Hi, my name is Luka, I’m 27 years old and I live in Belgrade, Serbia.
Reading has always been my passion but there were times in my life where I simply couldn’t keep up with it. Things slowly started to change as I spent 2018 and 2019 rereading childhood favorites like The Wizard of Oz and The Famous Five. Then, in 2020, I received Anxious People by Fredric Backman for my birthday and the rest is history. Although I was still forced to take breaks as life got in the way again, somehow the passion never subsided. In fact, I dare to say that my new excitement for books has been at least one small thing that helped me get trough those difficult moments.
I have also been interested in blogging for a long time, but it wasn’t until the discovery of Booktube that I knew what direction I wanted to go into.
I hope you’ll join me here at Red Lion Reviews as I document my reading journey and share my opinions about books I love and those I don’t love as much.
Fantasy, historical fiction and murder mystery are among my favorite genres, but I love classics too, and would also read pretty much anything for as long as it’s not too dark.
While the blog will primarly be focused on book reviews, I plan to occasionally talk about some other things as well, like anime, TV shows, drawing and some random stuff I like to do just for fun.
How it all started…
When I was a kid, my family didn’t have much, but we had books, a lot of them. Both of my parents were avid readers, but especially my dad, who I think read pretty much every book on this planet. Naturally, I displayed some of the same interests.
I was reading picture books long before starting school, but other, more complex things, that I couldn’t read myself, my parents read to me.
I was particularly drawn to encyclopedias and no topic was too complex – from planes, over steel production to animals (most notably crocodiles, sharks and stingrays – all of which horrified my mom) and dinosaurs, which were my absolute favorites. And my love for books only grew from there.
A cold winter evening at my grandma’s home in the countryside when I finished the first Harry Potter book is still vivid in my memory. The ending seemed kind of scary at the time, but I was so proud of myself for completing it.
Here are few other of my childhood favorites: Devojčica sa šestog meseca (Italian: La bambina della Sesta Luna) by Moony Witcher, The Chronicles of Narnia and some books my dad read to me (though I plan to go through them myself one day) – The Lord of the Rings, The Count of Monte Cristo, The Three Musketeers.
The first long book I read was Michael Strogoff: A Courier of the Czar by Jules Verne and my first somewhat darker read was A Game of Thrones.
Some Serbian books have impressed me as well, like Nečista krv and Na Drini ćuprija.
Finally, a few of the newer reads that have marked my return to reading: Circe, His Dark Materials, And Then There Were None, The Winternight Trilogy, The Grisha Trilogy and a collection of short stories by Edgar Allan Poe.
I hope this little personal history wasn’t boring, I just wanted to share my experiences as a reader thus far and potentially find others who share the same interests.