About me
Name: Sandra
Date of Birth: April 1975
Place of Birth: Weimar, Germany
Status: Single, and happy with it
BASICS
The usual childhood: I went to school, was bored to tears, but finished it anyway. Then trained to become a librarian at the most beautiful library. Got bored again, this time thought better of it and went to university instead. Got a Masters Degree in Biology and went on to work in some exceedingly awful office job that had nothing to do with biology whatsoever.
Four years later had enough and decided on a whim to go to New Zealand for a year on a Work&Travel visa. Had the time of my life, but made the grave mistake of returning to Germany in September 2005. Still thinking about when to leave and where to go next…
Certified bookworm. I can curl up with books for weeks on end, as long as nobody bothers me.
Blogging for the last 8 years, on and off. Changing the name and design of my blogs more or less at random and deleting everything from time to time (mostly by accident, but sometimes purposely). On my travels I have learned not to hold on to things, so I’m not too bothered if I lose some irrelevant data.
RANDOM OTHERS
atheist.bookworm. musiclover. misanthropist. sensitive. sometimes rude, though not always on purpose. daydreamer. couch potato. runner.smoker. coffee-addict. impatient. indifferent. tattoo-collector in training. confused. obsessed. frightened at times. frightening at others.
ABOUT THIS BLOG
This blog doesn’t have any goal, strategy, mission, purpose or indeed any deeper meaning behind it.
It is just my personal playground where I post random things that pop into my mind, musings about topics that interest me at the time, sometimes book or movie reviews (although in all probability not very detailed analyses, just pretty much my opinions), photos, links and all kinds of other stuff that doesn’t necessarily have anything to do with anything, if you catch my drift.
If you as a reader would like to chime in on any of the posts I write you are more than welcome to do so, even if you don’t agree with me – as long as you keep your comments on topic and reasonably polite*. I enjoy discussing things as much as anybody and, considering my sometimes not exactly mainstream or politically correct opinions on things, I have absolutely no problem with people disagreeing with me (after all, this is one of the prerequisites of a discussion, isn’t it?).
On the other hand: this is my own personal space and even though you are invited to get comfortable here, I do have no qualms whatsoever deleting comments that contain personal insults, name-calling or other childish behaviour. If you can’t play nice like grown-ups, go and play somewhere else. Luckily the internet is a big place and I have better things to do than feeding trolls.
*I say reasonably polite, because as you will probably notice when you read any of my posts we are not exactly in Sunday School here and swear words, especially of the more inventive kind, are definitely not frowned upon here. If you are easily offended when someone uses the word FUCK then this is probably not the place for you to hang out.
MY READING TASTE
If you have visited my Bookkeeping or Mt. TBR page you will probably already know that I am a voracious reader. I read about 100 – 130 books a year, depending on how much time I have.
Genrewise my reading taste is quite widespread, with a definite leaning towards the more sci-fi-ish direction. You could probably call it speculative fiction in the widest sense.
It is rare that I read straight-up science fiction in the narrowest sense of the word, in other words I am not a Trekkie (although I read quite a lot of ST-books in my youth, can’t say I loved them too much, though). Even though I do like Heinlein, Asimov, Farmer and some others, I am not really too enamoured of stories about space travel, time travel, alien invasions or stuff like that.
Same goes for fantasy: I absolutely love Tolkien (LOTR is the only book I own several different editions of), but the rest of the fantasy genre is very hit and miss for me. There are only so many stories about elves, dwarfes or dragons I can take. And don’t even get me started on crap like Eragon, which was just a blatant rip-off of so many so much better books and in my eyes should never have been published at all.
My absolute favorite genre of the last few years is post-apocalyptic fiction. That’s probably where my misanthropy comes into play again. There’s just nothing sweeter for me than to read about the demise of humankind in some horrible, gruesome way. I am working on building a collection of post-apocalyptic novels, which comes along quite nicely, although it is far from complete.
Apart from that stuff I read a lot of contemporary fiction that I couldn’t really pin down into one genre. Pretty much everything that sounds interesting to me for one reason or another. Recently, I have also developed a taste for short stories, which I used to despise when I was younger. I have a lot of catching up to do in that regard.
As to non-fiction I read a lot about design, especially webdesign, photography, writing, gardening, biology, evolution, psychology, sometimes a biography and lately even economy, don’t ask me why. And since I have taken up running I often delve into the sports section of my library as well.
So much for the stuff I do like. Is there any genre I don’t like at all?
So glad you asked. In fact, there are several:
1. Romance
This is a big one. I have really no idea how anybody can read this stuff, because from where I stand it seems to be pretty much all the same all the time, just with varying names and settings. I read some of it in highschool and even then it bored the fuck out of me. You couldn’t pay me enough today to pick up one of those books with these awful glaring covers. I think the fact that there have been 3 occasions when I had writers of romance tell me that they don’t even like to read the genre themselves speaks for itself. Waste of time.
2. Chick-lit
I don’t find chick-lit quite as awful as romance books, in fact I have read some myself whenever there wasn’t anything better around. Some of it was even halfway enjoyable – in a totally forgettable and rather bland way. But on the whole I tend to have no interest whatsoever in this kind of books. I just can’t connect to the heroines, who all seem to have only one goal in her life: to get the perfect guy. As if a woman can’t have a complete life without one. Sorry, that’s just too 1950-ish for my taste.
3. Vampires
Starting with Twilight, which I find complete and utter rubbish, the whole damn vampire craze just bores me to tears. I don’t find vampires sexy, I don’t think vampires are meant to be sexy, and those sissy vampires who can’t stomach the thought of ripping open a human’s throat and drinking his blood are just appallingly pathetic. Reading those kinds of soft-porn stories would make me roll my eyes so hard that I am afraid they could fall out, which is why I just stay away from the whole thing. Although staying away from the Twilight crap that seems to flood the whole internet is quite a challenge.
I probably forgot a few others, but these are my main stay-away-from-at-all-costs topics. 
