6 Easy Ways to Unhaul Your Books

6 Easy Ways to Unhaul Your Books shows three stacks of books including Strike the Zither, Secret of the Moon Conch, and The Edge of In Between.

6 Easy Ways to Unhaul Your Books

Spring and Fall always make me want to clean and organize, and one of my favorite things to organize is, of course, my books! This year, I’ll review somewhere around 200 titles, and about one-third of them will be in the form of physical copies I receive from publishers. Which means about 70 books for the year.

Not including the books I buy (not zero) or are gifted to me. Or books anyone else in our household of readers happens to buy.

At any rate, it’s … Continue reading

A Very Belated Winter Wrap-Up

2023 Winter Wrap-Up image shows a cup of tea on the right next to a stack of books.

A Very Belated Winter Wrap-Up

Spring has (maybe?) sprung, and here I am scraping together my winter wrap-up. It’s been a busy season! Read on to see the best books I read this season as well as my most popular posts. Finally, I’ll check in on the goals I set for the year and how I’m doing in meeting them.

Winter Wrap-Up Behind the Scenes News

Last year, I started working directly with several new publishers, which means easier access to more of the books I can’t wait to read. Which is good and bad? Because yeowza, my calendar has never been so packed.

I used to … Continue reading

If We Were Having Coffee Update

If We Were Having Coffee

I’ve been meaning to post a blog update and also really wanting to do an “If We Were Having Coffee” style post, so today is the day I’m doing it! If you’re unfamiliar with the prompt, it’s basically me talking to you as if we were across the table from each other having coffee– something I know I miss right now with social distancing and such. So. Here we go.

If we were having coffee I would tell you that my mom’s in the hospital. No, it’s not Covid19, thankfully. But it’s still the hospital, still scary, and still not at all what we planned for right now. She’ll be okay. I’m thankful for that. But even though I believe she’ll be fine, the fact that she’s in the hospital still throws my world off-kilter. My family and my parents all … Continue reading

Has Clean Become a Dirty Word in Book Reviews?

Has Clean Become a Dirty Word: using clean in book reviews

I’m super late to the conversation, but I’ve been thinking about this topic a lot. The first I’d seen of the discussion was a Twitter post positing that calling a book “clean” was the same as calling books with explicit sexual content or profanity “dirty”, which the tweet named as shaming language and not okay.

It takes me a long time to process things like that. I’m kind of a people pleaser by nature, so there was a part of me that wanted to go back through every post and page on my blog and replace the term “clean” with something more friendly and less potentially offensive.

Obviously, I ended up not doing … Continue reading