#book-tag — Public Fediverse posts
Live and recent posts from across the Fediverse tagged #book-tag, aggregated by home.social.
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Book Review: Endling by Maria Reva
Maria Reva’s debut novel, Endling is immensely ambitious and credit where credit is due this is a vast, sweeping novel that rocked me to my core in its first few chapters.
Rating: 🌟🌟
Genre: War fiction, Ukraine, Metafiction, Literary Fiction.
Publisher: Virago (Hachette UK)
Review in one word: Confounding
Goddamnit I really wanted to love this book so much…I really did.
All of the ingredients were there! A lone female protagonist who cares deeply for endangered mollusc species. Driving through Ukraine and looking to mate molluscs together to prevent them being “Endlings” in other words the final individuals of their species.
Maria Reva’s debut novel, Endling is immensely ambitious and credit where credit is due this is a vast, sweeping novel that rocked me to my core in its first few chapters.
It’s set against the harrowing backdrop of the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Yeva lives in a mobile laboratory, dedicating her solitary existence to collecting and sheltering endangered snails. Her most prized possession is Lefty, the last known individual of his species—an “endling”.
To fund her strange mission, Yeva works for a Canadian firm specialising in “romance tours” to Ukraine, a euphemism for the mail-order bride business. Through this work that Yeva crosses paths with two other women entangled in the romance industry: the stunning Nastia and her brilliant sister Sol, daughters of a famous feminist activist who has mysteriously vanished. Disheartened by her inability to save the snails and desperate for a way out, Yeva is drawn into Nastia’s audacious plan to abduct a dozen of the foreign men who have come to Kyiv in search of wives.
Endling tackles profoundly difficult themes of our time – war, extinction, the trafficking and exploitation of women and does this in a confronting and emotionally raw way.
There are self-conscious moments in this that I thought were totally unnecessary and cringey. The novel shifts back and forth in time in a jarring way and in some parts Reva herself narrates in the first person. This distracts from the story itself and slows it down massively. There’s also the not inconsequential thing of having 12 grown men jammed into a tiny van being driven around Ukraine for days to weeks at a time. Apparently none of the guys were aware of there being a war happening outside the van. Nobody mentions needing to go to the loo in the novel but this seemed like too much of an obvious omission. How on earth would this situation occur in reality?
I wanted so badly to love this novel but it seems to get bogged down in its own meta-narrative style. Hugely ambitious and filled with glorious moments of genius writing, I just wish Reva had made it simpler to follow and it would have been far more enjoyable.
Content Catnip
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Some book stats for first quarter. 20 total 19 print 10 audio 2 nonfiction 18 fiction 2 indie 4 library Sci fi, fantasy, classic lit, lit, thriller, mystery romantasy, historic lit. A nice spread. 1/3 #booksky #booktag
RE: https://bsky.app/profile/did:plc:oafgjhtd5qvbw4xmr4q5yyl3/post/3mjtsia72lv2u -
Book Review: How to Be Resilient by Gail Gazelle
In an increasingly scary, unpredictable and challenging world, Dr Gail Gazelle’s How to Be Resilient is a practical and compassionate guide that will empower you to find inner strength and inner calm needed to navigate life’s tough times.
Rating: 🌟🌟🌟🌟🌟
Genre: Self-Help, Personal Growth, Psychology, Mental Health
Publisher: Callisto
Review in one word: Empowering
Self-help books and books about resilience in particular are a dime a dozen nowadays. And so I almost rolled my eyes when I came across this book. But I was naturally drawn to it anyway and wanted to give it a go.
I was absolutely delighted to find that this book is not cliched or filled with overwrought and trite advice. Instead this is an indepth and extensive collection of theories all masterfully brought into the real world of actionable insights. collection of abstract theories but a roadmap filled with supportive advice and actionable exercises designed to help readers weather difficult times with courage and wisdom.
A physician at Harvard Medical School and a certified life coach, Dr Gazelle brings both medical expertise and a deep understanding of the human spirit to this accessible book.
