March '23 Roundup & Rambling

Raw Data:

Novels – 19 ↑

Short Stories – 0 ↓

Manga/Graphic Novels – 4 ↑

Comics – 7 ↑

Average Rating – 3.38 ↑

Pages – 5653 ↑

Words – 1707 ↑

The Bad:

Book of Joe – 1.5stars of Talker destroying my faith in Anspach & Cole

Blitz – 2stars of complete disappointment in the latest Chequy Files story

The Good:

The Book of Three – 5stars of middle grade fantasy goodness

Fathers and Sons – 5stars of even better than last time re-reading

Movie:

Shrek was a lot of fun. As long as you can get past the bodily function humor that permeates the entire movie like a toot in an enclosed room.

Miscellaneous Posts:

• PCP: Facing the Future
• Brainwash – MTG 4E
• Conceptualization Alpha
• The Bookstooge Chronicles: The Junior Year
• Brass Man – MTG 4E
• Frederick Douglass – Freedom to Journal the 18th
• Why I Still Paper Journal
• Bronze Tablet – MTG 4E
• For Where Your Treasure Is…
• Brothers of Fire – MTG 4E

Personal:

I think Mrs B is finally on the other side of her flair ups and vasculitis. She’s in the process of finding a competent GI doctor, so even that is a huge step in the right direction. She’s lost close to 20 lbs since New Years, so we’re doing what we can to fatten her right up. Thankfully, she can eat again full time. With her doing better, I am doing better. I can tell because my intense desire to write every single day is disappearing. I suspect soon I’ll be back to journaling once a week. And my overwhelming need to blab on my blog should decrease too.

March was a super bad bear of a month in terms of weather. We got more snow and winter storms in March than we did the entire winter leading up to it. Wet heavy snow made life miserable for a couple of weeks and made me realize that I actively dislike New England winters. But it didn’t last long, which was a blessing.

I read so much. It helped that I decided to buddy-read Web of Spiderman with Dave AND to read multiple issues at once. Sometimes I can get fixated on something (like reading only 1 comic of a particular character each month) to its detriment and my own. Reading multiples at once and lumping them all together keeps me interested and doesn’t overwhelm everyone with a ton of posts. But I just tore through books like nobody’s business. I better slow down though. Reviewing that many books leads to burn out, like I found out last year.

And can I say, THREE (!!!!!!!!!!!!!) 5star books this month? I know a lot of that had to with Mrs B finally feeling better, but even still, I have had six 5star books so far this year. To put that in perspective, I only had four for the entire year of 2022. So I can cruise for the whole rest of the year if I wanted to. Of course, I just hope this means I’m going to read a whole slew of fantastic books during the remaining months in ’23 😀

Cover Love:

The Death Tower,. Oh man, is that cool or what? I just love the Bantam editions of the Shadow.

Plans for Next Month:

Not post so much. Seriously. I had 9 double post days for March. 40 Flipping Posts. Nobody needs to blog that much, not even me. So I’m going to try to cut back, kind of like a speed addict. I already know I have 1 double post day coming up this Monday, but after that, I’m going to try reeeeeeeeeaaaaaaalllllllly hard not to. Wish me luck. And thank you for your forbearance, it is greatly appreciated.

I realize I have been posting a lot of visually oriented stuff (Magic cards, manga and comics, journal posts). I’m going to start spacing them out each week just a little more. Magic will remain on Mondays. Wednesday’s are now for Manga. Friday’s are now going to be my comic days.

April 9th is Easter, also known as Resurrection Day to us Christians. I’m debating about trying to write a new post for it or just recycle one of my older ones. Plenty of time to decide!

Other than that, I don’t have any plans besides book reviewing. I’ll write the non-book reviews whenever the nonsense bug strikes.