If I’m ever going to catch up with my reviews, I am going to have to post multiple reviews at once and make them a little (read: a lot) shorter than normal. Maybe you’ll like that? Or maybe you want all the juicy deets? It is what it is. Let’s begin with my Christmas reads.…
We’ll begin with a list that you’ll find nowhere else: My Best Reads of 2025. It’s possible that not a single book on this list was published in 2025, just that I read it in 2025. (Turns out a few of them were published this year. See asterisks.) Some of them were published hundreds of…
I like to pay attention to the literary prize winners. To a certain extent, you can trust that they’ll sift through a whole lot of books (though not even close to all the books) and come up with some good reads. Not all of them will jive with you, sure, but it’s a good place…
I have had this ARC sitting on my shelf for a lot of 2025. However, I wanted to wait till closer to Christmas to read and review it. I like everything in its season, and I balk at people who film holiday content in the summer, etc. I mean, they kinda have to, but I…
I am in a book club that just throws a book at you at a club meeting, and it’s the book you’re meant to read for the next club. There is no preamble, no warning, no sneak peek. Sometimes this works for me, and sometimes it baffles me: should I read this book? I know…
Earlier this year, I discovered that I might not hate Pulitzer Prize winners. For years, I had been reacting to The Goldfinch, which I reviewed here and am not a fan of. Also, I don’t get people’s love of it. So I had written off the Pulitzer. (Maybe there was more to that emotional decision,…
I have been shoving a couple books down people’s throats in 2025, each one after I read it. One of them I’m about to introduce to you, and I can confidently say introduce because it’s not a widely known or distributed book (or author). But it should be. And he should be. At least for…
I am one of those people who likes seasons. And I don’t just mean winter, spring, summer, and autumn. I mean the seasons of life, the holiday seasons, etc. Which means that when Halloween is fast-approaching in the heart of harvest time, I am ordering spiced lattes, baking bone cookies, and streaming Wednesday. It also…
This book came out of left field, but I am so glad it did. I am in this one book club (out of seven) that reads kinda whatever these two guys (okay, they own the bookstore) choose, at least most months. They don’t reveal the next month’s read until everyone is sitting around discussing the…
Oh, I have some things to say about Kerri Maniscalco’s Stalking Jack the Ripper. The first thing is that I did not actually finish this book. I’m being honest. But I read more than half and attended a book club, listening to lots of other opinions (plus reading reviews online). (I also skipped ahead and…
I don’t think I’d read Persuasion by Jane Austen, before. I have seen versions as movies. But I hadn’t read it. Now that I have, the only one left is Mansfield Park. Synopsis: Anne Eliot is a lonely, isolated almost-spinster at 27. She was engaged, 8 years ago, to a man she loved. But that…
Not all of us are devoted romance readers. Not all of us are on the ol’ BookTok following the “smut” lit comedy and reviewers. I guess we no longer call a certain type of romance literature erotica? Because there is a scale, instead. On one end of the scale, Anne of the Island, the third…
I have been told since the drop of Olga Tokarczuk’s Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead that I needed to read it. So, when The Empusium showed up on bookshelves this year with its cool cover and then winkled its way onto one of my book clubs’ lists, I jumped at the…
I should have known. But the teal spredges on Rebecca Thorne’s Can’t Spell Treason Without Tea (Tomes & Tea #1) got me. But there was the kinda cringe-y title and the AI-looking, too-modern illustration inside the front cover. And there was the okay rating, my friend warning me about the “clunky” writing. And the event…
When the woman leading our book club discussion of Real Americans by Rachel Khong said that Khong writes without a plan, little gears aligned in my head and I thought, “Of course she doesn’t!” I can’t guarantee that she’s one of those “outlines are below me” authors, but it would fit. (For my opinions on…
Ghosted by Amanda Quain is one of those YA books that is mostly meant for teen readers. I would say more than half of the YA books I read are more universal, but there you have it. That’s obviously more than okay. I enjoyed the read, to an extent, just maybe not as much as…
I was a little scared of The Honeys by Ryan La Sala because of the horror thing, even if it is YA. Honestly, many teens in my life can handle way more jump scares and gore than I can. Or they think they can and therefore watch and read it. But this book was full…
I read Bunny by Mona Awad because I was about to attend an event with the author. Out of the books available by the featured authors, Bunny was one that I already intended to read since many people over the past year had mentioned it, especially in conjunction with Yellowface (R. F. Kuang), another book…
I had almost no expectations when I bought Charles Yu’s Interior Chinatown and then slid it from the shelf then opened it to read it in the few days I had left for this book-club-read. I’m happy with the cover, but it would be impossible to set a reader up for exactly what they’re going…
I have a lot to say about Demon Copperhead by Barbara Kingsolver and David Copperfield by Charles Dickens. So I’m going to fly through the reviews as best I can. Synopsis: Loved Demon Copperhead. Made me look back and realize I actually like most of the Pulitzer-winners that I’ve read. (The Goldfinch had me feeling…
the starving artist 