lol and just as I come back to blogging here again, it’s the end of the month! Which I guess works out as I ease my way back to blogging casually to whatever extent that I can. I came to the realisation that I never got around to posting a monthly wrap up for March–things got way too hectic around then–so this update rounds up the last eight weeks or so on the blog (more or less):

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1. Books reviewed recently: Brandon Sanderson’s Edgedancer (review), Mary Balogh’s Someone to Love (review), and Margot Livesey’s The Flight of Gemma Hardy (review). You can check out all the books I’ve reviewed recently in the book review tag.
2. Only watched one movie recently that I reviewed (watched another movie earlier in the month but I didn’t post a review here): Thor: Ragnarok (review). You can check out all of the past movies I’ve watched and reviewed in this tag.
3. I squeezed a So You Want to Read… list last week. This month was National Poetry Month so I featured some poetry collections worth checking out; you can read that list over here. You can check out all of the previous lists over at this tag.
4. Hopefully in the coming months I can slowly update this blog to reflect the changes here (no longer .com, that sort of thing) as well as changes that are going on in my life (namely my poetry books–available online now, by the way). So fingers crossed that I’ll have more time to properly unpack myself here and settle back to some sort of routine (although I will be busy again for the next little bit).

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And that’s more of less it from me for now! Wishing everyone a lovely week and a wonderful start to May! 🙂

And just like that, it’s the end of another month. February is a fairly short month so there’s that but things are busy as always. As some of you may have noticed, I’ve started staggering my posts here on my blog. During my Reading Week I attempted to catch up here on my blog, which I guess I did a sort of successful job in covering my basics, but there’s still so much to be done here and to fix especially now that I’m not running under my own url like before. But anyhow, here’s what has been going on at my blog this month:

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1. Books reviewed this month include: Nicholas Ostler’s Empires of the Word: A Language History of the World (review), Giuseppe Ungaretti’s Selected Poems (review), and Robert Rotenberg’s Heart of the City (review). You can check out all the books I’ve reviewed recently in the book review tag.
2. I posted a few movie reviews earlier this month: What We Do in the Shadows (review) and Bon Cop, Bad Cop 2 (review). You can check out all of the past movies I’ve watched and reviewed in this tag.
3. I also posted a few graphic novel reviews this month: Monstress: Vol 1 (review), Doctor Strange: Blood in the Aether (Vol. 3) (review), and Thor: Worthy Origins (review). You can check out all of the graphic novels I’ve previously reviewed in this tag.
4. I hosted a book giveaway earlier this month for a change to win a signed copy of my second poetry collection, Of Frost and Fury: Poems Written in the Land of Volcanoes and Giants. Thank you to everyone who entered! I will host a giveaway again sometime in the future, keep a lookout on my poetry instagram account, @shallibeapoetinstead
5. On a final note, this month marked my eleventh blogoversary. 11 years blogging is quite massive to think about…celebrated it rather quietly this year, you can check out my thoughts from this event over at this post 🙂 so quietly in fact that I never got around to typing up a blog post about it #fail I’ll try to do it when I get a chance…

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And that’s more of less it for February! Wishing everyone a lovely March 🙂

I’m back! Well, sort of…I have yet to catch up replying on blog comments, and this month was just super busy (so busy that I forgot that my blog went off hiatus back on the 22nd…long story but because of the strike that affected my classes last year, my exams took place that week). Talk about a start to 2018! Anyway, so here’s what has been going on at my blog this month:

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1. Books reviewed this month include: Frank Herbert’s Chapterhouse: Dune (review), Alan Furst’s Night Soldiers (review), and Lauren Eden’s Atlantis (review). You can check out all the books I’ve reviewed recently in the book review tag.
2. A few changes happening on my blog: so starting next month I will be scaling back on the frequency of my blog posts. Aside from being super busy, I just don’t have that much content to post right now as my reading time has taken quite a hit as a result of balancing work and school and all the other creative projects I’ve been working on. Not sure how to stagger out the So You Want to Read… feature (see tag) as of yet but we’ll see.
3. Yeah, I haven’t gotten around to updating other features around the blog, like the header (since I did not renew my domain) and adding my books on the menu. This will be a slow work in progress.
4. In the meantime: my second poetry collection, Of Frost and Fury, is available online now!

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And that’s more of less it for this month! I hope everyone had a lovely January…oh, so February is around the corner and it reminded me that heh, my blogoversary is coming up. So keep your eyes peeled for that post…along with another little event happening here 😉

And here we are, at the end of another year. It has, suffice to say, been a very busy year for me and I reckon that busy-ness will continue into 2018. As a result there are going to be some major changes happening here on the blog to reflect the changes happening in my life. But firstly, this is what happened over here at the blog for the month of December (despite of the hiatus):

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1. Because of the hiatus, the only books reviewed this month are Faraway’s Sad Birds Still Sing (review) and Charles Baudelaire’s The Flowers of Evil (review). You can check out all the books I’ve reviewed recently in the book review tag.
2. For this month’s So You Want to Read…, I focused on the classic Russian author Ivan Turgenev. You can check out that post over here. For all my previous recommendations under this feature, check out this tag.
3. It’s that time of year in which we do the annual end of the year book survey, hosted by Jamie @ Perpetual Page-Turner. It’s been a rather odd year in reading for me but nonetheless you can read my answers to the survey over here.
4. I did a little unboxing post last week of two items that came some time ago: the Hippo Noto that I backed on Kickstarter and an A5 notebook cover from Shopot. You can read that unboxing over here.
5. On a final note, my latest poetry collection, Of Frost and Fury, is available now! You can read my journey on how it came about over here.
6. And now for the big news: I decided not to renew my url. I had been weighing this for the last month or so and decided, I’m not as engaged in the book/blogging community as I used to, my influx of visitors isn’t much anyway, and related on the second change happening here on the blog, my activity here has dropped. So I figured to let the deadline slide. So in January this blog will revert back to its hosted url, which is http://http://eclectictales.insanitysandwich.com/blog. Which means some changes will be made to the header of the layout and whatnot but the blog is sticking around (for now)! The second major change is just that I won’t be posting every day like I’ve done in previous years as there’s just not that much material to post right now. I’m just too busy with work and school and my poetry publications and my other hobbies and interests to keep up with blogging as I did before…
7. And on that note: the blog will once again be going on hiatus as I’m going to be busy with the end of semester/exams/craziness all around x_x

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And that’s more of less it for this December! Hope everyone had a lovely Christmas/holiday season, and wishing you all a Happy New Year! 🙂