First Chapter, First Paragraph Tuesday is hosted by Bibliophile By the Sea! Today I’m featuring Rouge by Richard Kirshenbaum, sent to me by St. Martin’s Press for review! Rouge is a fictional account of the first women to build major corporations in America based upon their own creations – namely beauty products. The novel follows four main characters who are all intertwined with each other throughout the decades as business and profits grow while personal lives become more and more entangled with personal and professional rivalries. I’ll have a full review posted next week, so keep your eyes out for that, but for now, enjoy this little sneak peak!

New York City, 1933

A Technicolor sky hung over the city even though it was only early May. At times, even New York City seemed to have caught the bug. The pear trees that bloomed like white fireworks every April may as well have sprouted palm trees. Everyone, it seemed, had just stepped out of a Garbo movie, and Josephine Herz (née Josiah Herzenstein) would be damned if she would not capitalize on this craze.

A young, well-kept woman was the first to grace her newly opened, eponymous salon on Fifth Avenue. With bleached-blond “marcelled” hair, a substantial bust, and a mouth that looked as though it had been carved from a pound of chopped meat, her new client had all the ammunition to entrap any man in the city, to keep him on the dole, and her cosmetic hygienist, in this case Herz Beauty, on the payroll. She lowered herself onto the padded leather salon chair like a descending butterfly and batted her eyes as though they too might flutter from her face.

I’ve taken this from the actual first chapter, rather than the prologue, and included a bit more than just the first paragraph. What do you think? Many thanks to St. Martin’s Press for sending me a complimentary review copy! Stay tuned for a full review next week!

Hello, reader friends! I haven’t done a monthly wrap up in literally forever, so I thought now that we’re halfway through the year, I’d start doing it again! (Please note the mild case of sarcasm and self-loathing in the previous sentence…) May ended up being a really great reading month, and I read twelve books! I also updated my personal book bullet journal and realized I set up some challenges for myself that I don’t know if I ever announced on my blog, so I’ll be writing a little bit about those and giving a status update. Sometimes I think publicly making some kind of announcement/commitment is the only way I’ll follow through with half the things I want to do… so anyway, without further adieu, here’s the list of books I read in May!

1. Star Wars: Poe Dameron, v.1: Black Squadron – Chris Soule (purchased) – 4/5 stars
2. A Job You Mostly Won’t Know How to Do – Pete Fromm (arc from publisher) – 4/5 stars
3. Exhalation – Ted Chiang (arc from work) – 5/5 stars
4. Work Optional – Tanja Hester (finished copy from publisher) – 3/5 stars
5. A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood – Fred Rogers (e-arc from publisher/Netgalley) – 5/5 stars
6. The Unquiet Heart – Kaite Welsh (e-arc from publisher/Netgalley) – 4/5 stars
7. Rooftoppers – Katherine Rundell (finished copy/borrowed) – 4/5 stars
8. Wicked and the Wallflower – Sarah MacLean (finished copy/borrowed) – 4/5 stars
9. Descendant of the Crane – Joan He (purchased) – 4/5 stars
10. Bibliophile – Jane Mount (purchased) – 4/5 stars
11. Ask Again, Yes – Mary Beth Keane (finished copy from publisher) – 4/5 stars
12. The Kingdom – Jess Rothenberg (arc from work) – 4/5 stars

The average rating for my May books is 4.08/5! I think I put some half stars here and there in my blog reviews, but I’m going off of my Goodreads ratings for this average. I think I had a decent reading month! It didn’t feel like I read a lot, but so far May is the month with the most reads!

I’ve really been enjoying blogging more as it makes me feel more accomplished about what I’m doing with my reading, but I definitely want to stay in the groove of posting 3-5 times a week (or more). I also want to start posting on Instagram more, and last week I took a ton of photos to use for this month and next month. I’m going to try taking more this week just so I can have a steady backlog, and I might see about using Planoly to help with keeping a nice “grid” and to help with reminders to post. I have a scatterbrain, and sometimes I just don’t remember unless I have a reminder. Setting up with Planoly might help as I can use my laptop to type out captions and all that jazz, and that’s so much easier to do than with a phone keyboard… I also will be updating some of the pages on the blog and maybe adding the challenge lists I have in my book journal so I can keep track here as well!

Last year, I set up some yearly challenges for me to follow through with, and I did about half of them. I wanted to read twelve Star Wars books (I read four), twelve Star Trek books (I read zero), twelve “classics” (I read three and then included the eighty Penguin Little Black Classics in increments of 10 to account for most of them; I ended up “reading” eleven by that justification), twelve non-fiction (I read twelve!), and twelve science fiction books (I read eight). I also tried to do 30 days of 30 short stories, but I just sort of stopped around story fifteen. I think it’s because I didn’t mention anywhere that I was doing it, and I had no follow up publicly with myself over it. Overall, and especially considering I read eighty of those Little Black Classics, I think I did all right.

This year, however, I want to read twelve Hugo/Nebula award winners to tie in with #sffreverb (of which I’ve severely let myself down with across the board and have only read one), twelve romance (last year I got into the genre a lot, and I want to read more; I’ve read one so far), twelve NYRB Classics (I’ve read zero), twelve classics (I’ve read zero), twelve historical fiction (I’ve read five), and twelve YA (I buy so much of it but I haven’t read much of it at all, especially last year?? Why am I like this? I’ve read five so far). These are the official lists I have in my book bullet journal, but I also “unofficially” want to read more middle grade, works by LGBTQIA+ writers, works by marginalized writers, and non-fiction books about space/astronauts/the space race (it’s been fifty years since the moon landing?? ahh). One of these days I’ll make a post of my book bullet journal and the lists I’ve made myself, so you can see that!

I also did Whole30 during May, and it helped me realize a lot about my eating habits in general. Reintroduction has been fine, so I’m also happy I don’t seem to have any sensitivities to food. I just need to keep instilling those better eating habits!

In June, I’m not going to give myself a set TBR. I have a lot going on, and I’m just going to read on a whim (with exceptions to review copies that I want to have reviews done for on time) and work on whittling down my Netgalley queue and my physical TBR. It’s summertime now, and I should have a less structured month! (But let’s be real, most of my reading months are entirely unstructured…)

How was your reading May? What are you going to do for June?

I finally caved and bought a very specific book-related domain name! My old one was just a catch-all for everything, and I didn’t feel it felt the theme I wanted to convey – books! One of my friends calls me the fairy bookmother because I always have something to recommend or say about books, and he thinks it’s a bit magical that I have that ability, so I decided to move forward with it!

For the last month and a half (I’m so terrible at this when I get stressed!) have been busy with some minor changes and some big ones. The big one is me teaching at a college level! I’m teaching an introduction to literature of sorts that’s also combined with learning how to write a literary/research essay, and I’m excited! It’s a lot of work, and I’m doing my best to keep on top of that while managing to still work at my other full-time job.

As a result of that busy-ness, I haven’t done as much reading as I would like, but I’ve got a few reviews coming up! I think I may have an update schedule now that I’ve sort of got a regular schedule in regards to evenings being off, so as of now, I’ll have posts on Sundays, Tuesdays, and Thursdays, maybe with some sprinklings in between! I think those are totally manageable for me. It’ll give me time to work on content and think of content and write those reviews! I miss writing about books, whether or not in an academic sense, as much as I miss reading books as much as I used to.

Anyway, like before, I’ll have reviews mostly of contemporary, literary, sci/fi and fantasy, and young adult! I’m going to be posting my review of Ernest Cline’s Armada here on Thursday! I’ve been putting it off for too long, and it needs to get posted!