Bookstooge's Reviews On the Road: Circum et Pervagatus

Showing posts with label Circum et Pervagatus. Show all posts

Tuesday, June 30, 2026

June '26 Circum et Pervagatus

Raw Data:

Novels/Novellas - 6 ↓

Short Stories - 2 ↑

Manga/Graphic Novels - 0 -

Comics - 1 -

Average Rating - 3.17 ↓

Pages - 1898 ↓

Words - 725K ↑

The Bad:

Dragons of Autumn Twilight - 1.5stars of dnf'ing of my youth

The Good:

The White Rose - 4stars of Black Company goodness

Movie:

Resident Evil 5: Retribution was an absolute action packed blast of a time.

Miscellaneous Posts:

Personal:

This was a busy work month. I had more 10hr days this month than I've had since January. I am not a fan of this. If it continues, and given the work load and how the office people are pushing I suspect it will, I will be having a talk with Human Resources. Just to air my concerns. We (Mrs B and I) will be able to pay off our condo by year's end I believe and once that happens, I am going to be looking long and hard at this whole 45+hr work thing. So that has been in the back of my mind all month.

I pretty much used up all my creativity with the Imperatoris Chronicorum IV post, so I just didn't have much else to say this month outside of book reviews. It did feel good to not blog as much, but that was a general words malaise thing, as my journaling time plunged too. I'm going to blame it on work though. When I'm exhausted, the words just dry up and they stay as stillborn thoughts inside my head.

Reading wasn't bad this month, but DNF'ing Dragons of Autumn Twilight really did a hatchet job on my rating average and page numbers. With only 9 books that had a lot more weight than it would have if I'd read closer to 15. Thank goodness July is a new month with a new start!

Plans for Next Month:

This past month was a nice break from the frenetic hurly burly of blogging. However, my reading is picking up, so then must my reviews. Which means I'll probably be doing more posts in July. I'm planning on going back to taking Wednesday and Saturday's off. I know I've been changing my posting days each month and I'd like to thank you all for putting up with that.

I will be making my annual announcement about the Barbara Cartland Buddy Read this coming Thursday. After last year's little dustup, I've made sure there won't be a repeat. So please look forward to that announcement where I spell everything out. So pull out your favorite pair of dice, buy a sealed deck of cards and get James Bond on the phone because we're heading to Monte Carlo this year! And that's all I'll say about it until Thursday.

Sunday, May 31, 2026

May '26 Circum et Pervagatus

Raw Data:

Novels/Novellas - 10 ↓

Short Stories - 1 ↑

Manga/Graphic Novels - 0 -

Comics - 1 -

Average Rating - 3.71 ↑

Pages - 2031 ↓

Words - 698K ↓

The Bad:

NONE! Wow, first month in I don't know how long where I didn't read a bad book.

The Good:

Spellbound & Warbound were both 5star re-reads by Larry Correia

Mrs Pollifax Pursued was the best Mrs Pollifax yet and I gave it 4.5Stars. On the first read.

Movie:

Afterlife (Resident Evil #4) was a good time. Alice was back to being human, which is as it should be.

Miscellaneous Posts:

Personal:

This was a fantastic reading month. My average was 3.71. That is stratospheric for me. It helped that I finished up the Grimnoir trilogy re-read :-) I did read less, but I need to get out of the mindset of just mindlessly consuming books.

Wordpress has always had "Achievements" for big milestones like anniversaries of your start date, or getting to 500 followers, or getting your first 100 likes. Things to help new bloggers feel motivated and some things for more seasoned bloggers. Well, part way through this month Wordpress really amped up that idea. If you visit "https://wordpress.com/reader/users/ME/achievements" you can see all of the Achievements you've accomplished so far and the absolutely monster list of more accomplishments you can achieve. It's the gamification of blogging and it stinks like horse manure. THIS is the kind of content WP is spending it's time on? This is why nobody is available on the help forums? This is why basic blogging functions are now behind "premium" paywalls? swearswearswear. Why doesn't most of that effort go into customer relations and customer service? I hate to use the following word, but this is the quintessential example of "Enshittification" and it's happening on Wordpress.com. It represents the idea that Wordpress thinks empty, useless shiny things are good enough while destroying, hiding and lying about core functions like notifications, subscribers (getting randomly unsubscribed from people or having them randomly unsubscribed from me is still happening, albeit much less) and basic statistics like actual "views" instead of allowing hundreds or thousands of bot views to be recorded. Ok, vent over. Except to say that:

Free Speech has consequences and I'm willing to accept those consequences - click to open

Matt Mullenweg can get Luigi'd and I'd not shed a tear. I might not dance with joy but there would be no sadness in Bookstoogeville that day. I am also willing to say this with the full knowledge that WP the fascists might very well close down my blog.

I took last week off from work. I've been needing that for several months and I made the most of it. I'd thought about doing a separate post about it, but with this Circum et Pervagatus post so adequately placed on the last day of my stay-cation, I figured I'd just talk about it here. I do have to go back to work tomorrow after 9 days of not even having to think about work, so this is my last hurrah! ;-) I basically walked to one of several coffee shops each morning, had an iced chai, read a book and took notes on it in a separate notebook from my journal. It was wonderful! The weather even cooperated so I could do the walk (it's about a mile away) and sit outside. Ahhhh, good times.

Cover Love:

The Ghost Pirates by William Hodgson. Not a recommended book but a truly fantastic cover.

Plans for Next Month:

I did a really good job of keeping Wednesdays and Saturdays post free. So for June I'm going to experiment with going post free on Tuesdays, Thursdays and Saturdays. I haven't hit a words wall in my blogging yet, but I'd like to prevent that if I can and slowing down my blogging is the best way to accomplish that goal.

