The alternate title for this blogpost could also be "A General Handful of Reasons My Brother is Deeply Annoyed With Me," being that - as the other major reader in the family - he's pretty regularly caught up in my mood reading shenanigans, and is either stuck behind me in line to get at a good read, or anxiously waiting for me to catch up with him after he's done speeding ahead. (To be honest, I think he'd even be a little justified about some of these qualms... but I'm the one painting his grad cap for him, so I'm relegating a limited amount of space for him to complain in the comments section.)
For the most part, I do have to chalk up a lot of these choices to being such a mood reader. And, of course, someone prone to buying excessive amounts of books at a time, so they just kind of hang out on my TBR for a while. And a fairly busy human being, who regularly suffers from some pretty intense reading slumps at times. But I'm working on it, all right?
1. Emily Wilde's Encyclopaedia of Faeries, Heather M. Fawcett
One of the most buzzy books in the Romance and Fantasy spheres' Venn diagram overlap last year, I picked this up for my Bloggoversary, and was eager to dive in... unfortunately, the intro was taking a little too long to get established for my liking, and I found the heroine difficult to connect to, so I stopped within the first 30 pages or so. But now that the sequel came out back in January of this year, I feel like I need to get my act together, or risk missing out on the hype train!
I absolutely demolished the first four books of the series back in 2021: for a series that I first picked up that January on a whim, I was through with Exit Strategy by early May, and had even dragged my brother and Dad into the fun with me! But after that, I seriously fell off, and only just finished the next up - Network Effect, the first full-length novella in the lineup - in December 2022, and haven't read another since. Maybe because it felt like the plot was getting a little too convoluted, or the genre elements were just getting a little too deep into the abstract chaos of SciFi for just casual reading, but I just couldn't drive myself to pick up another. I still have more books in the series on my shelves, and plan to read more... I just need to jump back into it.
Like I said, I'm a mood reader, which means I'm not just a freak about putting aside books I'm not really feeling in a given moment, but also, have a tremendous amount of anxiety over "wasting" a great book on a mediocre day. Therefore, my deep love of Seanan McGuire's Every Heart a Doorway series means that I hoard them, like a dragon, dispensing them only for my enjoyment on special occasions, like a long vacation, or my birthday. My brother would probably rank this among my Top Five least-likable traits, because he doesn't read the books until after I'm done with them.
Speaking of books I read with my brother and series he's far outpaced me on, my love of Libba Bray runs true and deep and across genre and despite my ever-increasingly-no-longer-classified-as-Young-Adult age with pretty reliable consistency. (She has a new title coming out at the top of next year!). I absolutely adored the first two books in the Diviners series, but for some reason, this title and King of Crows have been sitting on my shelves, in hardback, despite having been purchased within the first few months of release. I think my reticence stems partially from the fact that I was warned that these two get pretty sad?
I was a huge V. E. Schwab fan, back when her Darker Shade of Magic series first started making waves on BookTube (A series of which I have also, not foolin', only read one). I had just recently graduated college at the time - when books like Vicious and the This Savage Song / Our Dark Duet duology were published - and fully climbed aboard the hype train, but unfortunately, while I still believe she is an incredibly talented storyteller, I haven't read anything of hers since... not even the wunderkind YA novel that took TikTok by storm a few years back. I adored Vicious, though, and my enjoyment has only led me to pursue other similar superheroes-but-darker genre vibes in the time since. However, for some reason, Vengeful has stalwartly remained on my shelves: a Barnes and Noble Exclusive edition, complete with an author signature and an additional short story, no less.
Sometimes I really miss my Science-Fiction-loving roots. Every once in a while my genre dedication will rear its head again - Space Opera by Catherynne M Valente, Redshirts by John Scalzi, and the aforementioned Murderbot series are all SciFi faves - but you have to understand that I was a kid who fully grew up watching Kyle XY, Futurama, and Warehouse 13 every week, adored Disney's Treasure Planet in a way that formed load-bearing permanent structures in my brain, and genuinely, for serious, once brought a towel to high school for the day, to celebrate Douglas Adams' Hitchhiker's Guide series with my friends. When I think about it too deeply, I get all moody and go to Barnes and Noble and buy something with spaceships on the cover, which at one point, was Leviathan Wakes... an appropriate title, because this book is a behemoth. Which is probably why I haven't so much as looked in its direction since.
Diving back into my family's dedicated television viewing habits, a few years ago, my brother, father, and I developed a somewhat overly-involved fascination with a television show called Surreal Estate, airing on SyFy. Following a team of realtors who specialize in haunted houses, we were absolutely transfixed, for not only the first season itself, but the ensuing life-and-death tug-of-ware where the show was declared cancelled, then zombied itself back to life. (In the ensuing years, my Dad cut the cable cord, and my brother moved away for college... which means that his arrival home back in September after graduating works pretty well with the fact that all of season two is on Hulu, and the show was just picked up for a third season altogether). In the meantime, my sister became a total Grady Hendrix fan. This winning combo is why I not only pre-ordered it for her for Christmas 2022, but then, when she passed it on to me, immediately sent it along to my Dad. He thought it was okay. I still haven't read it yet.
I picked this up for my Bloggoversary last year, after being completely blown away when I saw it on store shelves. How precious, I thought, running my fingers along the cover, and how significant, being that I had only just convinced my brother to read the book and then watch the movie with me (He preferred one over the other). However, it wasn't even until earlier this year, when I saw that another one of his books was forthcoming, that I realized Mr. Beagle wasn't nearly as dead as I'd previously assumed him to be. (In fact, he's 85, and recently come out on the other side of some seriously underhanded dealings that severely limited his access to his own copyrighted material, which is insane. As a fan, I'm pleased to hear of both his still-kicking mortality and his legal success). I'm saving this read for a special occasion, though.
I was won over by TJR during a camping trip in 2019, on a lazy afternoon that saw me sobbing my tears into a sleeping bag while reading Evelyn Hugo. (Come to think of it, I finished Malibu Rising on a camping trip, too!). I read and loved Daisy Jones (but the TV show, not so much), and naturally, had to get a hardcover copy of Carrie Soto during an after-Christmas sale at Barnes and Noble. Unfortunately, I didn't really love Carrie's character in Malibu Rising, and had heard some mixed reviews about CSiB, so it still sits on my shelves.
It seems to be a general theme of this blogpost, of being enough of a fan to make something an auto-buy, but not enough of a fan to actually read the damn thing. In that vein, I'm a Jennifer Egan fan, and have been since I read Welcome to the Goon Squad back in my freshman year of college. I've read several of her books since then, like The Keep, which I greatly enjoyed due to its weirdness, and even managed to get halfway into Manhattan Beach, which I hated due to how normal and straightforward it was. But I still have Invisible Circus and Look at Me on my shelves, too, and haven't given them a chance either... it's just that this one was a hardcover purchase, the fact that it's the sequel to the WttGS, and I still haven't even tried it, which especially makes it kind of a bummer.
What's in your Top Ten? Let me know, in the comments below!
