Book Bingo Reviews 2023

And suddenly it’s 2024…. A new book bingo will soon commence, but first the reviews of the previous year.

Podcastmania: fiction

Here are a couple of podcasts with completed story arcs for those of you who have the patience of subscribing to an ongoing podcast and then having to wait patiently for them to update. It’s a bit of a mix bag of genres; there is some sci-fi, horror, thriller, adventure, comedy, I think I’ve got most bases covered in this one.

The Bright Sessions is a sci-fi podcast about people with superpowers in therapy. I have over time, probably due to all the superhero movies, developed an interest in how “normal” people would deal with having superpowers, so this podcast was a godsend for me. It’s really interesting to listen to the problems they face both due to their powers, but also their “normal” problems and how having superpowers affect or exacerbated those. As the show progress the various story lines starts to merge and the various patients’ stories also becomes part a bigger plot. I recommend it to anyone who is interested in an unusual approach into superhuman life, and all the trouble that entails.

Book Bingo Reviews: Didn’t Win This Time :(

Alas, no hat trick for me. But Hunter was  on fire this time, she has been done for months at this point. Whereas I started each book with enthusiasm and then got distracted by other shinier books, before I was halfway through. Also, there were a couple of the bingo books I didn’t like at all, but were too stubborn to dnf like I usually would. Basically, I have a thousand excuses, and I’m totally going to win next year. Here are my Book Bingo reviews for 2020 in reading order.

A Book With a One Word Title
Originally, Middlegame by Seanan McGuire was the book I’d chosen for the time travel category,

Book Review: Sophie’s World

Full disclosure, the purpose of this review is to convince Hunter to read Sophie’s World, which I can’t believe she hasn’t. Sofies Verden is a Norwegian novel by Jostein Gaarder, which was published in 1991 and made into a film in 1999. The novel is prefaced by this epigraph by Goethe: “A person who does not know the history of the last 3,000 years wanders in the darkness of ignorance, unable to make sense of the reality around him.” And that is what this novel does, it accounts for 3000 years philosophy.

Podcastmania: Mostly Night Vale Presents

This post is going to be mostly about some of the different podcasts from Night Vale Presents… As Welcome To Night Vale was what kicked off the whole listening to podcasts thing for me, I’m sure it will me no surprise that I’m a massive fan of most of the shows made by Night Vale presents, though I don’t listen to all, but they offer a lot of different podcasts.

Welcome to Night Vale was the first podcast I listened to, I didn’t even have a smartphone at the time. So, I had to listen using my computer

Podcastmania: Short Stories (mostly)

Here are some more podcast recommendations for you, these are (mostly) podcasts with self-contained episodes, so you won’t get caught up in a serialised story that just goes on and on and on… not that there is anything wrong with that, but it is nice to jump into a podcast sometimes without having to listen to every episode.

LeVar Burton Reads is an amazing podcast, where THE LeVar Burton reads a piece of short fiction for you (usually, but not always, it’s fantasy or sci-fi). He has a great voice for narration, and he starts each episode with a deep breath, it’s just instant de-stressing, and the stories he reads are really great, so it’s also a great way to find authors, whose writing you might like.