Welcome to Litsy!

January #WrapUp —-> 😮Cannot believe I‘m on track with my reading, especially since I‘ve been getting several projects done this month too.

🧟‍♂️Favorite Book: Rise by Mira Grant
🎧Three audiobooks
📱Two ebooks
📘One print book

Felt cozy being back in Grant‘s zombie world. Favorite stories focused on fleshing out details of the origins of Kellis-Amberlee and backstories for minor characters.

“Coming to You Live” is the last novella in this collection, and the second new novella in the Newsflesh world. It‘s Georgia and Shaun in 🇨🇦🌲 A tidy read to appease people who asked what happened. Definitely feels like Grant wrote it to tie up this series😮‍💨

“All the Pretty Little Horses” features the Masons three years after the Rising. While the world building details like how the government cleaned up cities, formed orphanages, and basically got back to the business of structure were all interesting to me, I still didn‘t care for the Masons. This quote almost makes me want to like Michael, but no. They adopted children for the publicity and traffic to their site, their new world order of news🤮

I so enjoy reading about Dr. Abbey, and not just because she‘s a dog lover. 🤞🏼I wish Mira Grant would write a trilogy with Dr. Abbey as the MC.

🔬Another novella featuring a minor character from the Newsflesh trilogy. I remember really liking “mad scientist” Dr. Shannon Abbey. Her attitude. Her outlook on the post-Rising world. This story should be a fun ride.

Zombie outbreak in a post-apocalyptic Seattle elementary school that also serves as the backstory for a side character in one of the novels of the Newsflesh series. While this particular story started slowly, it ramped up and made me want to reread the original trilogy, mainly because I don‘t have a clear memory of the minor character of Foxy.

🇦🇺 Forgot how much I liked this After the End Times adventure to Australia‘s rabbit-proof fence 🧟🦘

In the aftermath of the zombie rising, airline passengers are locked into their seats. Deplaning involves the flight attendants unlocking passengers row by row. Given some of the atrocious behavior in the last year or so, maybe airlines should adopt this policy now…🤔

I really like the San Diego Comic-Con story in this collection. Besides the awesomeness of this nerd nirvana setting for the initial waves of zombie risings, the characters nicely represent so many different types of geeks without feeling like any of them are tokens.

“Everglades” is short, but left me feeling the ewwwww of the zombie apocalypse and nature‘s cruelty.

🧟‍♂️ Quote from “Countdown” which I‘ve read before. I‘ve read 2 or 3 others in this collection, but everything else is new to me. Getting very excited to keep going. I love her zombie world. Even though she keeps writing other stuff as Mira Grant, I‘m really hoping that she may write more in the Newsflesh universe.

I loved these books and putting them in a pretty hardcover bind up, yesss! #MiraGrant #Newsflesh

(This review is for Everglades, a short story in the tagged collection.)

4/5⭐ A very well written, chilling entry in the Newsflesh universe.

#bookspinbingo @thearomaofbooks

Y‘all this book was so good, it made my laugh, it made me cry (again and again and again) and it was horrific in the best and worse sense of the word. If you‘re ever looking for a slightly too realistic zombie fiction with the kind of worldbuilding some people would kill for I highly recommend Mira Grant.

Welp, I can‘t think of a more ominous way to introduce a novella. Can you?

I finished “All The Pretty Little Horses” and yall? Holy shit. I‘ve never read something that had my opinion of a character walking such a perfect line. Now that I‘m finished I do not particularly like the Masons anymore than I did at the start, but I do understand them much better I think. And that‘s the part that counts really.

I do not know how to feel about the fact that this next novella of Mira Grant‘s is named after the song my mum used to sing to me (and the song almost in full is quoted on the next page) but I‘m excited to find out about the Mason‘s backstory. I‘ve been of two minds about them since the beginning. Itll be fun to find out which side will win.

Y‘all I don‘t know if there is any way to explain just how much I love Dr Abby. I very much enjoyed this meeting of Foxy and her and I truly hope they‘re doing well in whatever part of Mira Grant‘s brain holds the Newsflesh universe. Which is all to say Please Do Not Taunt The Octopus very much lived up to and surpassed my expectations. As do basically all of Mira Grant‘s novellas somehow.

lol (derogatory(towards the US government not towards Mira Grant‘s writings because she‘s right))

Honestly on name alone I would be looking forward to this story but it‘s also about Dr. Abby who is just fantastic so I‘m thoroughly excited.

