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I know I’ve done similar topics in the past. This time I’m specifically focusing on books set in Southern Ontario instead of in Toronto.
1.Ghost Road And Other Forgotten Stories of Windsor by Marty Gervais
2. Birding at Point Pelee by Henrietta T. O’Neill
3. Fifth Business by Robertson Davies
4. Alias Grace by Margaret Atwood
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Thank you to dark.shelf.of.wonders and Books Are The New Black for submitting this theme!
One of the unfortunate consequences of the rise of large language models is how they anre impacting the indie and self-published corners of the bookish community. I’m seeing more and more authors from these sectors use LLMs not only to design their book covers but also to help write or even sometimes do all of the work of writing their stories. (This is something I know because many of them actually admit to it!).
I am morally opposed to the use of LLMs in general because of how harmful they are to the environment, the widespread theft of written and visual imagery that was used to create them, and the devastating number of people who have lost their jobs as a result of these things. Therefore, the number of indie and self-published authors I review on my blog is seeing a steady and probably permanent decline. As committed as I used to be to featuring authors that needed such exposure, I can’t ethically continue to do so under current conditions.
You have the right to your own opinion on this topic, of course, but I will only be approving kind and respectful replies here.
So this post is looking back at a happier time before all of that stuff started happening. Here are ten self-published books I’ve reviewed here in the recent past. To the best of my knowledge, no LLMs were used in the creation of them.
The links below will take you to my reviews of these stories!
1. Homeless by Neil Shooter
2. Love Bug by Zoe Tasia
3. Five Miles Out Of Black Creek by Neil Shooter
4. Amina by P.B. Cannon
5. Marginal Worlds by Alfred Bekker
6. Cosmophobia by George Saoulidis
7. Mayday Mayday Mayday by Holly Schindler
8. Beach House on the Moon byLeigh Kimmel
9. Chasing June by Holly Schindler
10. A Hundred Julys by Holly Schindler
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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.
In previous posts on this topic, I’ve talked about my desire for replicators and for top-notch Star Trek medical care to be real due to all of the wonderful things they’d do for us.
I’m sticking with the Star Trek theme yet again this time because that universe was filled with some excellent ideas.
I wish we lived in a world where Warp Drives really existed as well so we could travel faster than the speed of light and see more of the universe. Right now we are only capable of traveling to the moon which, while still a noteworthy place to explore, doesn’t have any life on it.
Imagine a time when we could travel to distant stars and see if the moons or planets orbiting them had anything interesting living there.
Are there plants growing in those distant places that might cure diseases like cancer?
Are there friendly aliens living there with whom we could trade scientific knowledge and resources?
Could humans live there if necessary? Could aliens live on Earth?
The possibilities are endless, and I wish we could have answers to all of our questions.
Filed under Blog Hops, Science Fiction and Fantasy
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I’m going to try to not repeat any nationalities in this list!
As I haven’t read any of these titles yet, the only thing I can vouch for is that they fit the requirements for today’s theme.
1. Cuban Sun (Sofia Koury, #1) by Ann Bauer
2. Anna of Byzantium by Tracy Barrett
3. Stefi and the Spanish Prince by Donna Freitas
4. Number One Chinese Restaurant by Lillian Li
5. Indian Dust by Rumer Godden
6. 1916: A Novel of the Irish Rebellion by Morgan Llywelyn
7. Jamaican Me Crazy: A Christmas Escape by Debbie Digiovanni
8. I Survived the Japanese Tsunami, 2011 by Lauren Tarshis
9. Mexican WhiteBoy by Matt de la Peña
10. Scottish Ghosts by Lily Seafield
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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.
I love this topic but struggled to come up with an answer for it because I don’t read many fiction books that share weird facts in them.
Finally, I thought of a response. When I was a teenager, one of my English teachers assigned “The Landlady” by Roald Dahl to us. I’m afraid I must spoil the ending of this horror mystery tale in order to write my post, so do go read it first if you’re not already familiar with what happens. It’s a short read.