This is a collection of wisdom from many difference evidence-based approaches that are packaged together in an accessible and helpful way. ‘How to be Resilient’ is structured to empower you step-by-step and begins by demystifying the concept of resilience, explaining the psychology behind it and the science of neuroplasticity, the brain’s remarkable ability to rewire itself in response to new habits and experiences.
From this foundation, Dr Gazelle guides the reader through a series of practices rooted in evidence-based fields such as positive psychology, mindfulness, and gratitude research. The book is organised very well and is not overly long-winded either, each chapter has clear takeaways that reinforce the main points.
The overarching theme is that resilience is not an innate trait possessed by a lucky few, but a flexible pool of strength that anyone can consciously cultivate and fortified with continued and dedicated practice.
Dr Gazelle focuses on several core pillars for building this strength: learning to be more adaptable in the face of change, cultivating meaningful connections with others, staying mindful of one’s thoughts and feelings without being overwhelmed by them, and prioritising self-care.
Her style is clear, encouraging, and direct, making complex psychological concepts easy to understand and apply. The tone is deeply supportive, caring and non-judgemental, acting as a trusted guide on the journey toward greater well-being.
How to Be Resilient provides readers with the techniques—from meditation and journalling to strategies for deepening relationships—to not just survive challenges, but to heal, move forward, and continue to enjoy life to the fullest.
I found this book to be one of the best I’ve ever read (and I have consumed 100’s of self-help books over the years), I cannot recommend this book more strongly to you!
Content Catnip
Follow me on Mastodon Watch my videos Donate to my Ko Fi #art #book #BookReview #BookReviews #bookTag #books #growth #mentalHealth #mentalhealth #nonFiction #psychology #resilience #selfEsteem #selfCare #selfImprovement #selfhelp #storytelling -
#BookTag: Great British Bake Off Challenge
I absolutely love the Great British Bake Off so, when I saw this book challenge I though 'yeah, sign me up for that one.' ON YOUR MARKS – A Book You Can’t Wait To Read I can't wait to read The Last Mandarin, a fast-paced, all-too-real thriller co-written by #1 New York Times bestselling author Louise Penny and award-winning journalist Mellissa Fung, global politics become personal for two unlikely heroines.
https://alexwolfe.ca/booktag-great-british-bake-off-challenge/
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Book Review: Plant Magick: The Library of Esoterica by Taschen
Plant Magick is a collectors item of sublime and exquisite beauty. This is a treasury of art and plant history for lovers of nature, art history, folklore, witchcraft and magic. Psychonauts, spiritual seekers and shamanic explorers will find a lyrical home here as well.
Rating: 🌟🌟🌟🌟🌟
Genre: Non-Fiction, Philosophy, Spirituality, Esoterica
Publisher: Taschen
Review in one word: Esoteric
Divided into thoughtful sections and chapters, Plant Magick features visionary and universal wisdom from a broad range of scholars, witches, sorcerers and mystics about different aspects of plant magick, lore and practice.
There’s a diverse and broad exploration of magical practices using plants and fungi and how this is reflected in art across all ages and cultures. This is an ambitious ask and Taschen have delivered 100% with this stunning book.
If you or someone you know is a gardener, plant enthusiast, hedge witch or practising pagan or you simply revere and respect nature and plants – then this book will embolden and deepen your love and respect for these other-than-human beings.
The importance of plants as a part of religious and pagan rites, ritual, medicinal and transcendental spiritual purposes is explored through eye-popping and mind-bending art.
Each artwork is tactfully placed to add colour and depth to the informative essays that make up each chapter. The essays rather than being filler or less important than the artworks are a complement to them. The words are not wasted or superfluous but are instead brimming with lush and vivid detail about artists, movements and cultural phenomena throughout the ages. These allow you to understand the artworks in a much more profound way.
The sheer range of historical context explored in this book is exciting. Even if you casually flip through it, I guarantee that the hours will melt away and you will still be sitting on your sofa eyes glued to the pages, carefully turning them savouring every detail.
