Regency Magic
Last year I read a lot of Regency themed books for my Regency Romp. Which made me actually question whether doing Regency Magic might have been a tad too much too soon. Yes, it's been four years since I last did Regency Magic and this subgenre is such a favorite of mine that I am a little baffled I didn't squeeze it in somewhere. And yes, I do totally organize my blog around the "what do I feel like reading" versus "what is popular" which means I have a legitimate excuse to indulge in something Austenesque with a side of magic. But somehow I just didn't. And then the question of should I even be doing it now kept repeating in my head on a loop. But then two things happened, I started craving anything set in the Regency and I picked up C.C. Aune's The Ill-Kept Oath. The cravings were obviously caused by my withdrawal after reading so many Regency set books last year and The Ill-Kept Oath was one of those books you read and it's just sheer perfection. You want to inhale it all and yet you never want it to end and I felt myself falling in love with Regency Magic all over again. And then I picked up Jacey Bedford's Rowankind series and the same thing happened again! I wasn't just falling in love with a subgenre all over again I was falling in love with reading all over again! Therefore I am beyond delighted to spend the next two months with C.C. Aune and Jacey Bedford, as well as the much loved Stephanie Burgis, and the new to me H.G. Parry. I can't wait for you to read their books! Join me on this journey, read along with me, keep an eye out for an Instagram giveaway or two, and if we ever meet in person, excuse me for yelling at you to pick up The Ill-Kept Oath by describing it as Jane Austen with trolls. And yes, that did happen. More than once.
So here we go! The blog is fully back. Or I'm hoping it is. We'll see won't we? I took a year off in an attempt to quell the chaos that my life had become. Well, I don't know how things are going for you but that didn't work out so well. I was so excited for the start of this decade, the twenties are back people! But I didn't want it to start with a pandemic like it did a hundred years ago. Just goes to show that everything has a price apparently. The pandemic had me thinking I'd scrap my return, just continue to hide out in my house grumbling about people not wearing masks or social distancing, but then I realized that now IS the time to come back. Everyone needs an escape right now and everyone needs a community to belong to, and books set in another time are a perfect panacea, and my friends, my online community, YOU are what is keeping me sane. So it's time to get Roaring Back to Reading! To delve into the decade of decadence. The Roaring Twenties, where authors became stars and were fodder for gossip columnists! I'll be talking about several celebrity authors, some, like Scott and Zelda, who embodied the zeitgeist far more than say Virginia Woolf or Agatha Christie, who were still very influential. I'll be looking at the books, the adaptations, the stories of their lives, and I hope you'll join me. What else do you have on the books?
While I do love creating theme months and reading lists to go with these months, sometimes there's only so many Downtonesque books or Regency time period books one can take. The long and short of what I'm saying is that I read a lot more books than reviews I post here. On average I have about 104 reviews on my blog per year while I write anywhere from 50 to 70 more reviews... So I kind of have a backlog of book reviews that are just sitting around, collecting dust, being pushed further and further back in my blog queue. Therefore I was pondering, why not utalize this backlog for a theme month, or months... in fact I could throw in some books I've been dying to read and haven't had the time to get around to.
I never really talk about why I started my blog sincerely. I will almost always give the true, though somewhat flippant answer, that it was to get free books, and in particular Lauren Willig's ARCs. So perhaps it's time to tell this story? After my semester from hell, which ended with me getting pneumonia, I was at loose ends. I was supposed to go to Canada for the New Year but was too sick, so I started playing around with the idea of a blog. I thought it would be really cool to have a blog titled "Crazy Random Happenstance" because of the line from Dr. Horrible's Sing-Along Blog, though my blog would be entirely free of singing. Per dictates in place banning my vocalizations. Though I couldn't quite remember the quote "Crazy Random Happenstance" and instead used "Strange and Random Happenstance" which, if I'm honest, I like far more because crazy, well, I don't like all the connotations and I'm not pigeonholed as a Whedonverse blog then, despite the first post. I love you Joss, but seriously, not liking your recent work. So I made a blog and then school started and I forgot all about it. Then the semester ended and life was still stressful, just minus school. My cat was really sick, and well, really old if truth be told. I was in denial that he might not be around much longer and I needed a distraction. A blog was the answer. On May 19th one of my friends who had just started doing a knitting blog asked if I had thought of doing my own blog. I immediately wrote back: "sweet, I have blog I set up, just haven't started yet (with hopes of free books!)
mine is called strange and random happenstance." Within the hour I had written my first post. By 10PM the next day my cat would be dead. 
