My Year of Rest and Relaxation

by Ottessa Moshfegh

Started on: Apr 28, 2026

Finished on: May 2, 2026 (289 pages long)

This was another book recommended by the library in order to get myself out of the sci-fi/fantasy hole. This one I didn't like quite as much, although I am fascinated by the idea of trying to sleep as much as she did. It's a wonderful dive into a characters thoughts and it wanders in and out of thoughts in the same way that a dream does for me. There's something about it that made me uncomfortable, but I know that it is meant to be. That's the point of art, after all.

The Seas

by Samantha Hunt

Started on: Apr 27, 2026

Finished on: Apr 28, 2026 (193 pages long)

This was a book that was recommended by my library when I was asking about pushing myself out of the sci-fi/fantasy hole that I have dug myself into. And this was definitely a good book, just a little bit of magical realism, real problems dealt with by people. The way that the clarity of the perspective felt like it came and went like the tides of the sea itself. All of it was fantastic. I want to dive into writing a little more like this, I think.

Surprise! A Placeholder Book

by a person

Started on: Apr 27, 2026

Finished on: Apr 27, 2026 (350 pages long)

I definitely read a book. This is here to make sure I don't lose track that the book happened. No I won't tell you anything else about it.

Yet Another Placeholder Book

by a person

Started on: Apr 26, 2026

Finished on: Apr 26, 2026 (350 pages long)

I definitely read a book. This is here to make sure I don't lose track that the book happened. No I won't tell you anything else about it.

The Giver

by Lois Lowry

Started on: Apr 18, 2026

Finished on: Apr 19, 2026 (179 pages long)

Another classic that I hadn't revisited for quite a long time. I am already looking into reading the rest of the quartet (something I never did when I was younger), but it is startling how much this writing has not moved from being a reflection of the world around us in some ways. It made me want to look for the good and the bad, cherish the colors and feelings that keep us feeling so strongly.

The River Has Roots

by Amal El-Mohtar

Started on: Apr 18, 2026

Finished on: Apr 18, 2026 (133 pages long)

This was an absolute delight to read. A blend of a magical world that really crept into my thoughts over the days after it. The idea of magic being grammar (words are magic, regardless of if you think they are or not) was such a wonderful thing. I love El-Mohtar's writing and I am going to keep searching out their writing to look at more and more of the images that they can give to me, so I can study them in my mind for years to come.

The Little Prince

by Antoine de Saint-Exupery

Started on: Apr 17, 2026

Finished on: Apr 18, 2026 (96 pages long)

This is a classic. Even if it's made for children, it's made for the children in our hearts. It has been many many years since I last read this book and it is one that I've heard is always good to return to in your adult life and to reflect back on your life so far and where you are going in the future. I can't say that I have anything figured out. But maybe I'll stop being obsessed with my own little planet and look up and around me at all that the universe has to offer.

The Knight and The Moth

by Rachel Gillig

Started on: Apr 15, 2026

Finished on: Apr 17, 2026 (389 pages long)

This wasn't a book that I got for the romantasy aspects of it all, this was specifically because of the worldbuilding. I wanted to dive into the world that this book had put together and much to my joy, the story wanted me to go there with it. I love the world that's painted in this book and I'm very interested in exploring the sequel when it eventually comes out this year. I've liked the world, I'm in love with some of the characters, and I was surprised by the twist in the last couple of pages. I should have seen that one coming, but even if I had thought it would happen, I still think it would have surprised me a little bit.

Wolf Worm

by T. Kingfisher

Started on: Apr 8, 2026

Finished on: Apr 15, 2026 (276 pages long)

While I would argue that this leans harder into one genre, I do feel like this fit into the magical realism horror books that I've been reading a lot of lately. And honestly, this one had a twist that I called very early on, but it was more of a "Wouldn't it be cool if this happened?" than trying to actually guess something that was going to happen later on. The writing was beautiful, the constant use of pigments to describe the environment was also a wonderful touch. I loved the depth of everything here. Kingfisher's writing has always been a favorite of mine and that's only gotten more prominent, the more I read.

Speculative Whiteness

by Jordan S. Carroll

Started on: Apr 7, 2025

Finished on: Apr 7, 2026 (107 pages long)

The problems with Sci-Fi have been numerous for many years. I was exposed to some more varied Sci-Fi authors over the years and I knew that I liked the variety of stories that I could find in other parts of the world and the unique inspirations that made those Sci-Fi different required a lot of thinking about the state of the world in the past and in the future and how things could keep progressing. And despite knowing all of that, I didn't look back at the Sci-Fi I grew up with as closely as I wanted. I've expanded my repetoire of Sci-Fi authors, but that will never erase what people will do to the genre and how they will take something I love as a reason to keep their bigoted agendas for the future. It makes me sick. It makes me want to keep reading more Sci-Fi and share those new authors and messages with all the people in my life.

