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Nov, 22 - Managing Expectations

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It's amazing to me how much my expectations can color what I'm reading or what books I choose to prioritize. This week was a stark reminder of that for me. I finished three main books this week (again, not including the How to Train Your Dragon books that I finished because I still haven't figured out how to review those properly). One was a book I was looking forward to and was disappointed by, one was a book I'd avoided for actual years because I expected to hate it and then didn't, and one was one that I picked up randomly from the library and then read in a day because it was overdue. Oops. Lesson learned. You can't always judge a book by its cover... or even by what other reviewers say about it on GoodReads. ~~~  A Graveyard of First Chapters Author:  Johnny Payne Genres:  Magical Realism, Adult, Literary Fiction Review Type: BookSirens ARC Star Rating:  3 stars, although I'm still considering lowering it to 2.75 My Tags:  booksirens-arc, modern-fiction...
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Nov, 16 - Falling into Fantastical Worlds

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It's kind of weird to say this, but this month just largely hasn't been a reading month, which has made posting blog posts a bit tricky. I think this week was the first week all month where I actually had a good number of books to post, so here we are, back again for another exploration. I was apparently in the mood for fantasy this week, so all the books below feature fantastical worlds of one sort or another. I'm still figuring out how to review long series since I don't often have lots of new things to say as the books progress other than "Yup, still like it," and it gets harder and harder to review the books without providing spoilers even just by posting the synopsis for the previous books. That means that even though I listened to and thoroughly enjoyed two more books in the How to Train Your Dragon series by Cressida Cowell, I didn't include the review to them here. Maybe someday I'll circle back and review the series as a whole or something? We...
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Nov 3, 2025 - Just Mainly a Lot of Dragons

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Last time I posted, I expressed my surprise at how many books I'd managed to finish in a week. This week, I'm surprised at how few I've finished in the past two weeks. To be fair to me, the past two weeks have involved midterms and several other factors that resulted in a highly disrupted schedule (which is why I also didn't post anything the last two weeks...). Now things are starting to settle again, and hopefully I can slip back into a regular reading rhythm. In the meantime, here's a catch-up post of all the books I missed the last two weeks while I was dealing with other things. As a heads-up, the formatting gets funky on this post. For some reason Blogger wouldn't let me do what I've been doing for no apparent reason and I got fed up fighting it. I'll just try to do my normal formatting again next week... ~~~ How to Be a Pirate and How to Speak Dragonese Author:  Cressida Cowell Genres: fantasy, middle grade Star Rating:  4 Stars Review Type:  Reco...
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Oct 18, 2025 - Obscurity and Celebrity

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Well. This week happened. Somehow I read a lot this week? Which confuses me because it was an absolutely hectic week and I spent a lot of time wondering where my brain went and how the heck I could possibly convince it to come back and play nicely for a while. I'm still not sure I have a brain, but at least I have a blog post? It even has a theme again, and I'm still not sure how I did that because it was definitely a week where I read wherever my fancy took me and didn't try to stick to a genre or even what I was "supposed" to be reading. That means that in this post you'll find everything from Gothic classics to thrillers to middle grade fantasy. Some are obscure or still unpublished, others are famous and have left their mark. Some feature people living on the margins of society while others detail the lives of celebrities. It's a week of extremes. And honestly after the week I just had, it seems oddly fitting. Sort of on that note, the first review thi...
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