mini reviews

April Wrap-up and May Plans

Teal title card reading "April Wrap-Up" with flower ornaments around it.

Another late post, and the reason is… I caught covid and spent the last week being useless, doing nothing but blowing my nose, sleeping, and having insomnia (the irony, I know!) and brain fog. Even listening to an audiobook was hard, let alone write anything…

I’m on the mend though, and I want to get this out ASAP so I can focus on my May plans.

April was a pretty good month as things go, I read 14 books and close to 3500 pages! As always, a lot of audiobooks – and I cleared some old books from my TBR, that I own in ebook but found the audiobook for instead, so that really helped!

That said… I also blew up my budget by buying so many paper books, so while ebooks went down, paper and overall TBR went up… ah well, the curse of the book enthusiast I suppose!

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Shakespeare book adaptions: The good, the bad, the ugly

If you don’t know it already, I’m a Shakespeare Nerd. I wrote my master’s dissertation on queer productions of Shakespeare. One of my hobbies is to read adaptations of the plays, because I love a good modernization or reworking, and there’s so much interesting stuff that can be done with this dude’s work. He’s not a Classic ™ for nothing.

But having read a number of adaptations also means I’ve encountered a fair share of books that made me go “yikes” and “nope”. Sharing now with you: my short guide to the good and the bad of Shakespeare adaptations, as well as some non-book stuff I want to highlight, starting with…

The Bad

These aren’t just books I did not like. They have Something Wrong With Them that made me absolutely pissed off. These are fights I’m ready to fight with the authors. I don’t normally post negative shit like this, but for these books I make an exception. These are my ultimate “do not read, if you love yourself”.

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