Stacking the Shelves – January 2023

I always enjoy seeing these posts on other blogs, but to be honest didn't feel I 'acquired' (ahem) enough books in a week to make it worth while. Why did it take me so long to think about a monthly haul post, instead?! This month has been very generous on the book-buying, hurrah, so suddenly the …

Oddball – Sarah Andersen

Sarah's Scribbles is a comic series - online, and a set of books - celebrating life as an awkward nerd. Something I can entirely get behind! 🙂 The simple style of the artwork perfectly captures the humour in various, relatable situations. Although there's no overarching 'story', there are recurring themes, including cat ownership, being an …

Cryptid Club – Sarah Andersen

I do love Sarah Andersen's work, particularly Sarah's Scribbles, but also the more recent branching out, such as Fangs. This is another direction again, and I first stumbled across strips from the Cryptids on Instagram. Here we have a whole collection of the weird and wonderful! So what exactly is a cryptid? The dictionary definition is: "an animal whose …

Everything is OK – Debbie Tung

"For everyone who is going through a tough time. You are not alone. You matter. You are enough just as you are right now." A while ago I read the graphic novel, Book Love, by Debbie Tung. It's such an adorably sweet book, you never would have guessed that the author was struggling with anxiety and …

Fangs – Sarah Andersen

What happens when a 300-year-old vampire meets a charming werewolf in a bar? Well, in Fangs it's the start of a beautiful - if odd - relationship. There's a lot to like about this book. The humour is - sorry not sorry - 'fangtastic' (haha!). I loved the doggish behaviour from a big scary bloke who …

Bloodlust and Bonnets – Emily McGovern

"Somewhere in Great Britain at the tail end of the Regency..." Take an English Regency setting and a nice young lady who'd rather be anything but, throw in Lord Byron (you know, from books), a mysterious, non-binary adventurer, a giant psychic eagle (who happens to be French), and send them all vampire hunting through the …

Mythologica – Stephen P Kershaw

An Encyclopedia of Gods, Monsters and Mortals from Ancient Greece. "Myths are important. Greek myths are much more than children's stories... They might, or might not, be true, but this doesn't take away their power. They are traditional tales that are incredibly important to the people who tell them. But they are also free-flowing, adaptable, …

Preludes and Nocturnes – Neil Gaiman

Graphic novels should, it feels, appeal to me a whole lot more than they do. As it is, I read so fast the artwork tends to get lost, and it's tough to make myself slow down enough to savour it. It works, then, to go back for rereads - like this, of a series that …

The Dresden Files: Dog Men – Jim Butcher

"Get up, Dresden." (Story by Mark Powers, Art by Diego Galindo) The Dresden Files is one of my all-time favourite series, but it's been a long wait since the last novel. So, despite not being a huge fan of graphic novels, I absolutely jumped at the chance to nab a copy of this. I hadn't …