There aren‘t enough ways for me to express how goddamn good this book is. On the surface, it‘s wicked and satisfying, but the more I think about it, the more it‘s given me to consider.

So, I was skeptical but when my SIL handed this to me, I figured it couldn‘t hurt to glance through it and, to my utter surprise, I found myself absorbing Konmari‘s logic like a sponge. While I found some aspects problematic (the cute neighbor thread was a bit much) I really like how compassionate and individualized the method is. Will def be applying it to certain aspects of my life (though probably not my books).

Goldie Vance is the bad ass teen detective I never knew I needed. Sorry Nancy Drew, Goldie Vance just replaced you in my heart ♥️

Eee! So sweet! It took me under 10 minutes to read it and it was ten minutes well spent! And my cat thought it was pretty good too.

I enjoyed House of Furies so damn much. It didn‘t go quite where I thought it would (hoped it would?) but it satisfied my insatiable craving for dark, mysterious happenings in big, creepy houses. Highly goth approved.

This was so charming and lovely and meditative. It read like a breeze but I still find myself thinking about it several days later.

This was such a fun read - perfect for dark and stormy nights. While it wasn‘t as creepy as the blurbs implied, it was fast paced, tense and pleasantly dark. Plus, it featured one of the best creepy houses with secret passages I‘ve ever read. The sexy tension between Donovan and Kate didn‘t hurt either.

First book of 2019! Sadly, it was only so-so. The story and premise were solid, but Bailey‘s prose style is *really* self-conscious and over-wrought. As I was reading, I was always more aware of his thesaurus than the tension and dread I was clearly meant to feel. Not terrible but #pretentiousAF.

I loved Witches of New York! So witchy! So fun! So joyfully feminist! Great book to end the year on 🥰

There‘s nothing wrong with Number One Chinese Restaurant - some of the characterization and use of language is lovely - but, in the end, it was just a banal story about banal, sometimes awful people. It also had the highly polished but almost voiceless quality you sometimes get in highly workshopped novels and / or MFA program writers, which I don‘t, personally, enjoy. In the end it was good enough, but bloodless and definitely just so-so.

This is very much a marmite book - either you will love it, or you really won‘t. While I don‘t like marmite on toast, I LOVED this book. It may be my favorite read if the year.

This was such a compelling, painful read. Elegant, raw and completely affecting.

Reading this was like watching a slow-motion train wreck in the best possible way. Giles caught such desperate, raw depth of feeling in the boy, and such frustrated angry devotion in Ruth. They are both profoundly flawed and deeply compelling. It‘s a beautifully crafted novel.

This was one of the most intricately plotted books I‘ve ever read. While the morality underpinning it felt a bit heavy handed at time, it felt well-earned by the end. It really is a puzzle box, and a completely successful one. I‘m honestly impressed.

I really love hellebores. They‘re lovely and subtle and resilient little things. I love them so much that I used a bunch of images from this book for my newest tattoo 😊

Short, sweet and visually super engaging. I love Baby Monkey. I love Baby Monkey‘s pants even more.

So fun and sly and sweet and sharp-tongued. I ❤️ Catherynne Velente‘s brain.

When Catherynne Valente does a thing, she does it all the way. In this case, she pulled off a western retelling of Snow White with a bad ass, complicated POC heroine, a creepy, complicated villainess and enough of the uncanny to give it a lovely edge of strangeness. It‘s a gritty novella with gorgeous evocative prose - the kind of book you gobble while trying to savor the words.

I remember hating this book in high school, so I thought I‘d re-read it for the @bookriot Read Harder Challenge to see if I liked it more 20 years later. The answer is, apparently, no. I have no idea what my issue is because I can objectively see how good it is. It may just be the wrong book for. Maybe I‘ll try it again in another 20 years...

I really loved this one. I tried to read Meddling Kids but couldn‘t quite get into it so I wasn‘t sure about supernatural enhancements, but Cantero vaulted me into this crazy, labyrinthian plot set in a crazy, labyrinthian house and I couldn‘t put it down. It‘s not perfect by any stretch, but it doesn‘t need to be - it‘s purely, gleefully, unapologetically itself, and I loved that about it.

I‘m enjoying this IMMENSELY. Thank you @Liberty at @bookriot for recommending on All the Backlist! It‘s awesome and I never would‘ve found it otherwise.

Nicola Griffith did something powerful in So Lucky. She allowed a queer woman with a history of trauma spend most of her novel bitter and deeply angry. Mara‘s anger is ugly and frustrated and justified, and Griffith allows it to play out against a tense and emotionally isolated backdrop. While I can‘t say I “enjoyed” it, I was deeply compelled and, though it became a bit ham fisted towards the end, impressed by its taut elegance.

Mem is a lovely book. Though very smart and considered, it‘s ultimately driven by emotion and the sort of spontaneous realizations that happen when one least expects it - the kind one looks back on as having a “before” and “after”.

I‘ve read a lot of craft books in the twenty years I‘ve been writing professionally, and I‘ve got to say that this is one of the most useful I‘ve ever come across. It‘s deeply playful and seriously comprehensive. It‘s also quirky as hell, which is especially friendly for writers of fantastic and speculative fiction, but by no means exclusive to any one genre.

This was so much more than great noir. Mosley‘s prose is so damn effortless and effective; Easy is a fascinating, complicated protagonist; and the mystery is all wrapped up in issues of race and perception. It‘s flat out brilliant. So much punch packed into such a slender package.