Y‘all “The Day The Dead Came To Show And Tell” was a rough read, if I hadn‘t been actively looking after children while I read it I would have cried several times. I still highly recommend it. It is fantastically and horrifically written and sheds some light on one of my favourite side characters backstory.

Sometime (often) the most horrific parts of Seanan McGuires work is how accurate it is to reality, not the zombie apocalypse that‘s at the focus of the series.

As someone who works in an elementary school I can only imagine zombie apocalypse from the POV of a grade one teacher is going to be truly awful.

Y‘all “how green this land, how blue this sea” was yet another fantastic novella from this Newsflesh collection. I truly truly love the worldbuilding that Seanan McGuire does this with horror series. It‘s always equal pets fascinating and horrifying, which all horror really should be.

Here we go y‘all! This novella is in Australia which is a place I love to hear/read about and can never go to (sun allergy) so I‘m excited to see what happens when we fill it with zombies

I‘ve finished the Comic Con short story and y‘all it‘s so sad and so hopeful and I love it a lot. It perfectly captures on of the tags I use all the time on tumblr which is “kindness at the end of the world is worth living for” and also “stories are the things we die for”

“The heroes of the Rising took many forms. Some of them fought. Some of them hid. Some of them just left artifacts for us to find after they were gone. But all of them died, and all of them, whether they knew it or not, were mourned. — Mahir Gowada”

Yall I finished the first story in the Newsflesh collection and I cried, Mira Grant had a way of doing that to me. It‘s horror in its truest sense in that I read it and all I can see behind my eyelids is it‘s all too real application in the real world (at least our pandemic isn‘t zombies, I don‘t know what I‘d do if it was zombies)

Easily the most distressing part of the Newsflesh series (and collected short stories which I‘m currently reading through) is that they make it absolutely perfectly clear how easy it is for flu based viruses to transfer

Not bad. I enjoyed some stories more than others, I expected that. The last two were probably my favorites.

Got a new stack of books from my local bookstore today!! I‘m loving their new delivery system.
I‘ve swapped my ‘currently reading‘ from countdown to Rise because countdown is one of the novellas in Rise.

I just finished Blackout and I picked up her novella collection for $1.99 on kindle! If you‘re enjoying this series or already have but haven‘t read the novellas (like me) then get lucky and get them all for super cheap! #KindleDeal

What a great collection of novellas! Mira Grant can sure spin a great zombie story. I love her scientific explanations of how zombies came about, and how the Rising (the Zombie Apocalypse) progressed.

My favorite novella in here was How Green This Land, How Blue This Sea. It‘s an in depth look at Australia‘s method of dealing with the undead. Zombie Kangaroos y‘all! What‘s not to love?!

This bookmark from @Rissreads was the perfect match!

I didn‘t think a story about zombies could make me emotional but reading San Diego 2014 is like cutting all the onions in my fridge and then sticking them directly on my eyeballs.

I‘m apparently spending my Saturday with zombies and aliens.

A rainy day. My favorite.
#MondaysByTheWoods

I was so excited to find a used copy of this! I‘ve read most of the stories on kindle already, but my sis told me some of them have only been released in this volume!

After discovering "All the pretty little horses" was actually featured in "Rise", I decided to just finish the rest of the stories (even if I'd read most of them before)

A collection of short stories that expand on previous characters and plot points. By far one of my favorite collections of work by Mira Grant. She is the kind of writer that doesn't shy away from emotion and ripping your heart out in the process of character development. This series is in my top 5 ever read and I would recommend to anyone with a pulse. #miragrant #readthisbookmeow

All of these fantastic books arrived earlier this week and I am so excited for all of them.

Literally one of the best descriptions of SciFi 💕💋

Another one of my favorite author photos. I love it! 😂📚✨
#AuthorPhoto

I'm the only one up in our rental house so I thought that I'd get in some reading time, but I keep staring out of the window. We don't have scenery like this in my part of the country.

Yet more diversity! Physical and mental disability with a comment on ableism

I absolutely love this world. A lesbian movie star struggling with being told to keep her long term girlfriend a secret. A stable triad marriage. Zombie kangaroos and wombats. It doesn't get much better.