Tag: blogging

Rocks from Vesuvius

~ Veselin ~ 2 Comments

There’s a legend that bringing rocks down from Vesuvius makes the bad luck come home with you. Not sure what the origin of the story is, perhaps Pele’s Curse from Hawaii. Pele, the goddess of volcanoes, doesn’t like her rocks taken away by tourists. Wash your shoes if you visit Vesuvius.

The photo above represents what I saw from the crater last week.

March in Books

~ Veselin ~ 1 Comment

I completed 8 books in March.

Best

  • The Book of Koli by M.R. Carey – a teenager leaves the safety of his village to explore a hostile post-apocalyptic world where trees move and eat humans. The trees won’t eat Koli but have managed to do eradicate our society. 5/5
  • Rogue Protocol by Martha Wells – The Murderbot, who is a little bit human and a lot more a bot, moves around to find the truth about something. We don’t remember what exactly but it’s cool and the pages turn themselves quickly.
  • Retribution Falls by Chris Wooding – an airship and its strange crew run around to get through the day. The crew gets involved in battles and death. 4/5
  • The Girl With All the Gifts by M.R. Carey – a zombie apocalypse, followed by more zombie apocalypse, from the point of view of a teenage zombie. She isn’t really threatened by zombies. 4/5

Worst

  • The Cipher by Isabella Maldonado – A tiny FBI agent will face off against a giant serial killer with incredible reflexes, intellect, and combat skills, who has made it his goal to finish her off. The killer is so smart that he constantly streams and provides clues but everything goes through so many servers that it becomes untraceable 🙄. 3/5, barely read it.
  • The Alchemyst – two kids have the same very special gift. We’d expect something like playing a piano, speaking languages, or being good at math? No. They have strong auras. The idea isn’t bad but the book was hard to read. 3/5
  • The Boy on the Bridge by M.R. Carey – DNF. Suffered through about 100 pages with nothing happening. After all, what can happen so much given that the world is over, and then over again in The Girl with All the Gifts. End again? It’s just pointless and whatever the idea is, it doesn’t reveal itself within the first 100 pages. 1/5 DNF. My first DNF for 2025.

Reading Challenge Update

I read 27 books this quarter, a bit less than last year. I still try to read every evening after 10pm but seems to fail on some days. I haven’t been able to find a good new series to make achieving the goal easier. Chris Wooding’s Ketty Jay and Sten were both 4s, and nothing else had enough books to matter.