Spooky Season TBR 2022

Happy September! Autumn is my absolute favorite season and living in Minnesota I always feel like our fall is cut short by winter. So to extend the season I have decided that this year I will be celebrating fall and spooky season during September AND October. I love reading books that really fit the mood of the season so I have put together a rather large TBR for this year. I am a mood reader so this is mostly so that I have a large variety of books to choose from. I have gone through my entire library and selected books that I feel fit the vibe I’m looking for during spooky season and filled one of my book carts with those books so that when the time comes it will make it easier for me to choose a book rather than leaving them on the shelves intermixed with all of my other books.

And of course I had to decorate the cart as well! On the cart I have put 42 books from several different genres. There are vampires, witches, zombies, ghosts, serial killers, and more! I am SO excited to read as many of these in those two months that I can.

• The Sandman vol. 1 by Neil Gaiman
• The Hills Have Eyes: The Beginning
• 28 Days Later: The Aftermath
• 30 Days of Night: Red Snow
• Winterwood by Shea Ernshaw
• Final Girls by Riley Sager
• Book of Night by Holly Black
• Shutter Island by Dennis Lehane
• The Strain by Guillermo del Toro and Chuck Hogan
• The Southern Book Club’s Guide To Slaying Vampires by Grady Hendrix
• The Dark Half by Stephen King
• Hour of the Witch by Chris Bohjalian
• The Year of the Witching by Alexis Henderson
• House of Leaves by Mark Z. Danielewski
• Slewfoot by Brom

• Time’s Convert by Deborah Harkness
• The Only Good Indians by Stephen Graham Jones
• The Companion by Katie Alender
• Supermarket by Bobby Hall
• White Smoke by Tiffany D. Jackson
• NOS4A2 by Joe Hill
• Not the Witch You Wed by April Asher
• The Graveyard Book by Neil Gaiman
• Interview with the Vampire by Anne Rice
• Gideon the Ninth by Tamsyn Muir
• My Heart is a Chainsaw by Stephen Graham Jones
• Elevation by Stephen King
• The Beautiful by Renee Ahdieh

• The Historian by Elizabeth Kostova
• The Witch Hunter by Max Seeck
• Folly by Laurie R. King
• The Chain by Adrian McKinty
• Blaze by Richard Bachman (aka Stephen King)
• Dark Lover by J.R. Ward
• Red Dragon by Thomas Harris
• The Vampire Lestat by Anne Rice
• King of Battle and Blood by Scarlett St. Clair
• The Last Seance by Agatha Christie
• Dracula by Bram Stoker
• When the Reckoning Comes by LaTanya McQueen
• The Phantom of the Opera by Gaston Leroux
• The Turn of the Screw & In the Cage by Henry James

I also plan to choose my audiobooks that I listen to during work to fit the mood as well. I’m not sure what those will be yet but I’m guessing there will be some Stephen King in the mix. In addition to those, I have a few ARCs that will be read and reviewed throughout spooky season:

• The Wilderwomen by Ruth Emmie Lang
• Spells for Forgetting by Adrienne Young
• Daphne by Josh Malerman
• The Prisoner by B.A. Paris
• Little Eve by Catriona Ward
• The Luminaries by Susan Dennard

I am super excited to get started with these reads to fully embrace fall and spooky season this year. I would even be fine with this all extending into November as well 🙂

How early do you start celebrating fall and spooky season? Do you plan to read spooky season themed books during fall?

April 2021 TBR

Happy spring! It is hard to believe that it is already April 2021 but I’m definitely not complaining. I don’t know about you guys but I am so ready for spring. This has been one of the easiest winters for me in quite awhile but it’s still my least favorite season. Since I am still working from home, I didn’t have to drive to or from work in any snowstorms and am so grateful to have had at least one winter off from that. But enough about that… Today I am presenting to you my April 2021 TBR in all its singular glory. That’s right, folks, there is indeed only ONE book on my TBR this month. And no, this is not an April Fool’s joke! 🙂

War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy

War and Peace is a mighty tome that I have been wanting to read for many years now and I decided that this would finally be the year that I would make it happen. I spent the past few months consuming books in the attempt to get a good start on my Goodreads reading challenge before I would have to devote a lot of time to reading this Russian classic. Clocking in at 1,440 pages, I knew that I would need to block off at least a few weeks, if not more. A couple of weeks ago I sat down with my copy and in addition to relaxing the spine a bit to prevent the dreaded broken spine, I also leafed through and tabbed off the volumes and parts of the novel in an effort to come up with a loose schedule for reading it. There are 4 volumes plus an epilogue and within those are 17 parts total. I figure that if I can read one part every couple of days, I will need just a little over a month to complete the entire book. Once I start reading it I will be able to better gauge how quickly I can read it or how slowly I want to take it. From what I’ve gathered doing research on this book, this is not one to rush through.

When I first decided to read War and Peace this year, I wanted to do a little research on the different translations to find the right one for me. This article from Tolstoy Therapy really helped me start to narrow down the translation I wanted to read. I already owned a used copy of the Aylmer and Louise Maude translation but after finding a blog post by The Ardent Biblio where the author included a single line from three of the more popular translations, I decided that it was not the translation for me. I ended up choosing the Anthony Briggs translation which just seems to flow a little better for me. If you are wanting to read this book, I highly recommend doing some research to decide which translation will fit better for you. What works for me may not work for you or the next person.

