Thank you to TorDotComPub for sending me an ARC of High Times in the Low Parliament for review! This does not affect my review, all opinions are my own.

If you know me and my reading tastes, you know that I will read any and all books that involve necromancy or bone magic. Fall is slowly creeping up on us – very slowly, in my case (desert life…). And obviously necromancy and bone magic are both pretty spooky! So I decided to compile a short list of books that involve one or the other! I bet you can guess one or two of the ones I’m going to include haha. Read on to see if you guessed correctly!

As you may have noticed, my lovely co-blogger Ri has made her triumphant return to book blogging! The two of us thought we’d do a collaborative post to celebrate both being actively blogging again. We were playing around with ideas and I remembered that a looooong time ago, I did a bookish blog tag called “Six Degrees of Separation.” This involves starting with a given book, and then jumping from book to book making connections between them. You can see the previous posts I did here and here. You may have heard of the term in the context of how you are related to famous people, but this is the bookish edition.

We thought it would be fun to do this but trade back and forth in making connections to different books! We asked for suggestions for a starting book from our friends. And our friend Steph suggested that we start with Pachinko. But where do we go from there….?

Soooo this was meant to be a regular blog post series but apparently the last one I did was in 2019. THREE YEARS AGO. Whoops. But maybe I can get myself to do this again haha. I do love doing mini reviews! And I personally love reading shorter reviews, so I hope some of you do as well. This post will be about my 4 most recent reads, which all happen to be romance reads! Well okay, technically one of them I’d categorize as fantasy, if I had to pick a single genre. But it fits well into the “romance fantasy” genre mix. And one of them is a romance tinged with fantasy. I just can’t get away from fantasy for too long okay?? But anyway, I loved all of these! So let’s get into it.

This post is a slight departure from the usual blog content. I wanted to share some thoughts I have on some of the changes that have happened in my life in the past year or so, and I don’t have anywhere else to put it. So I guess the blog will do haha. I don’t know how long this will get, but here is a TLDR for you if you really don’t feel like reading my ramblings:

• I took an extended and indeterminate leave of absence from my PhD program for mental health reasons
• Over time I realized that my thesis/PhD work was making me unhappy, and decided I didn’t want to continue
• Had a major crisis about this because like wow that’s a big change for me
• Started applying to jobs, and now I’m an esports data analyst

I guess this post also serves as my “general announcement” to everyone that I will no longer be finishing my PhD. Some people know already. But I didn’t really talk about it publicly too much until I could discuss it with my advisor.

When I put it like that, in bullet points, it all seems so straightforward. But of course in the moment and going through it, it was definitely not that simple.