I didn‘t *not* enjoy this book. I was just hyper aware of Ruth Ware telling me what to think of Hal (not a mouse!)and manipulating the other characters to make her consciously twisty plot work. It was ok, but just ok.

It‘s great. That‘s pretty much all I can say without writing a thesis on why it is, in fact, so great. That said, there are bits that I found problematic from a modern, 21st century sensibility, but that‘s spoiler territory and it‘s still awfully great.

Tangled has human relations, misdirection and characterization like only Christie can pull off. So good.

My daughter and I just finished the entire series on audiobook and, I have to say, I was as invested as she was. David Tennant is a BRILLIANT narrator, but, more than that, the books are charming and funny and genuinely engaging. I‘m really happy she and I got to experience them together 💗

I tried this on audio but even though the narrator was *fantastic* I had to stop. Something about the novel irritated me so much that I ended up in a bad mood every time I listened. I‘m still not sure entirely what, but it wasn‘t really worth finishing it to find out.

I listened to this on audio and I literally couldn‘t listen to anything else until I‘d finished it. Even after all the hype, it managed to live up to my high expectations.

I‘m reading some Agatha Christie as I listen to her new biography. Even this, her first published mystery, is in a class by itself. Her portrayals of Poirot, Hastings and the rest of the cast are so wry and knowing and, ultimately, compassionate. Add in the clever plotting and it‘s obvious how strong she was right out of the gate.

This collection was so lovely and strange. Tidbeck has such a light, subtle hand that it seems perfectly natural for a carrot-baby to be born in a can, or a man to fall in love with an airship named Beatrice. Fantastic - on every sense of the word. ❤️

My 6yo daughter and I read this together, and we both fell in love with it. So much love for this book for so many reasons that I‘m not going to try to list them. Just read it if you haven‘t already.

Queer princesses kicking ass and falling in love? Yes. All the yeses everywhere. This was so lovely and charming and wonderful that I don‘t know what to do with myself ❤️

Library book haul! I just finished part one of a massive project and have the next week off. I‘m going to see how many of these I can get through before it‘s back to the grindstone.

I‘m not one for thrillers, especially those on the more gruesome end of the spectrum, but Belsham executes a take on the classic cat and mouse plot with so much confidence and with such a sure hand that I gobbled it up. It‘s a super strong debut, and I‘m looking forward to more from her.

I can‘t remember the last time I 100% enjoyed every single story in a collection, but I 100% loved every single story in this one. Barnhill‘s use of language is delicious and precise, and the stories she weaves with it are strange and bittersweet and lovely, almost like the narrative version of a sepia photograph. Possibly one of my top 5 favorite books of all time.

Some of these stories completely wrung me out, they were so emotionally powerful and linguistically rich. Others just didn‘t connect for me. As glad as I am to have read the collection, it was a little too hit or miss for me to feel fully satisfied.

This slim volume packs in an impressive amount of detailed information, both about the fashions themselves, as well as the historical period they represent. It‘s a lovely reference.

My daughter and I just finished reading this together. It was a big hit for both of us. Zita is a sassy, loyal, relatable heroine and her adventure is populated by some of the best not-humans I‘ve read in a long time (we especially love Strong Strong). “Mommy, this one gets five thumbs up.” I agree.

I ❤️ everything about Relish. Lucy Knisley is my kind of foodie. This is the memoir version of comfort food.

I LOVE the Haunted Mansion ride at Disneyland and was super intrigued by the idea of a graphic novel set in that world. I was ready to forgive all kinds of messes bc I‘m so sentimentally attached to the ride. But even though the artwork is beautiful, the story fell flat (hard). No amount of buy-in could get me past the floppy plot.

This was a completely fascinating read. Dickey contextualized the familiar idea of hauntings within the framework of American history, so that the details of each haunted place became a mirror to what‘s happening in our culture at a given time. Really brilliant. I‘ll probably end up giving it to everyone I know at Christmas.

I‘m not even sure where I heard about this collection, but I‘m glad I picked it up. The stories are quietly bizarre and just a few ticks off. Some of them feel a bit hollow, but for the most part there‘s some lovely meat on the bone.

I picked this collection up on a whim after hearing it mentioned on a @bookriot podcast. I didn‘t expect to read every story as if I were compelled, but I did. There‘s something alchemical about the way Sachdeva combines narrative with prose. At times, I wanted to stop reading, (Manus and Pleiades were especially difficult) but I couldn‘t, and now, having finished them all, I‘m very glad of that.

I‘m not a great reader of poetry, but I wanted to read something for Poetry Month, so I picked this up. It was incredible. I almost don‘t want to try to express how excellent it was - nothing I say would communicate how beautiful, powerful and painful Reynolds‘ novel in poems is.

I finished this last week and then life happened and I forgot to log it. Long story short, I loved it! Creepy, clever and a little insidious - everything I had hoped for and more! I especially loved The Rabbit and the Mr. Toad stories. So fantastically creepy.

This is my first David Mitchell, and I really enjoyed it. It‘s structure, which I can only describe as progressively episodic, worked incredibly well. While most of the bed fell a little flat fir me, the final moments redeemed it. Quick, merciless read.

I can‘t say that I enjoyed The Red Parts though I admire Maggie Nelson‘s honesty in writing it. She does not shy away from the messes in her own life, even as she writes beautiful prose about a murder trial. I failed to connect with it emotionally, but that may have more to do with me than with the book. Still, it was worth the read.