The Firsts of 2026 enthüllen meine ersten gelesenen und rezensierten Bücher. Lass dich von meinen Leseerlebnissen inspirieren. #BookTag #TheFirstof2026

https://theartofreading.de/the-firsts-of-2026-book-tag/

#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.

http://tcl-bookreviews.com/2026/02/01/tcls-somethingdifferent-sunday-28-new-years-bookish-resolutions/

#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!

http://tcl-bookreviews.com/2026/01/15/tcls-7th-my-life-in-books-aka-life-according-to-literature-tag-2025-version/

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

#AmericanHistory #art #BookReview #bookTag #BookReview #books #Colonisation #History #indigenous #JoyHarjo #JoyHarjo #literature #Native #nature #nonFiction #Philosophy #poems #poetry #storyteller #storytelling

Der Herbst ist da, die Spooky Season, der goldene Herbst und damit auch der #herbstbooktag.

10 buchige Fragen mit Herbstthema habe ich mit Manga, Comics und Romanen beantwortet.

https://youtu.be/h3Ec3Jmxg5A?si=aA3pgi1kzzK1QgFD

#booktag

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

#AlexHoward #animals #book #BookReview #bookTag #BookReview #books #cats #Edinburgh #fantasy #fiction #History #review #Scotland #ScottishHistory #storytelling

Es gibt ein neues Video von mir. Ich beantworte die Fragen zum Frühlings-Book-Tag und habe dafür einige Titel im Gepäck. Wenn ihr mitmachen möchtet, findet ihr die Fragen in der Videobeschrwibung.

https://youtu.be/Q0N-h_1A8yk?si=DtvNFDx2OQNrxuhQ

#frühlingsbooktag #booktag