eva devon

BOOKENDS: What I Read in September 2024

- Meg

September was a very meh reading month. Work was busy, I had car troubles that took up a lot of attention, and things weren’t great all around!! I did enjoy The Duke and the Dressmaker as a little historical romance palate cleanser. Everything else I thought should have been more fleshed out and longer!!! However, The Dragon’s Bride was very fun, and even though I wanted more, it stood on its own. The novellas from Kindle Unlimited often feel like starters, something that could eventually be built into a longer work, but is ultimately left as it is. The others were not even really worth revisiting for me, and I was disappointed in the execution of Squirrel Meets World and The Gothic. Peg and Rose Solve a Murder looks like it should have been more fun and have some of that spry old person/Golden Girls vibes, but it felt very bitter.

WHAT I READ

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

💖 The Dragon’s Bride, by Katee Robert
🌠 The Duke and the Dressmaker, by Eva Devon
💖 Squirrel Meets World, by Shannon Hale and Dean Hale
💖 Peg and Rose Solve a Murder, by Laurien Berenson
💖 The Gothic, by Nick Groom
🌠 The Backbone of the World, by Stephen Graham Jones
🌠 Bloody Summer, by Carmen Maria Machado
🌠 A Righteous Man, by Tochi Onyebuchi
🌠 Stag, by Karen Russell

BOOKENDS: What I Read in April 2024

- Meg

While it looks like I read more in April than March, it was a lot of finishing things I had started in prior months! I also wavered for a bit about counting the books I read for my courses, but I decided that the hard work needed to count for these! 🤣 The Reformatory is such great historical horror, and my first Tananarive Due (and definitely not my last). I had two DNFs this month, too: Icebreaker (sports romance is not my thing but I was curious about the Gru thing [iykyk] but it took so long for any part of the story to be set up that I lost any shred of interest that I had) and The Blacktongue Thief. This was one of my 12 in 24 reads, but it felt like it was a story being told around the actual story and nothing about it really engaged me, so I decided not to waste what little time I had to read that month on something that I wasn’t enjoying. Both of these DNFs came one right after the other and tie that with some weird course experiences, I was just like I DO NOT WANT TO READ ANYMORE. But I did end up rounding out the month by finishing Said’s Orientalism and MacLean’s Bombshell. I had read parts of Orientalism before, but not the entire work, and I really enjoyed it. MacLean’s historical romances are always a fun time.

WHAT I READ

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

🌠 The Reformatory, by Tananarive Due
🌠 The Beast and the Bookseller, by Eva Devon (Kindle Unlimited)
🌠👻 Icebreaker, by Hannah Grace
💖👻 The Blacktongue Thief, by Christopher Buehlman
💖 Ebony and Ivory: Race, Slavery, and the Troubled History of America’s Universities, by Craig Steven Wilder
💖 A History of American Higher Education, by John R. Thelin
💖 Budgets and Financial Management in Higher Education, by Margaret J. Barr
💖 Orientalism, by Edward W. Said
💖 Bombshell, by Sarah MacLean