Bound in high quality hardcover and featuring gold inlay, Plant Magick is a part of a larger four part series by Taschen called the Library of Esoterica. Other books that might tickle your fancy in the series include Tarot, Astrology and Witchcraft. Personally, the only other one I simply had to own was Witchcraft and the review for this one is coming up on Content Catnip very soon.
Would I recommend this book to you? If you love nature, art history, folklore, paganism…then this book is a must for your collection – 5 stars!
Do you have this book or do you plan on getting it? let me know below!
Content Catnip
Follow me on Mastodon Watch my videos Donate to my Ko Fi #art #BookReview #bookTag #BookReview #books #ContentCatnip #esoterica #folklore #History #magic #nature #nonFiction #Philosophy #plant #storytelling #Taschen #witchcraft -
#BookThreads #booksky 💙📚 #bookstodon TCL's #SomethingDifferent Sunday #28 - New Year's Bookish Resolutions! No bread, pottery, or stained glass today. Instead I bring you a new #Booktag, brought to you by @TStrawberryPost - a new blog for me! Only 13 questions, about our 2026 reading goals.
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#BookThreads #booksky 💙📚 #bookstodon TCL's 7th My Life in Books (aka Life According to Literature) Tag - 2025 Version - on my #bookblog here. Thanks to @annabookbel and @bookdout for these fun prompts/questions and this lovely yearly #booktag!
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Book Review: Conflict Resolution for Holy Beings by Joy Harjo
Harjo’s poetry is deeply rooted in her ancestral roots and the intergenerational trauma of colonisation. Her collection is a profound meditation on the lives, struggles, and resilience of all indigenous peoples.
Rating: 🌟🌟🌟🌟🌟
Genre: Poetry, Non-fiction, Native American Literature
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
Review in one word: Transcendental
Joy Harjo is an internationally renowned poet, writer, and musician of the Muscogee (Creek) Nation. She served three terms as the 23rd United States Poet Laureate. Conflict Resolution for Holy Beings is a powerful and essential collection of poems and prose from Harjo.
The book is not a linear narrative but a lyrical journey that weaves together personal memory, ancestral stories, and sharp political commentary to paint a vivid picture of Indigenous existence in the modern world.
The trajectory of the collection follows the profound cycles of life, loss, and survival. Harjo begins by emphasising the importance of passing down traditions from one generation to the next, a sacred act of cultural preservation.
Poems and short vignettes traverse time and geography, drawing on imagery and stories from ancestral knowing in North America, from Alaska to Hawaii to her own Cherokee lands.
The centrepiece poem, from which the collection takes its title, serves as a powerful axis for the book’s themes. In it, Harjo contrasts the worldviews of Native peoples and white Americans, particularly in their approaches to conflict, land, and spirituality.
Harjo critiques a colonising mindset that would build a casino on sacred land, contrasting it with the Indigenous preference for resolving conflict and expressing identity through art, music, poetry, and oral tradition.
There’s a lot of thematic focus on the Blues as a musical style and lifestyle and her prose is incantatory, blending the rhythms of traditional song and oral storytelling.
I loved this collection of elegiac and hopeful poems there is so much affinity I feel for her and her experiences seeing as I am indigenous as well. This is a moving and essential collection of poetry. Harjo is a genius for the ages!
Content Catnip
Follow me on Mastodon Watch my videos Donate to my Ko Fi#AmericanHistory #art #BookReview #bookTag #BookReview #books #Colonisation #History #indigenous #JoyHarjo #JoyHarjo #literature #Native #nature #nonFiction #Philosophy #poems #poetry #storyteller #storytelling
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Book Review: The Ghost Cat by Alex Howard
The Ghost Cat, a curious little novel about a spectral cat haunting an Edinburgh townhouse over several generations — is sometimes enchanting, sometimes discombobulating and overall quite uneven
Rating: 🌟
Genre: Fiction, Fantasy, Animals, History.
