Books

Book 913: Word Nerd – John D. Williams, Jr.

I have no idea where I stumbled across this book. At first, I thought it was The Allusionist or 99% Invisible podcasts, but can’t find any mention of it on their sites and there’s nothing on NPR, aside from a review which I usually avoid, points to where it came from. I also didn’t purchase it from Amazon or any other online book retailer, so I must’ve randomly picked it up in a physical store and not tracked the purchase.

I’m glad I picked it up though! Not because I play SCRABBLE, because I’m not great at it, but because it just had a great title and subtitle and I figured it’d be an interesting read and it truly was.

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Book 906: Black Cake – Charmaine Wilkerson

When someone from the publisher reached out to me about Black Cake, it wasn’t an immediate yes or an immediate no.* I honestly had no idea what I was going to do, I thought it was a beautiful cover (even if I didn’t notice the woman on it for ages) and the multi-generational story drew me in.

What ultimately decided for me was that it was a debut novel, love those most of the time, and my reading list is seriously lacking authors of color and I’ve been saying for years I’m going to expand my reading list. And holy shit y’all I’m so glad I did, this book took me for so many rides.

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Book 875: Souls Aligned (Tasier #2) – Arian Williams

What a dangerous opening line! For some reason when I said yes to this book, I mean I did read the first one after all, I didn’t realize a chunk of it would be taking place in Boston.*

It’s always a gamble with me when it’s in a town I’ve lived in or have been to frequently. Thankfully, Williams didn’t disappoint, but that’s because she kept everything super vague and general, which I’d rather an author do than screw up something everyone who’s been in the city for more than an hour knows.

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Books

Book 862: His Haven (His #3) – Con Riley

This one was a little bit of a disappointment for me. It doesn’t feel like it’s the story of this book that disappointed, more just that the last two were so strong and had such big emotional impacts that this one just fell a little short.

His Haven features Kier, a no-nonsense lawyer whose spent the last year hiding his hurt from being jilted at the altar, and Mitch, Justin’s (Tom’s younger brother with some mental disabilities, from His Compass) health assistant and friend. They’re thrown together when Tom and Nick (protagonists from His Compass) decide they want to purchase a place for Justin and Mitch to stay before/after their various sailing trips.

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Books

Book 861: Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal? – Jeanette Winterson

I picked this book up way back in November 2014 because I’d been hearing great things about it and remembered enjoying Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit in undergrad (and still languishing on my TBR shelf).

I only read this at this moment in time because a few months ago I created a spreadsheet of all the books on my TBR shelf that were under 250 pages that randomly spits out a book title so when I had a bit of a gap or wanted to actually make progress on my shelves I had an easy tool to select a book.

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