The Weekend Wrap-Up offers a little look at what I’m reading, the new books that came my way, and anything else I may have gotten up to this past week. I will be linking up to Stacking the Shelves, The Sunday Post and It’s Monday! What Are You Reading? and hopping around your blogs a little to see what the community has to share too!

My Week

I guess that second Covid vaccine hit me with the post-vaccine funk over the weekend. For several days, my arm was sore and swollen, that’s actually just about gone after a week, I was getting awful sleep, headaches, full-body aches on Saturday, plenty of brain fog and fatigue. In the grand scheme of things, it was all fairly minor but it did take me out of commission for a few days.

So with that and the blog move of the previous week, I’m feeling a little bit behind with blog content, reading, D&D prep, all sorts of things. I’ve been doing my best to “catch up” without overdoing myself and I feel like I’m somewhat back on track now. Though whew I still have some things to do and my usual fatigue and brain fog to deal with.

Reading

Back to reading! I have been continuing with The Liar of Red Valley and enjoying the atmosphere of it. It sort of gives me a True Blood vibe with the whole dark American gothic… monsters are real and existed before humans thing. I’ve been taking advantage of the Bout of Books reading sprints to poke me into reading a bit more which helped. I also started reading my next book for the Buffyverse Project: Halloween Rain by Christopher Golden and Nancy Holder. These two authors wrote some absolute corkers for this franchise and already it’s so much better than Coyote Moon. 

On the whole, I haven’t done great with Bout of Books, but my favourite thing about this readathon is that it’s not about the sprint it’s very much about taking part. So I’ve joined reading sprints (or reading in place events, I think I prefer that, it’s more community minded) when I’ve been able, I did one post for the Instagram challenge before falling off… and missed practically everything else but it’s been really nice getting a little familiar with some new people and refamiliarising myself with old friends. 

Now, the past couple of days I haven’t read much at all, so let’s get this post wrapped up so I can fix that!

Watching

On Saturday I was too exhausted post-vaccine to do really anything so I curled up on the sofa and finally watched Avengers: Endgame. That was a hell of a movie. I’ve been dealing with superhero fatigue since Tobey Macguire’s Spiderman so it took me by surprise that I enjoyed it as much as I did. I went and watched Wandavision a bit later that week which was incredible. I’ll probably watch Loki next, then I have Falcon and the Winter Soldier and the Marvel Spiderman movies. Then, of course, I watched this week’s Drag Race AllStars. All I’ll say is: Silky Nutmeg Ganache. 👏

Playing

Last night I decided that I’d been spending so much time working on blog things and organising various things and not properly relaxing, so I loaded up a game. This week it was Bless Unleashed. Last time I got through the opening tutorial things so this week I started on the levelling process. I got very close to level 5 and found it a lot more enjoyable this time, though I’m stuck in the city-based “go back and forth between these NPCs, there’s a good girl” part of the levelling process, and I heard that around level 30 open-world PVP begins and you can only opt out by paying – roughly $2 per hour. That doesn’t sit well with me, so I’ll see if the PVP bothers me, or just opt out of the game. I have Final Fantasy XIV to play right now, anyway.

On the Blog

It’s been another busy week on Dragons and Whimsy as I worked on the backend things that still need fixing and really work on building my blog back up from the years away and the move. And what better way to build than offer content?

• Weekend Wrap-Up: 14/08/2021
• Bout of Books 32 Signing Up Fashionably Late
• Yet to Read… Less Known Tudor Period Stories
• Review: My Best Friend’s Exorcism by Grady Hendrix

Incoming

I grabbed The First Kingdom and The Voyage of Freydis this week, more history non-fiction and historical fiction. This time around Britain in the time of “King Arthur”, and a woman-focused Viking story. 

Dragon Storm and Star Nomad were both free. Daros was also free, though technically should have been included a couple of weeks back. I somehow missed it so thought I’d add it in here. 

Constance is my Prime Reads pick for this month, I finally decided to go with the science fiction thriller about human cloning. I’m just not a big thriller person so it was a tough pick. 

Then last night, I was browsing Edelweiss. I often check them and NetGalley in case something jumps out at me, and last night I saw Gideon Falls, a horror graphic novel by the writer of Sweet Tooth and the artist behind Old Man Logan (which my husband assures me is an artistic masterpiece). It was a “download now” title too, so considering graphic novels and comics tend to be pretty quick reads, I downloaded it. So I’ll get that read and reviewed soonish! 

Next Week

I really want to get The Liar of Red Valley finished next week. All these setbacks have made it a long read indeed and I want to finish it before my reading mood switches too much. If I finish it, I may try to read something high fantasy again, or something a little more “whimsical”… not sure yet. Otherwise, I really need to get some prep done for my Friday D&D game (which should be Tuesday/Wednesday this coming week, will check with my group), so let’s hope for some low fatigue days.

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How have your weeks been? Reading anything good? Got up to anything interesting? I’d love to hear what you’re all getting up to in the comments!