August wrap up! I liked all of these, but The Anthropologists was definitely my favorite. The Future is Disabled was the only nonfiction book I read this month. I learned a lot and want to look into some of the ideas more.
The other four featured some of my favorite things
🖼️ Vanessa Yu‘s Magical Paris Tea Shop
🎶 The Second Ending
⚾️ Evvie Drake Starts Over
📚 The Bookish Life of Nina Hill (there‘s no emoji for trivia!)
I love mysteries! Here are all of them I read during my summer vacation in August!
Drive your plow over the bones of the dead was a reread for book club. I also watched the movie Spoor. This was great for discussion!
Stabbed in the Baklava was my June pick for #ThematicCozies celebration as it features a wedding. I really enjoy this series.
Murder at the Black Cat cafe has a cute cover but the contents of this story are pretty grim! 🐈⬛
A Lack of Temperance was my pick for #thematiccozies August travel theme because the main character is a traveling secretary! She goes to Arkansas to work for the head of the temperance society in this first book in the series. It was a little boring, but I‘d still try the next one!
April Reads! With the new school year starting, I didn‘t have as much time to read this month, but I enjoyed all of these very much! Joanne Harris is one of my favorite authors and I enjoyed Moonlight Market which is a story about the moth and butterfly worlds 🦋
Killer Run #ThematicCozies
Unmasking AI #MonthlyNonfiction2025
Twenty past one in the morning on New Year‘s Day.
#FirstLineFridays @ShyBookOwl
I enjoyed reading all of these but these two stood out:
Favorite fiction - At the End of the Matinee
Favorite nonfiction - Code Dependent: Living in the Shadow of AI
Another great reading month! The tagged book was the first book I finished this month and also one of my favorites.
The other two pictured on the graphic are Still Knife Painting for #ThematicCozies and Code Dependent: Living in the Shadow of AI for #MonthlyNonfiction2025 @julieclair
pickStill Knife Painting is the first book in the Paint and Shine series featuring Miranda Trent who moves back to Kentucky when she inherits her uncles farm house. She starts a business for tourists who want to have a local cultural experience with painting and moonshine.
Some characters didn‘t really make sense. But I enjoyed the premise and setting, and I would read the next book. For the #hobby theme, this has art, hiking, cooking & distilling!
In the mood for nonfiction this weekend 📚
Brave Hearted: The Women of the American West
Code Dependent: Living in the Shadow of AI
And I‘ll break that up with A Botanist‘s Guide to Society and Secrets!
#WeekendReads @rachelsbrittain
“Cold rain soaking her boots, splashing her stockings, and leaking from the brim of her ruined hat and onto her face was the least of Saffron Everleigh‘s worries.”
#FirstLineFridays @ShyBookOwl
I loved the first two books in this series and am looking forward to getting started in this one!
This afternoon, I went to a cafe for a book swap! I took Lessons in Chemistry and picked up The Kind Worth Saving. Ordered the balsamic veggie sandwich for lunch. Really nice event 😍
February wrap up!! Finally tried Canva for making this instead of just using LiveCollage. Looking forward to getting started on March reading!
“Music doesn‘t just progress forward in a straight line but works backward into the past as well. Without understanding that, you would never appreciate the fascination of the fugue.” - At the end of the matinee
Enjoying all three of these books, but especially this one!
February was another great reading month!
I don‘t rate the books on Storygraph so this graphic shows what I read at the beginning, middle, and end of the month. The best book I read in February was Human Acts by Han Kang and I also attended a book club meeting on it as well
Spotting something unusual in the flower bed, student number one from class one in the first year of high school went over to it and discovered a round white growth.
#FirstLineFridays @ShyBookOwl
so-soI had been looking forward to reading this for so long! It is set in Ireland, and the story centers on an archeological dig and the woods next to it. The woods, which really described vividly, were my favorite part.
It was disappointing to realize that I wanted to bail around a third of the way in, but I thought certainly this thriller would develop more tension and excitement. Nope!
pickThe subtitle of We Still Here covers the main topics within: pandemic, policing, protest, and possibility. This book was published in 2020 and is organized in interviews format. The chapters Justice for “All” and Whose Violence? were especially powerful.
#Nonfiction2025 #BlackLivesMatter #MonthlyNonfiction2025
@Riveted_Reader_Melissa @julieclair
#WeekendReads @rachelsbrittain
Enjoying all four so far! Tonight I‘ll probably finish Marigold Mind Laundry and then continue reading The Curious Kitten at the Chibineko Kitchen
What I warn you to remember is that I am a detective.
#FirstLineFridays @ShyBookOwl
Reading Marigold Mind Library, I found a reference to film director and screen writer Park Chan-wook. That inspired me to watch one of his films, so I chose Uprising which is set during the Imjin War
I‘ve been reading Taiwan Travelogue this week! It imagines two women‘s lives during the Japanese rule of Taiwan and is is framed as a Japanese writer‘s rediscovered work in translation. I was interested to see this piece from the Asymptote Blog on Taiwanese literature in translation-
https://www.asymptotejournal.com/blog/2025/02/19/taipei-travelogue-on-the-taipei...
pickHer Hidden Genius is about the life and work of Rosalind Franklin whose work was instrumental in discovering the structure of DNA. She faced many obstacles as a woman in science and this fictionalized account of her life includes not only her difficulties with colleagues in the lab but also her parents, who struggled to comprehend her passion for research. Yet she remained committed to her work despite everything ⬇️
I‘m working on writing a longish book review so I‘ve been reading and rereading the same book all weekend - The Black Swan Mystery! But I had a very bookish #ValentinesDayReadathon
🩵 Finished watching The Essex Serpent
💛 Bought a copy of Remarkably Bright Creatures at the bookstore
💚 Attended a book club on Human Acts
🩷 Got a message from someone who picked up a book I took to a book swap a few months ago!