It helps that I've started reading Isaac Asimov's autobiographical trilogy, which starts with In Memory Yet Green. I'll be reviewing that later this week, but it has slowed my reading waaaay down. It's a dense chunkster of a tome.

Thursday, April 30, 2026

April '26 Circum et Pervagatus

Raw Data:

Novels/Novellas - 13 -

Short Stories - 0 -

Manga/Graphic Novels - 0 -

Comics - 1 -

Average Rating - 3.25 ↓

Pages - 2955 ↑

Words - 1088K ↑

The Bad:

Tower of Terror - 2.5stars of snoozefestapalooza!

14 of My Favorites in Suspense - 2.5stars of wallowing in the gutter

The Good:

Hard Magic - 5Stars of really good urban fantasy

Shadows Linger - 4stars of pretty good re-reading

Movie:

Resident Evil: Extinction, the third in the RE film series, really amps up the tension but falls down pretty hard in most other areas. Decent but my least favorite of the series.

Miscellaneous Posts:

Personal:

Paid our taxes. We have the minimum taken out, so we usually owe some at year's end. I began doing that a long time ago when someone told me that "getting a refund" from the Feds was just giving them an interest free loan with MY money. I've never looked at the "refund" the same again. Took me about an hour, as I had all the paperwork necessary on hand. Just glad it's over with for another year.

Spring is here and we're already in drought conditions. I really don't understand that, what with all the snow we got this past winter, but that's what the weather people say. Considering how early it is for that, I foresee a very uncomfortable summer with lots of ticks.

The bot views are back, with a vengeance. March had kind of tapered off and I was hoping maybe I could use April though the end of the year, but nope, after the first week I kept getting hit. 600-1200 views a day is NOT normal for this blog, especially when I see the same posts getting hit day after day 10 times a day. Makes me wonder what Wordpress is doing, besides absolutely nothing I mean.

My Devilreads experiment is going decent but no better. Not doing reviews has kept me out of reach of the wokescolds and other such finger waggers there. The feed is atrocious though. I can't customize what I actually see so I end up with a lot of garbage as people "update" the percentage of the books they are reading. Overall, the site is not conducive to someone as words oriented as I am or who wants one on one interaction.

Cover Love:

The Tower of the Elephant, a Conan novella by Robert Howard. While not quite accurate, it really does portray the situation very well. And it's just plain cool looking :-)

Tuesday, March 31, 2026

March '26 Circum et Pervagatus

Raw Data:

Novels/Novellas - 13 ↑

Short Stories - 0 ↓

Manga/Graphic Novels - 0 -

Comics - 1 -

Average Rating - 3.32 ↑

Pages - 2667 ↑

Words - 934K ↑

The Bad:

Grunge - 2stars of REALLY bad theology

The Hero and the Crown - 2stars of teen girl cringiness

The Good:

The Doorbell Rang - 4stars of Nero Wolfe, fightin' da mahn!

Drumindor - 4stars of returning to a beloved franchise

Movie:

Apocalypse, the second in the Resident Evil movie franchise, was fun. I like these movies :-)

Miscellaneous Posts:

Personal:

We have a saying here in New England: "In Like a Lion, Out like a Lamb". This is in reference to March's weather. You can also reverse it. So if March starts off, say, by dumping almost 2feet of snow on you and then continues to snow every week, well, that's coming in like a lion. It means we're supposed to get gradually better and ease into April with warmer temps and smaller amounts of moisture. Ha! Ha I say. March came roaring in like a lion and dragged our carcass all over the place the entire month and then we got ticks from that lion when he left. Boooooo!

Work has changed a bit. We had one of the crew chiefs (we have 3 crews, each consisting of 2 men) leave end of February, beginning of March and one of the other instrument operators (not a crew chief) left last Friday. So we are down to 2 crews, just as the spring is coming and our busy season is starting to ramp up. Not that we haven't been busy before, mind you. There is a lot of work and we don't have the manpower to handle it. I'm glad I don't have to deal with that problem in the office.

The medication that Mrs B has been taking for close to 15 years now for her crohns disease is no longer effective so her GI dr (gastroenterologist) is trying to switch her to something else. We'll see how that shakes out with insurance. It'll be the same battle as her old medication but on a new hill, sigh. I'm also dealing with my own insulin changes but without the help of a Endocrinologist, just my family practice doctor. It is just going from name brand to generic, so it's more about the doctors office filling out the prescription correctly so the insurance accepts it. Let me digress for a second...

(Health Insurance is the worst thing to happen to our medical system here in the US, ever. There have been times that I have wanted to off every single Health Insurance CEO and their entire board of directors. They will burn for their crimes in the afterlife, for sure!)

Mrs B and I were introduced to the card game Munchkins last year and for Christmas we got 7 of the expansions to the game. We've been playing a game a couple of times a month and it's been fun. It is a simple game but with just enough complexity to keep me interested while not being so complex that Mrs B throws up her hands in despair (like Magic the Gathering). I like it enough that I'm even considering getting the Munchkins: Warhammer 40,000 version :-D That would all depend on whether Mrs B will play that or not.

Finally, since I changed the boring "My Week" posts to the sizzling and exciting "Imperatoris Chronicorum", I decided to latinize these Monthly Roundup & Rambling posts as well, because nothing says sizzling and exciting like a re-branding of the same exact product ;-)
Ave, Caesar Bookstooge, morituri te salutant!

Cover Love:

Nothing was good enough to take the effort to put a full size picture in my dropbox account, create and edit the dropbox link so that WP will accept it and then put it here. Sometimes it is worth it and sometimes not. This was a "Not" month.

Plans for Next Month: