You’ll be relieved I hear I’ve survived the reign of terror unleashed upon my neck of the woods last week to again participate in Sheila’s Monday check in.

Ad yes I am being facetious, but as well as the earthquake (I wrote about in last week’s post), we were faced with a treacherous cyclone. Named after a Brady Buncher. But, first things first…. my reading check in.

What I read

I started the week by finishing The Chimes  by Anna Smaill. I’ve already published my review. It was heavy-going but lovely in a way I probably didn’t eloquently explain. Incidentally – Smaill’s replacement of several words with their musical / Latin equivalents would really help diminish my use of adverbs. #orsomething

I also finished What You Can When You Can,  and I’ll be posting my review shortly – though the book’s publication date isn’t until April.

I was then seriously excited by the arrival of three new (real) books for review and keen to start turning those paper-like pages.

However… several books I requested from NetGalley were (then) approved all at once and suddenly I had about six new books on my e-shelf. (As you’d see from the little badge in my sidebar, I pride myself on keeping my NetGalley stats nice and high, so….)

I diligently sorted (by publication date) the new reads and tucked into the first book which was one by Sandra Brown. Breath of Scandal  was actually published back in 1991 (and again in 2013 and available now for the first time as an ebook!) but one I hadn’t read. I could have easily inhaled it in a sitting, but in a strange turn of events I paced myself and allocated it across two nights.

I also prioritised Three Twisted Stories  (released this month) by Karin Slaughter, who’s generally a favourite of mine.

What I wrote

It took forever to write and was excruciatingly long, but I shared my review of The Chimes  on the blog last week, as well as my thoughts on Tom Rob Smith’s The Farm  and Snowy River Man,  a novella by Aussie Lizzy Chandler.

I also wrote about preparing for the apocalypse – a very tongue-in-cheek post about disaster preparedness. I was a tad worried people would think me insensitive or overly glib, but everyone took in the vein in which it was written. The people-who-name-cyclones had inexplicably called the looming cyclone Marcia, which resulted in an array of Brady Bunch memes irreverently shared across social media platforms!

And finally I published my less-than-glowing review of Three Twisted Stories  in Goodreads. I try not to be too snarky in my book reviews, but I think I failed in this case.

Other stuff

I’ve already gushed about the cyclone. It actually hit land on the central coast of Queensland as a category 5 and fortunately, although there were buildings damaged, no one was hurt. By the time it reached my part of the world (several hundred kilometres south) it’d fizzled out to some angry winds.

I finished up at work on Friday and had to – very methodically – delete all of the work programs off my home computers and devices, lest I be tempted to ‘just check on stuff’ which I constantly did when not in the office. I’m not sure what’s next but will need to find some form of income fairly quickly. #notpanickingnotpanickingnotpanicking

Reading this week

As for this week’s reading, it’s back to those ‘real’ books which arrived last week… I’ve just started Claiming Noah  which will be out in March. But more on that later.

What’s on your agenda this week?