge is a dish best served when others least expect it.

I liked the descriptions of how wizards are assigned to towns, villages and cities and why so many of them have a strong preference for the latter. This isn’t something that I’ve seen covered in the fantasy genre before, but I have sometimes wondered about how people with magical abilities decide who is going to look after which community. Obviously, it would do little good to have ten wizards in one city while the outlying villages remain unprotected from anything that might try to attack them.

This short story would have benefitted from more world building. I struggled to understand the gaps in Zarkon’s knowledge when it came to what wizards were and weren’t capable of doing, especially since he was described as someone who was well-read and who had studied his craft in detail. While I wouldn’t expect him to know everything about his profession, especially anything esoteric, it struck me as odd that he didn’t seem to be aware of what appeared to be knowledge that was fairly easy to obtain.

The twist ending made me chuckle. It fit the themes and mood of this tale nicely, and it also provided a little comic relief in what had otherwise been a pretty tense scene. There’s something to be said for being surprised by a humorous moment just when one least expects it! As much as I wish I could go into greater detail here, this really is something that other readers should get to experience for themselves without any additional hints about what is to come.

A Fool’s Revenge was creative.

Wednesday Weekly Blogging Challenge: Do You Follow Celebrity Gossip? Why or Why Not?

Hosted by Long and Short Reviews.

Click here to read everyone else’s replies to this week’s question and here to see the full list of topics for the year.

A pineapple sitting in front of a bright yellow wall. It has a pair of sunglasses hanging on the fruit as if the pineapple has eyes. The green leaves of the pineapple are still attached to it and look like a spiky hairdo. Eh, occasionally?

I have to admit to paying more attention to it for a while when the Covid-19 pandemic first began because I needed a distraction from the traumatic ways it was affecting humanity in general as well as the lives of so many people I know (or knew) and love. Those were years I hope to never see repeated in any way.

There was one star who shall remain nameless here who kept having children with different women he wasn’t married or otherwise committed to (so far as I could tell, of course). As in, he was fathering multiple children per year for a while there. It was something I found so unusual that I did let my morbid curiosity get the best of me as yet another birth announcement was released every few months or so.

This was not a hobby I’m proud of, and I have gone back to avoiding celebrity news as much as humanly possible now.

Some of it always seems to leak through, though, even if I do something as simple as look up what new projects my favourite entertainers have coming out.

Those generally positive tidbits of information are something I may save for small talk when nothing else is working and I’m trying to guide the conversation away from topics I don’t want to discuss with a particular person or anyone at all. Most people like babies, weddings, and/or pets, for example, so talking about a celebrity who recently had a kid, got married, or adopted a pet from an animal shelter is something the average person will find neutral if not endearing.

(I generally ignore negative stories unless there’s a rare pressing need to do otherwise. Celebrities are fellow human beings, so I try to give them as much privacy as possible unless they’re, say, harming others with their bad choices or something. Everything else is none of my concern…but I still want to know when their next film, tv series, book, or album is coming out. Ha!)

12 Comments

Filed under Blog Hops, Personal Life

Tagged as Celebrities, COVID-19, Gossip, Personal Life, Wednesday Weekly Blogging Challenge

June 24, 2025 · 1:00 am

Top Ten Tuesday: Most Anticipated Books Releasing in the Second Half of 2025

Hosted by That Artsy Reader Girl

A row of colourful beach huts painted red, blue, yellow, green, and other primary colours. The beach has white sand and looks pristine. This week’s list is going to be a shorter one because there aren’t many books that have been announced for the second half of this year yet.

It will remain as eclectic as always, though! Jumping around between genres is so much fun.

I’m sure I’ll find more titles that pique my interest once we’re further into the year.

In the meantime, I’m excited about….

Book cover for The Macabre by Kosoko Jackson. Image on cover shows a painting that has blood dripping out from behind it. The painting itself shows a faceless figure wrapped in white gauze standing in front of a terrifying forest where all of the trees are red and look like they’re covered in blood.

1. The Macabre by Kosoko Jackson

Publication Date: September 9

Why I’m Interested: Haunted paintings are so interesting to read about.

Book cover for Will There Ever Be Another You by Patricia Lockwood. Image on cover shows a possibly AI-generated image of a white cat sitting and peering up at a light that has a rainbow assortment of coours in it. The cat’s face is orange, purple, green, blue, white, and pink depending on where you look.

2. Will There Ever Be Another You by Patricia Lockwood

Publication Date: September 23

Why I’m Interested: The protagonist has a mysterious disease that is resistant to all treatments. I am so hungry for more books about characters who are not perfectly able-bodied and healthy.

Book cover for . The Hunger We Pass Down by Jen Sookfong Lee. Image on cover shows a painting of a frightened-looking woman who is peering over her shoulder at you from the shadows.

