Hello! Thanks for checking out my blog! This will be a more informal, chatty post than usual. I’ve been working on this blog for 3 months now, and I’m starting to get an idea of what works and what doesn’t, so I have some updates to share about changes I’ll be making here and there. Plus, I have some exciting news! So let’s get into it.

As some of you who stop by on a regular basis might have noticed, my Tuesdays-and-Fridays schedule hasn’t exactly been working out for me lately. I managed to get my hands on some new releases over the past couple months, so I wanted to post individual reviews of those, and they’ve been bringing lots of visitors to my blog, which is exciting! I definitely plan to continue doing that whenever I can, even though they’ve been overloading my schedule a bit. And that leads me to the really exciting news: I recently joined NetGalley, which is a place that provides free ebook ARCs (advance reader copies) to reviewers in exchange for honest reviews, and I requested all the upcoming releases I’m most looking forward to over the next few months. I maybe went a little too crazy with my requests, since I thought I’d mostly get rejections at first, but to my surprise I immediately got several acceptances! So from now on, not only will I be reviewing new releases, but I’ll also be reviewing the occasional upcoming release as well!

All of this to say, most weeks I’ll need to post here more than twice, but I’m not sure yet whether I want to make it a regular thing. I do want to make this blog my full-time job eventually, but right now I have a lot going on in my life outside of reading and writing, so it feels like a lot to juggle. So, for now I’ll keep to a Tuesdays-and-Fridays schedule for the most part, but some weeks there might also be an extra post at some point. Please check back regularly if you want to follow what I post, or just fill in the Subscribe form (link is at the top of the page) if you’d like to receive email notifications for each post.

If you’re following along with my language-studying journey, you may have noticed that today’s post was supposed to be my introduction to Ancient Egyptian. One of the things I’ve learned over the past 3 months is that my Friday World-LiteraTour-project schedule isn’t working out as I’d hoped. I’m not getting as much time to learn about these ancient languages as I would like, and my language posts generally get the least views, so I’m going to change my plans a little bit. I still want to focus each month on one language and its literature, but I’ll only do one post per month on the language learning, and I’ll post that in the second half of the month after I’ve had a chance to learn enough to make it interesting. Then, instead of a language-introduction post on the first Friday of each month, I’ll make one of these Update-TBR-Chat posts.

However, part of each start-of-the-month informal post will outline my language plans for the month ahead, so here’s a link to a YouTube video from The British Museum‘s channel that I will be watching at some point in April, on learning how to read Ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs:

I’ll also be reading and discussing The Egyptian Book of the Dead and Penguin’s collection of Writings from Ancient Egypt this month, so I hope you’ll check those posts out in the days ahead!

Another project I hope to undertake for this blog is a Top Canadian Reads project. I’m a proud Canadian who is increasingly frustrated with the rest of the world’s lack of knowledge about Canada’s vibrant literary scene, so it’s about time I started trying to do something about that! To that end, I plan to round up all the “best Canadian literature” lists I can find, compare them using a points system for each book that appears on multiple lists, and come up with a Top 50 Canadian Books list. Then I’ll talk about the ones I’ve already read, and I’ll add one or two that I haven’t read yet to my TBR each month until I’ve read them all. I love Canadian literature, so I’m excited to get to share that love with others! There’s so much more to our literature than Anne of Green Gables and Margaret Atwood, so please join me in discovering lots of Canadian literary gems.

Now for my April TBR… I’ve already finished and reviewed The Antidote and The Shivers collection, but I have several more reviews coming this month! Here are the new or upcoming releases I’m hoping to review in April:

Sunrise on the Reaping by Suzanne Collins
Hubris Maximus: The Shattering of Elon Musk by Faiz Siddiqui (ARC)
Cold Eternity by S.A. Barnes
Proto: How One Ancient Language Went Global by Laura Spinney (ARC)

That last one has me SO EXCITED. I can’t believe I was approved for an ARC of a book about ancient languages!! How kismet is that?!

And here are the other books I’m hoping to read (or finish reading) in April, whether for fun or for book clubs or whatnot:

Berlin Alexanderplatz by Alfred Doblin (I started this one in January!)
Pat of Silverbush by L.M. Montgomery (started this in February, but it’s my bedtime re-read that I often don’t have time for)
Season of Migration to the North by Tayeb Salih
A Murder in Hollywood: The Untold Story of Tinseltown’s Most Shocking Crime by Casey Sherman
My Stories, My Times by Jean Chretien
The Meaning of Mariah Carey by Mariah Carey and Michaela Angela Davis
Lara’s Gift by Annemarie O’Brien
The Family Next Door by Sally Hepworth
Before the Coffee Gets Cold by Toshikazu Kawaguchi
Rasselas by Samuel Johnson
The Meanest Doll in the World (The Doll People #2) by Ann M. Martin and Laura Godwin

If that sounds like a lot, it really really is. 🤣 I probably won’t get through all of it, but you can bet I’m gonna try!

Okay, I think this post is teetering on the brink of tl;dr, so I’m gonna go read a book now. 🤣 Thanks for stopping by! Happy reading!