Hello everyone, we just waved goodbye to 2022 and welcomed a new year… 2023! And what a year 2022 has been… there’ve been some world shattering (literally) events I never expected to see in my life: war in Europe and climate change is progressing even more and faster than expected… The war shocked me, as many others I’m sure, and still baffles me that there’s too little reaction from the other countries… this war has also shown to me that people tend to make the same mistakes and never learn from what history has told us and shown us before, which baffles me even more! So yes, I’m flabbergasted by this! I sure hope the people affected by this unnecessary war are all as safe as possible… I cross my fingers 🤞 that it will be over sooner than later! 🤞

And then there is the climate change and its progress this past years… Unfortunately we will all have to make a change (yes, me too!) in order to be able to control it (stopping it is not even a possibility anymore, I’m afraid)… I am currently reading The Climate Book, composed by Greta Thunberg: a collection of essays and short thoughts of scientists, famous people, writers, actors and what not about the issue of climate change… a must read for everyone! More on that later once I finished it…

About the climate change… in 2022 we saw a new sort of protest which shocked me as well… and though I understand the frustration of protestors and I fully get what they are trying to do and trying to tell us, I am not a fan of destruction of (expensive) property by throwing soup at artworks, paintings… or by glueing oneself to those! The message of the urgency to react will not be attained by destruction! But I admit it, action will have to be taken and by just talking and false promises, we will not get where we need to get in order to save life on this planet…

Not to descend in a political and depressive monologue about the world problems (although I really felt I needed to say my piece about those two topics) I want to say a few positive things as well!

2022 has been a good year for me personally… and there’s one big positive, a huge one! I ended my year reading 145 books, novels, short stories and such… 145 indeed! (All of my reviews can be found on my blog here or on my goodreads page: Looneybooks79)

So yeah I was very happy to end on that note… I will try to read as many in 2023… so I need all the support… something tells me I will have a very ‘historical’ year with a lot of non-fiction books to read… I discovered the genre the past years and am starting to become more and more interested on the genre. So yes, you will see a lot of those come by my page!

I am still searching my way in ‘blogland’ so I will be changing a few things in the way I review my books, movies…

The first change will be my format, only slightly though… barely noticeable!

The ‘biggest’ change will be that, on tis blog at least, I will no longer add a rating… just because I feel like it doesn’t add anything real and it is very subjective… plus my written review will express my true feelings toward the book i read or the movie I watched (although I might still add a rating to movie reviews, I’m not sure yet)

And the last change is not really a change… more a choice… the language in which my book reviews will be written will depend on whether the book has an English translation or not… and in which language I read the book… so sometimes I will only write it in English, sometimes only in Dutch… maybe once in a while in both languages (albeit the one I read it in more expanded)

And if i ever find the time and maybe help from someone, I’d love to arrange my posts on this blog so they’re easier to find but bear with me, this could take time… (or maybe never happen 🙈)

Well, that was it from me for now… I wish all my followers and readers a very happy, healthy, fun, fertile and bookfilled 2023! Thank you for sticking around and please spread the word to other booklovers! 😉