@ShananigansReads
“It is minus twelve degrees Celsius as Anna Larsson drives along Tångbölevägen, which is a very narrow road.”
This book, along with the first in the series Hidden in Snow are the basis of The Åre Murders on Netflix! #FirstLineFridays @ShyBookOwl
Earlier this week I went to see Macbeth with David Tennant and Cush Jumbo at the cinema. The staff was handing out there free postcards as we went in the theater!
This production was amazing and I loved the music and set, but I think The Tempest is still my favorite. Which is your favorite Shakespeare play?
This is the first one of these lists I‘ve done! #tbt #ThreeListThursday @dabbe
1. There were several I studied as a French major: Rhinoceros, Tartuffe, The Stranger
2. Surfacing by Margaret Atwood is one of my favorite books
3. I would like to read The Street by Ann Petry
I think this week‘s sign might be my favorite so far!
The Library! A great place to get checked out 📚
pickOf course I was initially interested in this book because of seeing this beautiful cover on Litsy. When I was younger, I was a little obsessed with reading about the Salem Witch Trials, and I read The Scarlet Letter around that time too.
The author had such a unique idea for the origin of the famous red letter, and the reimagining of Hester and Nat‘s stories was so full of emotion!
I spotted this while reading the New York Review of Books. This month marks the 100th anniversary of Edward Gorey‘s birth 🎂
At the end of last year, I saw an amazing exhibit called Journey to the World of Edward Gorey - I love his illustrations!
#5JoysFriday @DebinHawaii
☕️ Had a Honey Cream Latte in a cute Tom & Jerry cup
🐧 Finch friends
🍱 Dinner at a Japanese restaurant
🍿 Watched A Real Pain at the cinema with a friend
🎧 Audiowalk listening to Hester
I just learned about mlíko when reading A Little Place in Prague and then saw this article about it while scrolling today! It‘s behind a paywall, so here‘s more info from Atlas Obscura instead
https://www.atlasobscura.com/foods/czech-milk-beer-mliko-pilsner
pickAnna Love and Leo Knight are in Prague to learn about brewing beer, but only one of them will have the honor of having their beer featured at the Christmas Beer Festival. I loved everything about their story in the city of a hundred spires 💕
#FictionalTraveler #APlaceYouLove @julieclair
pickThis was such a good cozy mystery with the beginnings of a romance between Clara Harrington, newly arrived in the village of Picklemarsh, and Felicity Abbot, local councillor. Clara and her Aunt investigate the death of their neighbor who collapses face first into his dessert.
But I can‘t recommend this book fully!! Why?? Because you‘ll want to know what happens next, and there don‘t seem to be any more books in the series!!
This weeks sign at the library! Winter is bearable with good books 🐻
I already posted a January wrap up but then I found the monthly graphics on Storygraph 😆 This is the first time I‘ve actually kept up with tracking my reading daily so I‘m excited to see this graph!!
#WeekendReads @rachelsbrittain
🧬 Her Hidden Genius
🍰 Death Before Dessert
January wrap up!! I enjoyed all 12 books this month📚
Not pictured are The Desire Map & Winter in Sokcho which I finished at the last minute! #FictionalTraveler #SomeplaceCold 🇰🇷
The Woman Destroyed 🇫🇷 The Samurai of the Red Carnation 🇫🇷 🇯🇵 Invisible Helix 🇯🇵 Welcome to the Hyunam-Dong Bookshop 🇰🇷 #ReadtheWorld2025
The Puffin of Death 🇮🇸 A Trail of Lies #ThematicCozies
The Kiss Countdown #RiseUpReads
1. The 2025 planners were on sale so I bought a Snoopy themed one
2. Had coffee with a friend before attending a work event
3. Mr Donuts collab with Pierre Marcolini. Chocolate brings me joy😆
4. I tracked my reading every day this month!! Love seeing my completed tracker on Fable
5. Also I started using Finch from the beginning of the year-it‘s so cute and motivating
#FiveJoysFriday @DebinHawaii
He arrived bundled up in a woolen coat. —Winter in Sokcho
#FirstLineFridays @ShyBookOwl
pickRead it in one sitting!! Another great mystery in the Detective Galileo series—the characters and their invisible connections had me hooked 🧬
Shiori Ito‘s documentary Black Box Diaries, based on her memoir Black Box has been nominated for an Academy Award. It is the first Japanese documentary to be nominated
https://www.tokyoweekender.com/entertainment/movies-tv/shiori-itos-black-box-dia...
![[tagged book]](https://image.librarything.com/pics/litsy_webpics/icon_taggedBook@3x.png){kind=icon}
