bookends

BOOKENDS: What I Read in June 2023

- Meg

June was a romance-heavy month for me! It wasn’t until I got everything entered into Goodreads that I noticed three (and a half) of the books I read featured a romance plotline, but June was also a weird month and I didn’t feel like I could focus on too many heavy reads in a row. Not the Kind of Earl You Marry and The Heiress Gets a Duke were my favorites of the romances I read, and The Perks of Loving a Wallflower was good but felt a little flat at times. The romance hints in Of Manners and Murder definitely had a hint of what is to come with the series, and I may borrow the second book from the library once it comes out even though I found the first to be a bit slow in the first half. Thornhedge is another winner from T. Kingfisher, and it has proven that I will read anything her and love it, so I need to get my hands on her backlist. The Future of Another Timeline is a riot of a read, and it makes me miss the riotgrrl days a bit. I loved the time travel concept in this, how history and the future can be and is changed even without time travel, and the writing in this has a buzz running through it. Linden’s The First Sister was a surprise read for me in how much I loved it! I recently purchased the sequel, and the conclusion to the trilogy comes out later this year – feels familiar but subverts a lot of science fiction tropes in a way I enjoyed. Green’s The Anthropocene Reviewed feels just like listening to him speak on social media, and it makes me want to listen to the audiobook in the future.

WHAT I READ

💖 purchased/owned | 🌠 library/borrowed | 🔮 review copy | 💞 reread | 👻 dnf

💖 Not the Kind of Earl You Marry, by Kate Pembrooke
🔮 Thornhedge, by T. Kingfisher
💖 The Future of Another Timeline, by Annalee Newitz
💖 The Perks of Loving a Wallflower, by Erica Ridley
🌠 Of Manners and Murder, by Anastasia Hastings
💖 The Heiress Gets a Duke, by Harper St. George
💖 The Anthropocene Reviewed, by John Green
💖 The First Sister, by Linden A. Lewis

BOOKENDS: What I Read in May 2023

- Meg

May was a solid reading month for me, and I read eight books! The Once and Future Sex was a great introduction to women’s medieval history and provided a jumping off point if you wanted to get started with reading beyond a men’s-focused frame of reference. Some Dukes Have All the Luck was an addictive read that I couldn’t put down once I started it and made me want to read this author’s backlist immediately!! Deanna Raybourn’s Silent in the Grave is her debut, and I can see a lot of the threads that would become evident in her Veronica Speedwell series (which I also love and need to catch up on). The Crane Husband is a solid novella and once I’d recommend to those really interested in fairy tale explorations, while The Witch’s Heart was a bit of a disappointment because Loki as a character in that felt… juvenile. One can be a trickster without seeming like a one-trick pony. Ash Princess is a solid series opener, so I’m looking forward to reading the rest of the trilogy as I’m trying to read more of what I have on my kindle. The only two that were less than great, but not bad, were The Death of Vivek Oji (I was not expecting some of the elements as I’d not really seen them spoken about in some of the reviews I read, and I felt the incest took away from the impact of the story) and Our Share of Night (seemed a bit too long in the middle and dragged, and the best part of it was in the last quarter of the book or so).

WHAT I READ

💖 purchased/owned | 🌠 library/borrowed | 🔮 review copy | 💞 reread | 👻 dnf

🌠 The Once and Future Sex, by Eleanor Janega
💖 Some Dukes Have All the Luck, by Christina Britton
🌠 The Death of Vivek Oji, by Akwaeke Emezi
💖 Silent in the Grave, by Deanna Raybourn
💖 The Witch’s Heart, by Genevieve Gornichec
🌠 The Crane Husband, by Kelly Barnhill
💖 Ash Princess, by Laura Sebastian
🌠 Our Share of Night, by Maria Enriquez

BOOKENDS: What I Read in April 2023

- Meg

I read eight books in April! Leech was delightfully creepy, though I don’t really know where the Wuthering Heights comps came from except maybe for the atmospheric/on the moors remote sort of vibe. I really enjoyed Vo’s The Chosen and the Beautiful as a stand-alone work and as a companion to The Great Gatsby. Neill’s The Bright and Breaking Sea was so much fun, and I hope there’s more after the sequel that I can’t wait to read. I read Fangs on a break at work, and I thought it was cute. I also finished up my listening to The Old Kingdom trilogy on audio with Abhorsen. It still remains one of my favorite series of all time, and I feel like I could read it over and over again while getting something new out of it each time. One Dark Window is a series/duology opener with a card-based magic system that I really enjoyed and found fresh in the wake of a lot of romantic fantasies lately. The only book I found myself disappointed in was The Witch and the Tsar, a Baba Yaga retelling with none of the bite I expect from Baba Yaga. As Death Draws Near was a fine series continuer, but not one of my favorites of the series. I got the next book from the library as I am trying to get caught up on series I enjoy reading and are still active!

