Tag: War

Books

Book 868: Sailor Proof (Shore Leave #1) – Annabeth Albert

Geoff W

Book cover of "Sailor Proof" with Amazon Affiliate linkThis is the very first Annabeth Albert ARC that I’ve read!* (I think, there may have been one more in her True Colors series, but who cares I got one!) Generally I’m bogged down in other stuff and I don’t realize when Albert’s releasing new works, but after joining her Facebook group and signing up for her newsletter I’m much more on the ball than I have been in the past!

The only downside of reading this as an ARC is that I have to wait for the next book FOREVER!!!! I’m so used to blazing through her series, that I actually forewent reading the teaser for book two, Sink or Swim, because the publication date is SO FAR AWAY!!!!!!!

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Books

Book 846: The Lavender Menace – Tom Cardamone (Ed.)

Geoff W

Book cover of UGH. I wanted to like this so much more than I did. I remember the excitement when I stumbled across it seven years ago at PAX East in the LGBT lounge. I guess I either forgot the premise or didn’t really read the full premise of the book so ended up slightly disappointed.

Don’t get me wrong there were definitely a few stories I very much enjoyed (more the redemptive ones) and there was some great writing throughout the novel, but there were some larger issues with the collection that may reflect when it was originally published (2013) and how far we’ve come as a society, and also the background of the editor (cis white gay man).

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Books, Professional Development

Book 830: 10% Happier – Dan Harris

Geoff W

Book cover of "10% Happier" with Amazon Affiliate linkI honestly had zero expectations going into this book. During the pandemic my employer provided us free access to the 10% Happier app which I took advantage of and have used sporadically (really need to get better at that). I enjoyed both Harris and Joseph Goldstein’s insights on mediation in the various getting started sessions and was curios if there was more out there.

I vaguely knew Harris had written a book, but it was never an OMG I have to read this type book, but when it randomly came across my screen one day I requested it from the library and saved it for a vacation read.

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Books

Book 788: Wolf Hall (Thomas Cromwell #1) – Hilary Mantel

Geoff W

Book cover of "Wolf Hall" with Amazon Affiliate linkI clearly was not in a hurry to read this one. It has been on my Kindle since I purchased it in December of 2011 and that was TWO years after it won the Booker Prize! I avoided it for some time because I was waiting for the remaining two books: Bring Up the Bodies (2012) and The Mirror and the Light (2020), but I also avoided it because it’s a freakin’ tome. It comes it at just under 560 pages.* Thankfully the next one is shorter (436), but the last is 200 pages more coming in at 764 pages! OOF that is going to be a commitment when I get around to it.

I also actively avoided it because that was around the time that I came to realize that in general I find myself enjoying the runners up to the Booker Prize more often than the actual winner. There’s like a mental hurdle I don’t think I can quite make the leap over to fully appreciate and see the beauty in most of the winners. I knew this was long and I knew that it had A LOT of description and the formatting was weird (minimal quotation marks, the point of view), so I knew it would be a big challenge for me.

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ARC, Books

Book 778: The Mosquito – Timothy C. Winegard

Geoff W

Book cover of "The Mosquito" with Amazon Affiliate linkWell if I wasn’t already so jaded from having lived through the last nine months of the COVID-19 pandemic, I’d be terrified mosquitos were coming to exterminate all of us!

I accepted this galley back in April when the pandemic was just really kicking off.* And then I promptly forgot about it for a few months, followed by avoiding it for even longer because it just didn’t feel right to read it with the way the world was going. I finally decided I needed to clear my galley backlog and this was the oldest so here we are. This particular quote caught me with all the rumors flying about where COVID-19 came from:

Zoonosis rates have tripled in the last ten years, and account for 75% of all human diseases. The goal of health researchers is to identify potential ‘spillover’ germs before they make a zoonotic jump to humans. (Ch. 18)

After reading this book, I feel like wherever coranavirus came from it was like “hey Mosquito, hold my beer,” and then it seriously underwhelmed when you look at the stats in this book!

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