BOOKS ABOUT BOOKS! Which, let’s be honest, is very on brand for this tag 😂 Y’all know Belle would love a book with bookish themes! Seriously, though, I cannot get enough of books that have some kind of bookish theme. It’s probably because I find it easy to connect with the bookish main characters and the themes just speak to my nerdy soul. Whatever it is, books about books are my happy place 💕 Some recent favorites would be The Starless Sea, Tilly and the Bookwanderers, and The Ten Thousand Doors of January.

I knew next to nothing about The Merciful Crow by Margaret Owen when I first spotted it at the library. The cover completely hooked me and I checked it out immediately. Thankfully, the book turned out to be just as amazing on the inside as it was on the outside! This book and the second in the duology, The Faithless Hawk, are now two of my favorite books of all time. I can’t wait to read whatever Margaret Owen writes next!

The Heart’s Invisible Furies by John Boyne. It has an average Goodreads rating of 4.47 and I thought it was just… meh. It wasn’t bad, it wasn’t great, it just… was. I thought it was going to be this moving, epic tale, but it was mostly just a slog. It took me forever to read because I just could not motivate myself to pick it back up once I put it down, lol. I think it just wasn’t what I was expecting coupled with the fact that I probably could be pared down by a couple hundred pages. I’m glad other people enjoy it, though!

SAMWISE GAMGEE IS FAR AND AWAY BETTER THAN FRODO BAGGINS! This is a hill I will die on! I gotta be honest and admit I have only finished one and a half of the books in the Lord of the Rings trilogy by J.R.R. Tolkein, so maybe Sam turns into a horrible hobbit by the end. But, from what I’ve read, he will always be my favorite and Frodo can go take a long walk off a short pier 😤

(I don’t actively hate Frodo… but he definitely isn’t my fav 😂)

Everything I’ve read and enjoyed in 2020?

Jk, jk! Unless… 🤔

Seriously, though, I think I’ll go with The Rage of Dragons by Evan Winter. I kind of talked about this in my review of the sequel, but I was reading this book when we first moved to Massachusetts. Cross-country moves are stressful, y’all, and it was nice to come home and have this immersive fantasy to lose myself in. It helped me unwind and I’ll always be grateful for that!

There aren’t a lot of series that I’ve started out not liking but got better… mostly because I don’t tend to continue on with a series if I don’t like the first book. So I decided to pick a book instead which is, funnily enough, the beginning of a new series. It took me a couple of tries to get past the first few chapters in this book. It felt like such a slog and I was honestly bored to tears. But it was a Netgalley ARC and I needed to finish it, so I decided to give the audiobook a go. Y’all, once the crew gets out to sea, this was a wild ride! I found myself really enjoying this book in audio form and now I’m curious about continuing the series.

I’d love to have dinner with a couple of characters from Raybearer by Jordan Ifueko! If I must pick just one, though, I have to go with our main character, Tarisai. I love her so much! She’s such a wonderful person and sounds like someone I would love to meet. I feel like we’d get along and, let’s face it, Tarisai needs some down time. I’d probably have to convince that she can take a load off for a little bit, but we’d have fun. And I just realized that, if I don’t want her getting sick, I would have to invite the rest of Dayo’s Council sooooo… win-win!