WHAT I READ

💖 purchased/owned | 🌠 library/borrowed | 🔮 review copy | 💞 reread | 👻 dnf

🌠 Leech, by Hiron Ennes
💖 The Chosen and the Beautiful, by Nghi Vo
💖 The Bright and Breaking Sea, by Chloe Neill
🌠 Fangs, by Sarah Andersen
💖💞 Abhorsen, by Garth Nix
🌠 The Witch and the Tsar, by Olesya Salnikova Gilmore
🌠 As Death Draws Near, by Anna Lee Huber
💖 One Dark Window, by Rachel Gillig

BOOKENDS: What I Read in March 2023

- Meg

March was a lot of shorter books because Twilight is so slowly paced that it seemed like it took forever for me to get through! Which! First of all! Even me from two years ago would not have thought in 2023 I would have willing read Twilight and found entertainment in reading it!! It was a sort-of buddy read with a friend, and I wanted to giggle along with her, so I read it. I am not sure if I’ll continue the rest of them, but considering I was staunchly against reading it or even seeing the movies (I may end up going that route!! But who knows!!).

I like reading books before the movie adaptations come out, and I read Women Talking before seeing the film, and I think this is one of those cases where the movie feels like a more appropriate point-of-view for this kind of story. For it being about women talking, the book was narrated and seen from the point-of-view from a man, and the film focused more on the women speaking and telling their truths.

Reading Mysteries of Thorn Manor means I have read all that Margaret Rogerson has put out, and I don’t know when her next will be out! She’s one of my current favorite YA fantasy writers, and I have loved everything she’s written so far. A Prayer for the Crown-Shy is an excellent follow-up to A Psalm for the Wild Built, I was creeped out by Chuck Tingle’s venture into horror with Camp Damascus, and rereading The Great Gatsby was an experience! I can’t believe it had been ten years since I’d last read it, and I read it to refresh myself with the story before I read Nghi Vo’s The Beautiful and the Damned. I didn’t enjoy Six Wakes as much as I thought I would, but I am not sure if it was due to a reading slump or not. Overall, it was a decent month for reading!

WHAT I READ

💖 purchased/owned | 🌠 library/borrowed | 🔮 review copy | 💞 reread | 👻 dnf

🌠 Women Talking, by Miriam Toews
🌠 Twilight, by Stephenie Meyer
💖 Six Wakes, by Mur Lafferty
💖💞 The Great Gatsby, by F. Scott Fitzgerald
💖 A Duke in Time, by Janna MacGregor
💖 Mysteries of Thorn Manor, by Margaret Rogerson
🔮 Camp Damascus, by Chuck Tingle
🌠 A Prayer for the Crown-Shy, by Becky Chambers

BOOKENDS: What I Read in February 2023

- Meg

I read ten books in February, and it’s the most of the year so far. It’s also the month where I read the most from the library, which is great because I am attempting to use the library and spend less on books this year. Part of that is because I tend to only read a lot of books once and then carry them on my shelves for years before they find new homes, and using the library gives me the opportunity to read the book once, enjoy it, and send it back right away. Reserving books and going into the branch to browse also scratches that shopping itch.

I didn’t have any real duds of a book this month, with all of these being 3-star reads and above. I may write a few reviews for these if I feel inclined too, but all of these are worth checking out for one reason or another. My favorites of the month are Margaret Rogerson’s Vespertine, Rin Chupeco’s Silver Under Nightfall, and Beth Revis’s Star Wars: The Princess and the Scoundrel. I’d been meaning to read Sister Outsider for quite some time, and I’m glad to have read it in February. The God of Endings and Silver Under Nightfall were two more additions to my vampire reads of the year, and I wasn’t aware that when I started The God Of Endings that it was about vampires. Khaw’s The Salt Grows Heavy is a delightfully creepy mermaid novella that shows us that even though there are scary bitey mermaids, there’s always something much worse out there. Johanna Lindsey’s When Love Awaits is a very dated historical romance with plotlines and themes that wouldn’t jive today, but as I want to familiarize myself with the genre, I wanted to read some older published works and I couldn’t put this one down. I was entranced, and part of that was due to it being set in medieval times. Overall, February was a great reading month!

WHAT I READ

💖 purchased/owned | 🌠 library/borrowed | 🔮 review copy | 💞 reread | 👻 dnf

🌠 The God of Endings, by Jacqueline Holland
💖 Vespertine, by Margaret Rogerson
🌠 Silver Under Nightfall, by Rin Chupeco
🌠 A Psalm for the Wild Built, by Becky Chambers
🌠 You Sexy Thing, by Cat Rambo
🌠 The Final Strife, by Saara El-Arifi
💖 Star Wars: The Princess and the Scoundrel, by Beth Revis
🔮 The Salt Grows Heavy, by Cassandra Khaw
💖 Sister Outsider, by Audre Lorde