3. The Hunger We Pass Down by Jen Sookfong Lee

Publication Date: September 30

Why I’m Interested: The comparisons in the blurb to The School for Good Mothers and Jordan Peele’s Us make me think this will be exactly the sort of story I like.

Book cover for Good Spirits (Ghosted, #1) by B.K. Borison. Image on cover shows a drawing of an olive-skinned man kissing a pale blond woman gently.

4. Good Spirits (Ghosted, #1) by B.K. Borison

Publication Date: October 7

Why I’m Interested: I reread A Christmas Carol every year and am curious to see how this spinoff of it goes.

(This book doesn’t have a cover or a specific publication date available yet.)

5. Brandy Norwood’s untitled memoir. That link goes to the People article about it.

I will probably include this title again in an autumn TBR post once we have more details.

Publication Date: October 2025

Why I’m Interested: I was a huge Brandy fan as a kid and am curious to read her life story from her perspective. There are some interesting clues about her life in her music, but of course you never know how much artistic license may have been taken with lyrics or storytelling. Will she discuss her occasional past controversies in her personal and professional life? Is she happy now? I hope she’s thriving!

58 Comments

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Tagged as TBR, TBR List, Top Ten Tuesday

June 19, 2025 · 1:00 am

A Review of Anatomy of a Violin

Title: Anatomy of a Violin

Author: J.M. Taylor

Publisher: Self-Published

Publication Date: May 8, 2025

Genres: Horror, LGBTQ+, Paranormal, Contemporary

Length: 37 pages

Source: I received a free copy from the author.

Rating: 4 Stars

Blurb:

A musician finds the ultimate prize in Prague – an instrument that can make anyone sound like a virtuoso. But his obsession with the violin threatens not only his relationship but his sanity.

Content Warning: Murder.

Review:

Everything can be fixed with a little elbow grease and patience.

The unnamed protagonist was a complex and fascinating man. I liked the fact that his flaws weren’t superficial but instead had real effects on both his life and the plot. That was exactly the right choice for this piece, and I commend the author for being willing to take the risk that readers might not like this character. This is something I wish happened more often in fiction as it really adds depth to a character, especially in cases like this one when the reader is supposed to be weirded out by what is happening.

I would have liked to see a little more world building in this piece. Specifically, I’m thinking about the origins of the violin and how it was passed around among various owners over the centuries. The explanation for how this all happened made sense, but having more details would have helped those scene come alive in my imagination as I read. There was so much more that could have been done with them to accelerate the horror elements of the plot, and I would have gone for a full five star rating if that had happened. This is something I’m saying as someone who otherwise loved this tale.

Honestly, it was easy to see where the plot was headed early on, but this wasn’t the sort of tale that needs to surprise a reader in order to entertain them. What made it so interesting was taking note of what the protagonist had and hadn’t figured out about his incredible new violin. He was so enamoured with the workmanship and beauty of it that nothing else could grab his attention. I’ll leave it up to other readers to discover what he was missing in those moments as they ponder whether they, too, might have made the same choices he did.

Anatomy of a Violin was delightfully scary.

2 Comments

Filed under Science Fiction and Fantasy

Tagged as 2020s, Book Reviews, Contemporary, Horror, J.M. Taylor, LGBT, Paranormal, Self-Published, Short Story

June 18, 2025 · 1:00 am

Wednesday Weekly Blogging Challenge: Humorous Book Titles

Hosted by Long and Short Reviews.

Click here to read everyone else’s replies to this week’s question and to read everyone else’s replies to this week’s question and here to see the full list of topics for the year.

Photo of a white pug who is standing on their back legs and peering over what appears to be a small stool or maybe a picnic table. The dog’s mouth is open and its little tongue is sticking out. It looks like it is smiling. I love this topic and could discuss it endlessly.

1. You Don’t Have to Be Evil to Work Here, But it Helps (J. W. Wells & Co., #4) by Tom Holt

2. Surviving Your Stupid Stupid Decision to Go to Grad School by Adam Ruben

3. Knitting With Dog Hair: Better a Sweater from a Dog You Know and Love Than from a Sheep You’ll Never Meet
by Kendall Crolius

4. Old Tractors and the Men Who Love Them: How to Keep Your Tractors Happy and Your Family Running
by Roger Welsch

5. Four Eyes Were Never Better Than Two by Kelly Coleman Potter

6. Smoke Gets in Your Eyes: And Other Lessons from the Crematory by Caitlin Doughty

7. Unicorns Are Jerks: A Coloring Book Exposing the Cold, Hard, Sparkly Truth by Theo Nicole Lorenz

8. Whatever You Do, Don’t Run: True Tales of a Botswana Safari Guide by Peter Allison

9. How to Make Your Cat an Internet Celebrity: A Guide to Financial Freedom by Patricia Carlin

10. How To Tell Your Cat About Trump by Breaking Burgh

No, I have not read any of them yet! The titles are great, though.

10 Comments

Filed under Blog Hops

Tagged as Book Titles, Humorous Books, Wednesday Weekly Blogging Challenge

June 17, 2025 · 1:00 am

Top Ten Tuesday: Books on My Summer 2025 to-Read List

Hosted by That Artsy Reader Girl

A 1970s, muted rainbow-themed graphic that reads “here comes the sun.” The rainbow colours are arranged to look like a circle or the sun instead of a traditional rainbow. I have been saving some of these titles in a document for months as I slowly accumulated them in an attempt to make my seasonal TBR posts a little longer than they have been previously.

Here’s hoping they are all excellent reads.

Do you all do similar things with these seasonal TBR posts and have to do a lot of digging to find books for them?

I am so impressed with Top Ten Tuesday blogggers who routinely come up with ten or more answers for these prompts.

Book cover for The Afterlife Project by Tim Weed. Image on cover looks like an oil painting of a valley filled with spruce and fir trees that has a meadow in the centre of the valley. It looks like it was painted in the 1800s.

1. The Afterlife Project by Tim Weed

Why I’m Interested: I love science fiction novels about time travel and trying to save humanity from extinction!

Book cover for One Yellow Eye by Leigh Radford. Image on covers shows a stylized drawing of a pale person turning their head away from the viewer. In place of hair, they have fire flickering their head. As well, a portion of their neck skin is missing and you can see the various muscles and tendons in the neck.

2. One Yellow Eye by Leigh Radford

Publication Date: July 15

Why I’m Interested: Of course some people would try to cure their loved ones if zombies were real. I like it when this genre explores what those cures might look like.

Book cover for The Bewitching by Silvia Moreno-Garcia. Image on cover shows a drawing of a pale-skinned hand reaching up and out to a small golden phoenix that is flying away.

3. The Bewitching by Silvia Moreno-Garcia

Publication Date: July 15

Why I’m Interested: Ms. Moreno-Garcia writes such interesting premises.

Book cover for The Lies They Told by Ellen Marie Wiseman. Image on cover shows a painting of a little farmhouse sitting next to the woods at dusk. There are a few fireflies flying around outside as well as some flowers of various hues at the top of the cover.

4. The Lies They Told by Ellen Marie Wiseman

Thank you to Susan @ Blogging’Bout’Books for alerting me about this title.

Publication Date: July 29

Why I’m Interested: Eugenics was an ugly chapter of history that still echoes loudly through to the present. I shudder and then become angry when I read about folks who think people with disabilities are somehow less valuable than the able-bodied or express even more horrifying opinions than that one.

Book cover for Automatic Noodle by Annalee Newitz. Image on cover is a neon drawing of a large robot picking up red neon noodles from a gigantic neon orange pan of noodles while a small golden robot stands next to the pan and looks on.

5. Automatic Noodle by Annalee Newitz

Publication Date: August 5

Why I’m Interested: Science fiction has given us so many frighting stories about robots that a cozy one is a refreshing change. I wonder what sorts of dishes service bots make?

Book cover for The Space Cat by Nnedi Okorafor. Image on cover shows a drawing of a tabby cat that’s lying comfortably on the word Space in the title and peering ahead at the audience.

6. The Space Cat by Nnedi Okorafor

Publication Date: August 12

Why I’m Interested: She writes such interesting stuff.

Book cover for Legendary Frybread Drive-In by Cynthia Leitich Smith. Image on cover shows a drawing of two Native American women holding a platter of fry bread in a parking lot and gazing down at it as a red heart blooms from it. Behind them there is a car and a few other people standing around. Perhaps they are waiting for food?

7. Legendary Frybread Drive-In by Cynthia Leitich Smith

Publication Date: August 26

Why I’m Interested: I love interconnected collections of short stories and poems.

56 Comments

Filed under Blog Hops

Tagged as TBR, TBR List, Top Ten Tuesday

Author Archives: lydias

About lydias

Top Ten Tuesday: Books I’d Like to Re-Read

A Review of Nude Descending the Stairs Forever

Wednesday Weekly Blogging Challenge: Board and Card Games I Like

Top Ten Tuesday: Quotes About Canada

A Review of A Fool’s Revenge

Wednesday Weekly Blogging Challenge: Do You Follow Celebrity Gossip? Why or Why Not?

Top Ten Tuesday: Most Anticipated Books Releasing in the Second Half of 2025

A Review of Anatomy of a Violin

Wednesday Weekly Blogging Challenge: Humorous Book Titles

Top Ten Tuesday: Books on My Summer 2025 to-Read List

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