Book Bingo Reviews 2023

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

Book Bingo Reviews 2022: I Lost, But I’ll Be Back in 2023

This year, Sunny decided to sprint out of the gates and left me in the dust. So, she won a well-deserved victory. (Only very slight spoilers below)

20 Book Questions for 2020

I decided it would be useful for me to take stock of the books I’ve read in 2020, but it was 70-something books, so I did this instead, which was much more fun. (no spoilers)

The Best Book You’ve Read in 2020?

There are so many – but if I had to pick only one (and it’s killing me). It would be The Faceless old Woman who Secretly lives in Your home, because it was one of the books that brought me out of my reading slump, it’s a Night Vale novel, and yet it is completely different from the other NV novels, it does some really interesting things with how it involves your senses in the writing, and finally who doesn’t like a good revenge story.

Third Time’s the Charm: Book Bingo Reviews 2020

I finally won! And it only took three tries. Overall, I attribute my victory to Denmark being on corona lockdown and me taking long walks, because my fitness centre was closed, so quite a few of the books ended up being audiobooks that entertained me on my walks. 

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: Come Tumbling Down

Come Tumbling Down by Seanan McGuire was a nice surprise, since I thought Down Among the Sticks and Bones would be the last, we would hear of the Wolcott twins. Come Tumbling Down takes place after the events of Beneath the Sugar Sky and is (as far as I know) the end to the story of the Wolcott twins, but then again, I didn’t see this book coming, so who I am I to say that it’s the end.

(review and spoilers below)

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.

Book Review: Angel Mage

The last book I read in 2019 was Angel Mage (then I wrote half of this review and promptly forgot about it, whoopsies). I went into it with high expectations, since I have been (re)discovering my love for Garth Nix and his writing style with the Abhorsen books. Angel Mage is fantasy in a The Three Musketeers setting, so I knew I was going to love it, even before I read the book, considering that besides my love for Garth Nix, I also love The Three Musketeers and have read and watched it in every version I’ve been able to get my hands on.

It’s not necessary to have read The Three Musketeers to read and enjoy Angel Mage. You can easily enjoy the book, without any familiarity with The Three Musketeers. However, Angel Mage is a kind of homage to The Three Musketeer and Alexander Dumas, so you will notice several nods to it, if you are familiar. And I do take delight in details like that. But enough beating around the bush, review and microscopic spoilers for this absolutely fantastic book below the cut.

Book Review: “Naturally Tan” by Tan France

“Naturally Tan” is a memoir written by Tan France, published in 2019. The book chronicles the life of Tan France from his childhood in England to his accidental rise to fame as the Fashion Guy on Netflix’s “Queer Eye.”

Memoirs and autobiographies are only something I read, if I really find the person behind them interesting, and if at all possible I prefer the book to be at least partially written by the person it is about. I first heard the name Tan France, when I watched “Queer Eye.” Now, I normally find “make-over shows” to be superficial and I’ve never believed that changing the way a person looks is going to magically fix their lives, but I gave “Queer Eye” a chance, and I’m glad I did – because the show is so much more than a “let me fix your hair, give you are new wardrobe and teach you to do your make-up, and now your life is magically better,”-show. As a result, I became fascinated with the “Fab 5,” who used not just their skills, but also their personal life experiences to help the “hero” of each episode.

Tie-in novels – Yay or Nay?

A few years back (read: 10 years), when I first dove head first in to the Supernatural fandom and didn’t look back; I stumbled upon a little something called tie-in novels. Something I, up until that point in my life, had no idea existed, so of course I immediately bought a few of them. I’m not going to say that I was hooked from the get go, because I wasn’t. I was actually a little disappointed, because I remember thinking that the book lacked the tone of Supernatural that I was used to from the TV show. I had difficulty recognising the characters of Sam and Dean, who I felt I knew pretty darn well from my TV screen. So, it actually took me a little while to give it a chance again.

Part of Hunter’s private tie-in book collection

Eventually, I stumbled upon another Supernatural tie-in novel that seemed to get really good reviews by the fandom. This one was called Bobby Singer’s Guide to Hunting. It was written by David Reed, a writer whose name I recognised as a writer and script coordinator on the show. According to IMDB, Reed had as of 2012 written two episodes for season 6 and has been a script coordinator on 62 episodes. So, I figured he would at least know canon and how to write the characters. I did not regret buying that book – but more on that later. I would by no means call myself an expert on tie-in novels, but I do have some opinions and observations I would like to share with the world, so here goes.

A tie-in work, according to Wikipedia, “is a work of fiction or other product based on a media property such as a film, video game, television series, board game, web site, role-playing game or literary property.” Tie-in works are authorized by the owners of the original works, which means they do not fall under the non-profit “fair use” umbrella under which most fanfiction can be found. As such many consider tie-in works as a form of legal or authorized fanfiction, a discussion that I have no intention of getting into here. I would, however, like to add that according to the Supernatural Wiki, Eric Kripke (creator of Supernatural) calls the Supernatural tie-in materials “fun fodder” and not canon, essentially saying that it is up to the fan to decide whether or not they want to consider a piece of tie-in material canon or not, and I agree.  As of writing this I have only actually read tie-in works from Supernatural and the Star Trek Franchise, so my opinions here are formed and based solely on what I have read from those two fandoms.