Thursday 11/7/2019: Emergency Room & ICU
So November 7th, 2019, was the day I could have died three different ways before breakfast.
Author: James Viscosi
That Was The Year That Was (In Music): 2019 Edition
Last week I posted my 2019 reading report from Goodreads; this week, it’s time for my 2019 listening report from Last.fm. Last year, Last.fm generated a nice 2018 listening recap report and dashboard; this year they did the same:
Continue reading “That Was The Year That Was (In Music): 2019 Edition”
That Was The Year That Was (In Books): 2019 Edition
Goodreads has prepared their annual review of books read and rated by their users in 2019, and my reading list apparently went downhill in 2019, with an average book rating of 2.7. (Last year’s average book rating was 3.5.) I attribute this decline to a couple of factors:
- I only read a couple of Nero Wolfe books this year.
- I decided to eschew the “pick a random book” reading model I’ve been using for the past few years, and go with “read books in the order I acquired them” instead. This put me back at books I picked up starting in 2015, many of which were, I think, free books from the early days of my participation in the BookBub mailing list, and a lot of these were subpar YA offerings. (Interestingly, back in 2015 or 2016, I tried to get one of my books — Dragon Stones, of course — into a BookBub promotion, and they rejected it because it only had 20 or so reviews/ratings so they couldn’t be sure it was up to their standards. Hmm.)
Aside from the quality of my reading material, there were a few other, uh, issues that cropped up towards the end of 2019 which affected how much reading I got done. I’ll be getting into that soon. But for now, let’s just look at the books:
Continue reading “That Was The Year That Was (In Books): 2019 Edition”
Teaser Tuesday 11/26/2019: “Night After Night”
Recently I was reading Night After Night, by one of my favorite authors, Phil Rickman, who wrote a couple of amazing horror novels back in the day, but who’s now probably best known for the Merrily Watkins series of (somewhat) paranormal mystery novels. This one is not a Merrily Watkins novel, but it is a—wait for it!—paranormal mystery. Of sorts.
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Temporary Hiatus
Hi everyone, Jim here. The astute reader may have realized that I haven’t been around to visit or leave comments over the last couple of weeks; this is because I was hospitalized for a while as a result of a sudden, unexpected medical condition. I am home recuperating now but will mostly be out of commission, computer-wise, for some time as I recover. (There’s one more scheduled Teaser Tuesday post queued up and after that the blog will go dark for a few weeks or months.)
I will be back eventually, but for now, I’ll let my furry friends at The Oceanside Animals explain things from their perspective:
Not A Review of “Maiden”
The Early Years: Jim Is Small But Very Precise With Measurements
Sadly, my drawing skills never really improved all since then. Also, is it just me, or did I draw myself looking a tiny bit like the Joker in that picture?
Hmm, okay, maybe not.