Review in one word: Confusing
The premise of this book sounded enchanting. A cosy historical fantasy novel set in Edinburgh from the perspective of a cat! I mean this sounded like a book made especially for me. To say I was excited was an understatement!
The novel begins in the early morning in 1902. At a handsome home in Edinburgh’s New Town on the street of Marchmont Crescent, Grimalkin is snuggling next to his beloved human companion, housekeeper Eilidh. It will be his last day as a living cat. Sooner after he is plunged into a feline netherworld where he meets Cait-sìth who grants him eight additional lives. “For three he plays, for three he strays, and for the last three he stays.”
The novel follows Grimalkin as he witnesses the world’s changes for the next 120 years. This book starts off with an enormous amount of promise and the first few chapters are really engaging.
I don’t know what I was expecting but the tone of the novel seemed a bit silly. The narrative felt cheapened by fast-paced vignettes of the lives of people living in the home. Instead it’s a mash-up of key events and figures from throughout the past 100 years who all seem to converge on the one house over that period of time. So it’s a whistlestop tour of the The Blitz, the moon landing, the coronation of Queen Elizabeth, the 2008 financial crisis and so on. After a while in the same mode it all felt a bit repetitive and stale.
The individual vignettes don’t linger long enough for the reader to meaningfully connect with the characters who live in the house or to care what happens to them. At the end of each vignette set in a particular period, the author felt it necessary to explain the characters and the historical context of the vignette. This unconventional move of explaining a vignette after it’s told seemed like lazy writing and also seemed condescending, as though the audience needed to be given historical context in order to understand. There is also a confusing addition of which monarch was reigning after each vignette—to anchor the reader in time. These flourishes, rather than enriching the narrative, came across as being self-conscious and condescending.
On a positive note the main character of Grimalkin the cat is engaging and amusing in a snooty, feline way. The stories themselves were sweet and amusing but also at times discombobulating and lacking in meaning and depth.
The Cat-Sith, a kind of Grim Reaper figure who grants Grimalkin eight additional lives is a towering figure in the book who commands a lot of attention in the beginning, it would have been good to hear more from him.
As cat lover and devotee of all things feline I just couldn’t like Grimalkin much as a character. Each time he enters into a new era he finds so much to moan and complain about. There’s a sense that he’s a Luddite and technophobic Boomer (in cat form) who rails against any new changes in the world and spends a lot of time grumbling about new things and longing for the good old days. Some will find this charming and this belligerence rather cat-like, I just found it annoying.
I’m not sure if I would recommend this book, it’s a strange and surreal read with not much satisfying depth to it.
Content Catnip
Follow me on Mastodon Watch my videos Donate to my Ko Fi#AlexHoward #animals #book #BookReview #bookTag #BookReview #books #cats #Edinburgh #fantasy #fiction #History #review #Scotland #ScottishHistory #storytelling
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#ValentinesDayBookTag #booktag #bookblog #bookblogger #booklovers #books #bookish #booktwt @_TeamBlogger @BloggersHutn @BiblioblogR
https://chasingdestino.com/2025/02/16/valentines-day-book-tag-2/
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#wwwwednesdays #bookblog #bookblogger #booklovers #booktag #books #bookish #booktwt
@_TeamBlogger @BloggersHut
@BiblioblogR
#bookblog #bookbloggerhttps://chasingdestino.com/2025/02/05/www-wednesday-february-5/
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@meeghanreads #booklovers #booktag #books #bookish #booktwt
@_TeamBlogger @BloggersHut
#top5tuesday #bookseries
@BiblioblogR #bookblog #bookbloggerhttps://chasingdestino.com/2025/02/04/top-5-book-series-i-will-start-in-2025-top-5-tuesday/
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@meeghanreads #booklovers #booktag #books #bookish #booktwt
@_TeamBlogger @BloggersHut
