Blogmas Day 6

I may have forgotten to post for the past three days and am now behind. I’ll just add the days onto the end of Blogmas to make up for it. 😅

Books

• I finished The Secret History (a buddy read with my friend Yenna) and am currently working on my annotations for it. Spending three months annotating An Enchantment of Ravens has taught me so much about annotating and helped me figure out my style and what works for me. Compared to when I started annotating An Enchantment of Ravens I feel a lot more confident annotating The Secret History.

• I’m currently reading Salt to the Sea by Ruta Sepetys. A few years ago I read her book Between Shades of Gray, a book on the Soviet Labour camps after WW2 and refugees from the Baltic States such as Lithuania. I love how Sepetys books focus on the often untold or overlooked parts of history and show hope even though the events are often brutal and cruel.
• There are a bunch of other books I want to get to this month such as The Poppy War, As Long As the Lemon Trees Grow, Clockwork Prince, The Favorites, A Christmas Carol…I also need to finish writing my 2023 book reviews.
• I went to a used bookstore on my day off this week and picked up a few books – Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell, Years of Red Dust and Circe. It’s always so lovely to walk around a bookstore and be surrounded by books.

Writing

• With 2023 drawing to a close I need to finish my journal though I’m not sure if that’s possible (there’s over 50 pages left in it). One can always hope…
• Blogmas has been interesting so far! The first five days were relatively smooth because I had ideas but now I’m not sure what to post about. I’ll need to do some brainstorming in the next few days.

Other Things

• Work has been picking up with the holidays and I’m looking forwards to seeing my friends from college come back for the holidays. It always adds a sense of joy to going to work and it’s nice to catch up with them!
• Colder days mean candles, blankets, tea and cozy movies. I’ve been watching My Happy Marriage (an anime and it’s so cute) and I finished Dickensian (a British show that combines a bunch of Charles Dickens’s characters into one plotline). It’s very well done and now I want to read all of Dickens’s books even though they can be so difficult to get through.

~ Ming

What things have you been loving lately?