Now that you’ve all had a chance to read it for yourselves, this tale was about a young man who was meeting up with a landlady who happened to have a room available to rent to him. She was a rather strange woman who seemed to be obsessed with taxidermy. The story ends with the young man drinking a cup of tea she offered him that tasted faintly of bitter almonds.
We were all confused about that detail until our teacher told us that cyanide tastes like bitter almonds.
Yes, she poisoned him. After he died, she was planning to taxidermy him just like she had with her previous two boarders.
We were all a little horrified by how this story ended, but it was a memorable one for sure!
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Apologies to Susan @Bloggin’ ’bout Books, but I haven’t visited many exciting bookish places. My books generally come from the public library, and I simply do not have the budget to travel to other countries.
Unless you want to hear stories about me reading encyclopedias from the 1960s at my grandmother’s house when I was a child, I’ll have to tweak this topic a little in order to participate.
Therefore, here are ten bookish places I’d like to visit that are either the settings for famous works or have beautiful libraries or festivals there:
1. The W.E.B. Du Bois Center Library in Ghana
2. The Library of Alexandria in Egypt (If it still existed, of course).
3. Prince Edward Island, Canada
4. The Jane Eyre trail, Peak District
5. The Ake Arts and Book Festival in Nigeria
6. Amsterdam
7. Kyoto
8. Cartagena
9. Buenos Aires
10. Chimurenga Library in South Africa
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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.
I’m not a very picky eater, so this is going to be a short list.
I do not like alcohol (and have medical reasons to avoid it now anyway), so any wine, beer, or other alcoholic beverage made in Ontario isn’t something I will be imbibing.
Sushi Pizza. There’s a restaurant here in Toronto that serves it. While I love pizza, sushi is one of those foods I’ve never learned to enjoy. The seaweed wrap for it is far too salty and chewy for my tastes. Maybe it’s because my family never ate sushi when I was a kid?
Sausages. There are farms in Ontario that make all sorts of sausages, and I rarely if ever like any of them. Meat is something I eat, but I enjoy it far less than something like a warm, crusty loaf of bread with a little vegan butter and cherry jam on it.
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This will be a short list this week as I’ve more or less lost interest in reading series. Too many of them have either ended unsatisfactorily for my tastes or never been completed at all.
With that being said, here are a few exceptions to that rule for me that I still need to finish:
1. The Golden Compass (His Dark Materials, #1) by Philip Pullman
2. Children of Time (Children of Time, #1) by Adrian Tchaikovsky
3. Semiosis (Semiosis, #1) by Sue Burke
If you know of any speculative fiction series published in the last 10 years or so that were excellent from beginning to end, please share!
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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.
One type of Canadian food I haven’t tried yet is Saskatoon berry pie, but I’d bet it will be amazing once I find a dairy-free version or recipe for it someday Everything else on this list is something I have eaten at least once.
I can’t possibly know what everyone has or hasn’t already tasted, so Wikipedia links are included in this post if anything I described is unfamiliar to you or you’d like to know more about them.
Maple syrup is at the top of my list for this topic because Southern Ontario is excellent at making it and it’s one of those foods that people buy here to give as gifts elsewhere. I know it’s collected in many other places on Earth, too, so I hope you all have had a chance to taste it if you wish to.
Poutine is delicious as well. You may not think that French fries, gravy, and cheese (or, in my case, vegan cheese) would go so well together, but they’re delicious. I prefer to add a few tablespoons of chopped green peppers for added flavour, although it’s not a traditional topping per se.
Butter tarts are something I wasn’t able to try until I finally found a bakery that makes a dairy-free version of them. Thank goodness for vegan and allergy-aware bakers is all I can say! They are an incredibly rich dessert that I adore, and I recommend them as well.
Peameal bacon sandwiches are a delicious lunch due to how rich and savoury this type of meat is. They’re typically served on the same sort of bun you might use for hamburger or veggie burger meat. I like to put some honey mustard on mine, but they’re good plain as well.
Nanaimo bars took some getting used to due to my dislike of shredded coconut, but they’re otherwise wonderfully fudgy and sweet.
