A FULL DECADE OF THIS BULLSHITE!

So - yeah, as it turns out, I've been running this blog for ten years now. Every single book I've read, be that a weighty tome my excitement has run down with each page I turn, or a picture-book that my niece demands I read to her, I have been here cataloguing & commenting, to whatever extent I feel it deserves. I hope my efforts have been fruitful in helping readers find books they're interested in & especially if those are from unexpected angles.

   To celebrate my first full decade of The Tsundoku Tortoise, I did toy with the idea of doing a "best of" kinda roundup from all my previous past-year-summaries, but let's be honest, those summaries tend to already include almost all the books I read in that given year, and performing such a roundup would be such an unwieldy task that I might just quit doing this blog rather than have to fulfil it.

   So I'm doing something else.

   It probably comes as no surprise to followers of this blog that I generally have more than one book on the go at a time. Thus, here, I will describe for you, in no particular order, the bookmarks upon which I most rely.

• "the Emma bookmark" - a slapdash collage doodle thing that I co-created via post with my friend Emma Scott when we were 15ish
• "the Bristowe bookmark" - a handwritten postcard sent to me from my dear friend Charlotte Bristowe after I purchased some of her artwork
• "the [alphabet unrecognised] bookmark" - a fabric bookmark template upon which I inflicted several lines of writing in languages that existed in cultures I hadn't finished making up when I was about 14
• "the prayer mat" - self-explanatory, it looks like a bookmark-shaped Islamic prayer mat
• "the primary school memoir" - a gorgeously hand-stitched bookmark featuring numerous insects & flowers amid the words ISAAC'S BUGMARK - all creatures great and small; given to me by my teacher when I was in year one, as I was in hospital for some time, and obviously my teacher was an absolute sweetie with too much free time
• "the Too Much Money note" - a superficially-somewhat-convincing-looking banknote for £1,000,000 with King Charles on it, this being delivered through my letterbox within the week that he was crowned, and on the reverse side reveals itself to be a very poorly disguised Christian evangelistic tract
• "the WAY Too Much Money note" - a legitimate $10,000,000,000,000 (and yes, I know, ten trillion, that's what it is) bill from Zimbabwe when they were having their hyperinflation crisis. I got it on eBay for 10p

   I hope this was informative.

   Here's to another ten years of writing reflections on my reading into the void!