Month: April 2020

10 Books I Wish I Read as a Child

Posted April 28, 2020
Books, Lists, Memes, Top 10 Tuesday

Even though I did do a fair bit of reading when I was little, there are a lot of children’s “classics” that I haven’t read. That might be because I wasn’t that interested in them, they weren’t widely available in the UK, or I just didn’t know that they existed. It happens sometimes. I could go ahead and seek out those books I missed out on and read them as an adult, but there is a big problem in that: I’m an adult who doesn’t have children and doesn’t plan to have children. There are children’s books out there that are still enjoyable to adults but I prefer to read things that are more suited to my reading age. Mostly. The Chronicles of Narnia series by C.S. Lewis – I have actually read about 3/4 of The Lion the Witch and the Wardrobe at school. The movie came out when I was 10 so the teachers at my primary school decided that we would read it as a class before we all went to see it as part of a school trip. Unfortunately, the teacher I had decided to stop reading it because, according to her, the book is “supposed to last forever”. It’s 208 […]

Movies I Want to Watch Based on Books I Haven’t Read

Posted April 23, 2020
Books, Movies, Watchlists

There is this rule in the bookish community that I will always think is bogus and should be broken if you want to break it, and that is that you must always read the book before you watch the movie. I personally think that this is a silly rule because you can consume media in any way that you want to and there is no “right” or “wrong” way to do it (unless you’re stealing, then that’s definitely wrong). There are many reasons why we watch movies based on books without having read the book like we didn’t know it was based on a book until later, we were too young to read the book when we first watched the movie (which is what happened when I first watched The Princess Diaries), or we may have absolutely no interest in reading the book at all. Which may be sacrilegious to some people, but is perfectly understandable to me. It is not a crime to not want to read the book that a movie is based on. How many people have read the book that Mean Girls is based on? Probably not that many because it’s based on a self-help guide. Treasure Planet Based […]

10 Books I Enjoyed But Rarely Talk About

Posted April 14, 2020
Books, Memes

When you’ve read over 400 books in your life, it’s pretty easy to forget books that you loved, especially if you don’t consider them to be your ultimate favourites. Thanks to my horrific memory – both short and long term – I tend to only talk about books that have either stuck with me for a very long time or I only just read and still have on my mind. The books that I’m talking about in today’s post are books that I do love, but I just don’t really talk about for many reasons: they’re either books I read a long time ago, or they’re classics, or they’re just not favourites so they’re never really on my mind. Dracula by Bram Stoker – I don’t talk about classics very often because I don’t read a lot of them, but Dracula is one that I will talk about sometimes because it’s one of my favourites and a huge inspiration to me as a writer. Nineteen Eighty-Four by George Orwell – I first read this book completely unprompted when I was 14, and have since read it twice for academic reasons. And, thankfully, neither of those times have stopped me from loving this book. Yeah, it gets […]

TV I’ve Watched Recently (and a couple podcasts too)

Posted April 9, 2020
Life, TV

I’m pretty sure that I am not the only person in the world who has watched an obscene amount of TV recently. As much as I would prefer to spend my time reading, the amount of silence that takes for that is driving me a little crazy. We usually watch a lot of TV in our house anyway, but because of lockdown, we’ve been watching even more to the point that we’re all kind of running out of things to watch. Thankfully, everything that I’ve watched has been enjoyable and different from one another, and I’ve also been listening to some podcasts lately, which is something I wasn’t into before. So today, I thought that I would share what I’ve been watching (and listening to) lately! The Imagineering Story This is a Disney+ series that chronicles the history of all the Disney theme parks starting from the very beginning, and I’m enjoying it so much that I’m sad that it’s a weekly show and hasn’t been released all at once. I love amusement parks and especially Disneyland so I love learning about what attractions were in the parks before I was able to go to them, although I am disappointed […]

Starting Fresh

Posted April 5, 2020
Announcements

Hello again! Recently I’d been feeling somewhat frustrated with blogging in general, but more specifically the tech side of it. I am in no way good with computers, I just know how to use one. So seeing that I had completely filled up my disc space on my previous blog was kind of the final straw for me to have a completely fresh start with blogging. It is bittersweet to say goodbye to my old 8-year-old blog, but I think it’s for the best because while trying to fix my disc space problem, I ended up breaking the entire thing. Whoops. I wasn’t kidding when I said I’m not good with computers. Instead of getting in touch with my previous host (who no longer offers free hosting), I decided to grit my teeth, buy a domain, and set up with a new host. And behold! We no longer have Exploring by Starlight, but Monstrumology instead! Why have I swapped the stars for the lab, you ask? There are three reasons: I just don’t feel like a “nerdy” person anymore and I want to move away from that, there’s a blog out there that has a name very similar to my old blog name, […]