About

Ventureadlaxre means a relaxing adventure, specifically as the word ‘venture. (n) A risky or daring journey or undertaking: “pioneering ventures into little-known waters” shapes its beginning, and has the added bonus of ‘read’ within.

Nope, I can’t pronounce it either. When picking a domain I got sick of everything I wanted being already taken and utilised in a far more brilliant way than I could ever hope… so I made up a gibberish word.

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This site shall be mostly book reviews and the occasional discussion post (mostly about Australian book awards such as Aurealis and Ditmars, but quite often the Hugo Awards too). When I started out there were often interviews, competitions, squee and lists of just about anything (but probably mostly books) however these have dropped off somewhat.

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This blog is run by Katharine, an Australian who reviews for a handful of publishers. Reviews are cross-posted to Goodreads and Amazon. Recently Goodreads announced they had hit 20 million accounts and 50 million reviews, and that Katharine was ‘in the top 1% of reviewers’. Also, quite often, within the top 20 Aussie reviewers, too.

Katharine has been a judge in the Australian speculative fiction Aurealis Awards (convening anthologies/collections in 2011 and 2012, fantasy novels in 2013 and 2014, and judging best completed spec-fic series of 2011-2014, and 2015-2017) which is called the Sara Douglass award. From 2015 to 2018 she was also one half of the coordination team. Lastly, Katharine was also one of eight judges of the Australian Children’s Book Council of the Year awards for 2013/2014, and in 2017, was one of ten judges in the Self-Published Fantasy Blog-Off #SPFBO hosted by Mark Lawrence.

Katharine tries to both nominate and vote in the Hugo awards, Ditmars, Tin Ducks, and anything else possible each year.

In 2015, Katharine was shortlisted for a Ditmar award in two categories, and then was shortlisted again in 2016, and has also reached ‘Top Reviewer’ status on NetGalley, which means many publishers have chosen her reviews to feature on their page (and she got a tiny badge to show for it!).

Since 2012 Katharine has read between 130-155 books each year and managed this through to 2016. Health taking its toll (as shows on this blog), this dropped to 103 in 2017, 69 in 2018, and 57 novels in 2019. She is aiming for 60 books in 2020.

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All books reviewed on Ventureadlaxre are purchased by me, borrowed from friends or the library, or received from authors/publishers in exchange for an honest review. I do not receive any compensation, monetary or otherwise, for anything I post here. If I link to a particular store to buy a particular book, I do not receive any money through the clicking. I’m far too lazy to set it up.

This site is best viewed in Chrome or Firefox, and looks pretty atrocious in IE. Apologies for that.