I am really excited to get started on this book and I am hoping to do a few updates here on the blog and Instagram as I read.

Are you a fan of reading the classics? What’s the biggest book you have ever read?

21 Books In 2021 Challenge

Hello everyone! It’s been a long time since my last post. What can I say, 2020 was a doozy. My hope this year is to be more active here but at the same time still keep things low key and as stress free as possible. This is supposed to be fun 🙂

My first post for 2021 is a reading challenge that I have been seeing around both in the blogging world and on Instagram. It seems like the perfect way to knock off some books that have been sitting on my TBR list for far too long as well as books I acquired last year that I had fully intended on reading in 2020. My full reading goal for the year is 75 books so this will be only a fraction of what I hope to read this year. This challenge is pretty self-explanatory… to choose 21 books that you want to read in 2021.

• The Bronze Horseman by Paullina Simons
• Queenie by Candice Carty-Williams
• The Vanishing Half by Brit Bennett
• Aurora Rising by Jay Kristoff and Amie Kaufman
• Firefly Lane by Kristin Hannah
• Mexican Gothic by Silvia Moreno-Garcia
• Winterwood by Shea Ernshaw
• Silver Sparrow by Tayari Jones
• The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms by N.K. Jemisin
• A Song of Wraiths and Ruin by Roseanne A. Brown
• Into the Wilderness by Sara Donati
• The Year of the Witching by Alexis Henderson
• Kindred by Octavia E. Butler
• With the Fire on High by Elizabeth Acevedo
• Ross Poldark by Winston Graham
• Stormdancer by Jay Kristoff
• Spinning Silver by Naomi Novik
• Rebecca by Daphne du Maurier
• Regretting You by Colleen Hoover
• The Starless Sea by Erin Morgenstern
• Recursion by Blake Crouch

I feel like this is a pretty good mix of genres so I should be able to fit all of my moods whenever they strike. What books are you hoping to read this year that you haven’t gotten around to in years past?

Halloween TBR

Happy October everyone! I absolutely love this time of year. Everything about fall is fantastic to me. One of my favorite things to do is to pick out some spooky and thrilling books to read all month long. I’m not so great at following through with my TBRs but I am most successful with my Halloween TBRs. I think I’ve picked some really great books, including a couple I don’t have in hand yet.

• The Companion by Katie Alender
• The Shadows by Alex North
• One By One by Ruth Ware
• The Year of the Witching by Alexis Henderson
• Mexican Gothic by Silvia Moreno-Garcia
• Ninth House by Leigh Bardugo
• Home Before Dark by Riley Sager

I have a couple other books that I will also be reading this month that I am super excited about:

• Magic Lessons by Alice Hoffman
• The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue by V.E. Schwab
• Swamp Thing: Twin Branches by Maggie Stiefvater
• The Forgotten Kingdom by Signe Pike

What books do you plan to read this month?

20 Books of Summer: 2020

Hello! I’m here for another attempt at the 20 Books of Summer challenge! I don’t know that I’ve ever read all of the books I’ve picked for my challenge TBR but it’s fun to put them together anyways. I am a mood reader so I put together a different variety of genres to keep me interested all summer long. I will also be focusing on ARCs as I mentioned in my last post but I decided not to include those in this list. So here we have my book choices for the next three months. I don’t have them in any particular order so I will just pick and choose throughout the list as I go. The two books marked with an * are books I need to read before two of the ARCs on my list for June.

(All links are to each book’s Goodreads page)

1. Recursion by Blake Crouch
2. The Midnight Lie by Marie Rutkoski
3. Winterwood by Shea Ernshaw
4. Regretting You by Colleen Hoover
5. The Starless Sea by Erin Morgenstern
6. Warrior of the Altaii by Robert Jordan
7. The Beautiful by Renee Ahdieh
8. The Near Witch by V.E. Schwab
9. Ninth House by Leigh Bardugo
10. Misery by Stephen King
11. The Lost Queen by Signe Pike*
12. Escaping From Houdini by Kerri Maniscalco
13. Aurora Rising by Amie Kaufman and Jay Kristoff
14. Call Down the Hawk by Maggie Stiefvater
15. House of Earth and Blood by Sarah J. Maas
16. The Outsiders by S.E. Hinton
17. Postscript by Cecelia Ahern
18. DEV1AT3 by Jay Kristoff*
19. Dreams of Gods and Monsters by Laini Taylor
20. The Testaments by Margaret Atwood

The following are the ARCs that I will be focusing on for the month of June. As I mentioned above, two of these ARCs I need to read a preceding book for and I included those books in my challenge TBR, marked with an *. I also marked the corresponding ARCs with an *. I put these in order of publication date and my plan is to read them in this exact order.

 

1. Blood Countess by Lana Popovic
2. Ruthless Gods by Emily A. Duncan
3. A Bad Day for Sunshine by Darynda Jones
4. Big Summer by Jennifer Weiner
5. The Jane Austen Society by Natalie Jenner
6. The Dilemma by B.A. Paris
7. TRUEL1F3 by Jay Kristoff*
8. The Forgotten Kingdom by Signe Pike*

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Have you read any of the books on my list?