Wolf Hall

This book has sat on my shelf, unread, for years. It’s curious, because it’s so lauded a historical fiction of a time period that I love reading about, so I can’t figure out why I hadn’t picked it up before. But the recent publication (and Women’s Prize short-listing) of the final book in the trilogy,…

Vox

There has definitely been a trend in recent literature for speculative stories about dystopian futures (especially in the US and especially for women). This isn’t really a surprise, I don’t think, considering some of the leadership we’re currently experiencing. And it definitely adds a realistically frightening edge to the speculative-ness of the stories. Obviously, Margaret…

Gideon the Ninth

Well, I think we could all agree that I knew I’d be reading this one. Tagged as lesbian necromancers in space, there was really no more I needed to know. And all the awards it’s been nominated for since then really only reinforced what I already knew. In fact, this was in the stack of…

Beloved

I am 31 years old, an avid reader, was the nerdy kid in English class who always actually read the books assigned, and yet…this is the first of Toni Morrison’s works that I’ve ever read. I’m disappointed in both myself and all the school systems I went through. But it’s never too late to correct…

The Lost Queen

I have always, always, always been obsessed with the legend of King Arthur. I have read so many retellings of the story. (Mostly fictional – I love it, but I’m not a scholar. Haha.) But seriously, I read T.H. White’s The Once and Future King so many times growing up that the spine broke and…

Where the Crawdads Sing

Well, I finally did it. I read this book. I have been so hesitant because the hype for this one is legitimately beyond real and I just figured there’s no way it stands up. Plus, I can’t lie, without the hype, it’s not one that I would for sure pick up just after reading the…

How We Fight For Lives

I’d seen a couple reviews for this memoir that said it was very powerful, and I was interested in reading it, but I can’t necessarily say it was super high on my TBR, objectively. However, it was one of the books I managed to grab in my last library haul before the closures for COVID-19.…

The Little Paris Bookshop

I picked this novel up at a used bookstore a few years ago and never got around to reading it. It just sounded sweet and the cover is super cozy looking, but for some reason it never called out to me as my “next read.” During the last meeting for my long-distance book club, I…

His Dark Materials

Remember a few months ago when I posted about Harry Potter (finally)? I told a super cute story about how my husband and I started on January 1, 2019 and read a chapter out loud to each other before bed each night (ish - since he works 24 hour shifts, there were a lot of…

Know My Name

This has been on my TBR since the moment I heard about it. And that was only reinforced by all the reviews I saw of it. I knew it wasn’t going to be easy though, for so many reasons, personal and otherwise. But important and necessary. Originally, I was nervous when my hold came up…