Happy New Year! I hope you all had a fabulous Christmas and are ready to jump into 2018. I am!
I’m making a couple of minor changes here on the blog. The main one you’ll notice is that I’m publishing a book review on Monday instead of my Bookish Question. And the Bookish Question has now become a Tuesday Book Chat, in association with Australasian Christian Writers. We’re hoping to get more people involved, and we’ll share a little more about that later.
Anyway, here’s our first question for 2018:
Did you receive any books for Christmas?
I gave some books. My mother asked for the latest historical novel from Alison Weir, which was easy. My children asked for the new edition of the Official Scrabble dictionary which includes words like “twerk”, “emoji” and “emoticon”. Sigh. And I bought my husband Artemis, the new novel from Andy Weir, author of The Martian. He isn’t a big reader but he enjoyed The Martian, so I hope he’ll like Artemis as well.
And I will admit to treating myself to a few Kindle books over the Christmas holidays. Weird story. I signed up for a free service called Down Notifier, which sends you an email if your website goes down—something that’s handy to know (says me, the victim of a hacker attack which destroyed my site a couple of years ago).
Anyway, Down Notifier emailed me and offered me a $20 Amazon US gift voucher for reviewing their service. It’s a good service, so posting a review was no problem. Sure enough, a week or so later, I got an email offering me the choice of a $20 Amazon gift voucher, or $20 via PayPal. I chose the voucher, and bought:
- The River of Time series by Lisa T Bergren
- Evergreen by Susan May Warren
- June Bug by Chris Fabry
- One Christmas in Winter by Bell Renshaw
I also pre-ordered Surgeon’s Choice by Richard Mabry, which releases this week. But that only uses up half my voucher (thanks to pre-Christmas sales!).