@BiblioblogR #bookblog #bookblogger #top5tuesdayhttps://chasingdestino.com/2025/01/27/top-5-authors-i-want-to-try-in-2025-top-5-tuesday/
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Forget the top tens today, I’m revisiting My Life In Books for 2024 #booktag
http://onemore.org/2025/01/28/my-life-in-books-2024-edition/
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@JaleesaReads @In_The_Lines #bookbloggers #booklovers #booktag #books #bookish #booktwt
@_TeamBlogger @In_The_Lines
@BloggersHut @elliasreads
@BiblioblogRhttps://chasingdestino.com/2025/01/26/the-kindness-book-tag/
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@kristinharmel @NetGalley #bookbloggers #booklovers #booktag #books #bookish #booktwt
@_TeamBlogger @BloggersHut
@BiblioblogR #thestolenlifeofcoletttemarceauhttps://chasingdestino.com/2025/01/22/the-stolen-life-of-colette-marceau-bookreview/
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#bookbloggers #booklovers #booktag #books #bookish #booktwt
@_TeamBlogger @BloggersHut
@BiblioblogR @MeeghanReadshttps://chasingdestino.com/2025/01/21/top-5-books-i-will-definitely-read-in-2025-top-5-tuesday/
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#SomethingDifferent #20 - The Great British Bake Off #BookTag Challenge! I'm actually in Italy right now, visiting my son, but the #bookblog must go on! Thanks to @Nicki_Mags, @portybelle and @JoannaLouisePar for the inspiration! #bookstodon #Sundaybooks
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A brutal, universal story of a little girl growing up between the world wars in #Denmark. #BookReview #Booktag #writing #books #nonfiction #literature
http://contentcatnip.com/2024/10/19/book-review-childhood-by-tove-ditlevsen/
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Libro con un gran final: concluyó el booktag haciendo un poco de trampas, ya que me cuesta quedarme con solo uno.
El de El Encuadernador que comentaba antes brilla mucho de la mitad hacia el desenlace.
Los últimos capítulos de La Canción de Aquiles son desgarradoramente bellos.
La Casa al Final de Needless Street tiene un final que es pura catarsis y una montaña rusa de emociones. El de La Bahía del Espejo me gustó mucho también.
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Libro que todavía quiero leer antes de que acabe el año: me gustaría leer por fin Mandíbula, de Mónica Ojeda.
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Libro de mi género favorito: mi género favorito es el terror gótico. Y el libro que he escogido (también de autora nacional, por cierto) es Carcoma de Layla Martínez.
Una novela muy cruda y escrita desde el rencor y la conciencia de clase, que te remueve por dentro al leerla. Una combinación perfecta entre terror de casa encantada, realismo mágico y novela social.
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Libro de une autore nacional: Las Herederas, de Aixa de la Cruz
Jamás me habría imaginado lo muchísimo que me iba a gustar este libro. Me encanta cómo, aunque esté escrito en tercera persona, te arrastra tanto a la cabeza de las protagonistas que da la sensación de estar en primera. Y la atmósfera te atrapa por completo. El imaginario que construye, puro realismo mágico. Los conflictos familiares. Todos los temas que trata. Me encantó.
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Libro que leíste más rápido: Acércate, de Sara Gran
Repito libro, pero es que lo devoré. Por poco no lo leo de una sentada, y fue porque se me hizo tarde y tuve que acostarme. Es un libro que entra solo.
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Libro más largo que he leído: La canción de Aquiles, de Madeline Miller (497 páginas según Goodreads)
Este año he leído más lecturas cortas que tochos, y al leer en digital muchas veces no tengo claro el número de páginas.
El libro me encantó. Creo que Madeline Miller reimagina muy bien los mitos de la Grecia clásica, y esta historia me emocionó muchísimo.
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Mejor audiolibro que he escuchado:
Aquí habría puesto The Sandman (ya sea en su versión en inglés o en español), porque me parece espectacular, pero todavía no he terminado de escucharlo.
En su lugar voy a incluir un relato de Alix E Harrow que escuché, titulado The Six Deaths of the Saint. Es un relato de fantasía oscura lleno de épica y dramatismo. La narración te sumerge aun más en la historia.