Split pea soup is actually something my parents made on occasion when I was growing up in the United States. I didn’t realize there was a French version from Quebec, too, until I moved up here.
Finally, beaver tails are a classic Canadian treat. It’s a flat pastry that’s fried and then covered in toppings that range from a simple cinnamon and sugar to chopped up pieces of well-known candy or candy bars and copious amounts of icing. They are also teeth-achingly sweet, so you may want to consider splitting one with a friend or relative as a little bit can go a long way.
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Thank you to Anne @ HeadFullofBooks for coming up with this topic! Here are books I’ve read in August over the past ten years. I can’t guarantee that I was reading them on precisely August 11 as I don’t keep track of such information, but they were all read in this month and all good reads.
2016
The Many Deaths of Tom Thomson: Separating Fact from Fiction by Gregory Klages
Genre: History
Why I Liked It: Tom Thompson was a famous Canadian painter and one of the Group of Seven who created all sorts of art in the early 1900s. This book explores his life and mysterious death, and I thought the ending was quite fitting for a life that ended far too soon.
2017
Coping With Your Difficult Older Parent : A Guide for Stressed-Out Children by Grace Lebow, Barbara Kane, Irwin Lebow
Genre: Psychology/Self-Help
Why I Liked It: My parents are actually wonderful, but unfortunately I have other relatives in their age group who are only becoming more difficult to handle as they grow older. I’ve read multiple books about boundaries, dysfunctional families, (severe, untreated) mental illness, and self-care over the years to help me develop the coping skills I need for these situations.
2018
The Bedroom: An Intimate History by Michelle Perrot, Lauren Elkin
Genre: History
Why I Liked It: The wide range of topics it covered. Yes, there were references to sex in this book, but it also talked about many other things related to bedrooms and sleeping: central heating, how hotel accommodations worked in the past, how people slept in jails, hospitals, and sanitariums, and so much more.
2019
Let’s Play White by Chesya Burke
Genre: SFF
Why I Liked It: This was one of those collections of short stories in which every entry was unique. I get a little bored with collections that repeat the same themes too often, so this one definitely stood out to me.
2020
Zombies, Run!: Keeping Fit and Living Well in the Current Zombie Emergency by Naomi Alderman
Genre: SFF, Health, Fitness
Why I Liked It: Honestly, the information in it is just as applicable to now as it was to 2020. Taking care of yourself during stressful times is incredibly important no matter what the threat is. The zombie angle simply added a dose of fun to what is otherwise a serious topic.
2021
Broken Places & Outer Spaces: Finding Creativity in the Unexpected by Nnedi Okorafor
Genre: Memoir
Why I Liked It: I don’t purposefully seek out information about the lives of my favourite authors because I believe they deserve privacy just like the rest of us (unless they’re harming other people or something, of course). Therefore, I didn’t know about Ms. Okorafor’s botched back surgery or how it lead her to become an author until I read this. It was quite interesting!
2022
On Sundays She Picked Flowers by Yah-Yah Scholfield
Genre: Horror
Why I Liked It: Eveything up until the ending was perfect. The protagonist was nuanced and relatable and the setting was deliciously scary. I just wish the conclusion had been a happier one, but I’m still glad I read it.
2023
The Necessity of Stars by E. Catherine Tobler
Genre: SFF
Why I Liked It: This one had the opposite problem that Scholfield‘s tale did. The beginning was a little lacklustre, but the ending was so worth the wait. Once again, I’m glad I read it even though it didn’t match all of my expectations.
2024
Gay the Pray Away by Natalie Naudus
Genre: YA
Why I Liked It: I related to it on so many different levels, from growing up in a conservative Christian homeschooling family to being a lifelong bookworm to eventually coming out.
2025
Ghosts, Trolls and the Hidden People: An Anthology of Icelandic Folk Legends by Dagrún Ósk Jónsdóttir
Genre: SFF
Why I Liked It: You all might remember how much I love myths, fairy tales, and folklore in general. This was a fabulous collection of just that.
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