Matthew reads, I guess...

So, at the beginning of 2020 I gave myself the goal to read 24 books this year – two a month. I realise that’s not the most ridiculous  task for someone who does want to be an author. Also, especially when there are people set themselves the goal to read a book a week. And, for me, I obviously enjoy reading, I wouldn’t have made this blog if I didn’t, but my want to read kind of comes in waves. Like, I’m not the quickest reader, because I’ve realised I have a habit where I’ll start to read and then if I’m not that interested in it, I’ll just start skimming. But if it’s a book I’m actually into, I will fully just spend hours a night and read a huge chunk in one sitting. Then sometimes I’ll finish a book, get the next one I want to read out, and then not touch it for weeks.  Sometimes I just don’t want to read, and I feel like that’s okay, especially in the face of those book bloggers that are like, “Here are the 95 books I read this year, and if you’re not reading at least ...

  So, The Vast Fields of Ordinary by Nick Burd isn’t a particularly recent release, Amazon says my version of the book was released in 2011, but there was also apparently a version released in 2009. I didn’t read the book back in 2011 – I barely read books in 2011. I don’t remember exactly when it was when I first read it, but I remember it being one of those books that immediately shot up into being one of my favourites. Now, after that first time I read it, I put it back on my bookshelf and didn’t touch it for the longest time. So, it just sat there being one of my favourite books, but as time went by, I slowly forgot what happened in the story, and why I loved it so much. I vaguely remembered the main characters, Dade and Alex, and that there was a sub-plot about a girl, Jenny, who went missing, but that went missing. This blog post comes as the result of me re-reading The Vast Fields of Ordinary to see whether I could recapture what it was exactly that I loved about the b...

Yes, you read that right, The Haunted Vagina by Carlton Mellick III is indeed a real book, that I managed to come across when I was browsing the internet and, yes, I did read it.             Also, welcome to the closest thing to a series I’m likely going to start on this blog. I’m calling it “Cursed Book Club”, and it’s going to be talking about some of the cursed books I managed to come across. I’m assuming that most of these are going to be those books that get sharted out onto Amazon and are sold for like 99p. And The Haunted Vagina is the first instalment of Cursed Book Club.             I feel like I need to explain myself, and how I came across this book. So, I watched a YouTube video that went onto the Reddit page “r/menwritingwomen” and after going there myself I managed to find it. It wasn’t like I was looking for anything shady, it was just there. There you go. ...

I don’t remember whether I’ve mentioned this in the five other posts on this blog. But Adam Silvera is my favourite author – and They Both Die at the End is my favourite book of his. Now, while he is my favourite author, his writing has hurt me, multiple times.      I do mean this in a good way, however.    Not every book has made me feel something. There have been plenty a book that I have just read, and then moved on with my life because it was just plain okay. Like it wasn’t so bad that it made me feel disappointment, and it wasn’t good that it made me feel something good.    Anyways, this post comes in the wake of me reading the new, re-release, of Adam Silvera’s More Happy Than Not . The bitch with the extra chapter at the end.    So my first point is: Oh my god, I forgot how sad this book was. I read it over the course of three days, but in two sittings – the second of which may or may not have been 200 pages… All I’m going to say is, ...