The Honeys

by Ryan La Sala

Started on: Apr 5, 2025

Finished on: Apr 7, 2026 (340 pages long)

I think the new genre of my year is going to be magical realism. While a lot of this story does eventually delve into something more solidly magical, there's a lot of magical realism in this horror novel. There's a little bit of unsettling, a little bit of unsatisfying. And it made me think. That is the important part of it all. It really made me think.

The Raven and The Reindeer

by T. Kingfisher

Started on: Apr 3, 2025

Finished on: Apr 4, 2026 (224 pages long)

I like reading stories that have their basis in myths from around the world that I'm less familiar with. I knew very little about the mythology of the area in which this book is based in. So now this has turned into a fun project, where I'm going to spend an amount of time looking up new mythological information to see what's going on there and compare it to the other mythologies that I'm familiar with. It was a quick book, but the ending chapters really stuck with me. It might be one that I want to read again in several years.

Vita Nostra

by Marina Dyachenko, Sergey Dyachenko

Started on: Mar 29, 2025

Finished on: Apr 4, 2026 (408 pages long)

This book came recommended to me because of my previous like of The Magicians series. And I have to say that this delivered in a similar part of what I wanted out of the world. But I wanted also something that wasn't cut and dry about what was going on. I wanted magic realism and this was exactly that. I loved the translation and the overall story of this novel. It makes me think that I might need to find some more Russian authors to read and see if their storytelling is something that I absolutely adore or if this book was just perfect for me this week.

Consider This

by Chuck Palahniuk

Started on: Dec 20, 2025

Finished on: Mar 30, 2026 (256 pages long)

Now you may be thinking, "Damn that's a long time to be reading a book." You'd be right! I started this one while dealing with some parts of life and just kept trucking forward. Sometimes, the only way to understand advice is to sit with it. And there are parts of this book that I sat with and some that I have consumed right down to the metamorphical bone and made part of the flesh that I carry with me. But no matter how it went, this is a book that I will come back to. Especially as I start working on the reading lists that were in the back of the book. I would not be surprised if I don't reread this one soon. Not all that is written in this book is something that I will use, but all of the words have made a shift in my perspective and how I work on things.

The Gilded Abyss

by Rebecca Thorne

Started on: Mar 26, 2026

Finished on: Mar 28, 2026 (446 pages long)

So I've been absolutely craving another playthrough of the Bioshock series, but instead of doing that, I decided to turn around and focus on getting other things done. The compromise for myself was that I got to read a book that was similar to it. Now I will say, the aesthetics of it are the same, but this narrative diverges greatly from the Bioshock series, but in fantastic ways. It tackles one of my favorite fantasy tropes. And I am absolutely looking forward to the second book in the series as soon as it comes out.

Another Placeholder Book

by a person

Started on: Mar 23, 2026

Finished on: Mar 25, 2026 (503 pages long)

I definitely read a book. This is here to make sure I don't lose track that the book happened. No I won't tell you anything else about it.

Placeholder Book Because I Don't Want This One On My List

by a person

Started on: Mar 15, 2026

Finished on: Mar 21, 2026 (488 pages long)

I definitely read a book. This is here to make sure I don't lose track that the book happened. No I won't tell you anything else about it.

Anatomy of a Breakthrough

by Adam Atler

Started on: Mar 20, 2026

Finished on: Mar 21, 2026 (320 pages long)

Everything going on inside of this book is advice that I have heard elsewhere (not a bad thing) backed up by more examples than just explicitly the creative sources that I usually see (very good thing). It's always reassuring to see more than one person cover the same advice because that usually means that it's advice worth taking. I really did appreciate all of the anecdotes and while I didn't take as in-depth notes as I normally would for a book like this, it did help me start rethinking some of the creative ruts I have found myself in recently.

Swordheart

by T. Kingfisher

Started on: Mar 16, 2026

Finished on: Mar 20, 2026 (426 pages long)

I was already interested in the concept of this story in terms of just what the world was like, and (while there wasn't a ton in the way of explicit answers) there were a lot of small pieces of the world that I got to put together and understand. I wish that I could have another couple stories in this universe, covering all of the other things that are out there.

One Dark Window

by Rachel Gillig

Started on: Mar 17, 2026

Finished on: Mar 18, 2026 (421 pages long)

Okay, so this book has been popping up everywhere and I'm assuming that more people were focused on some of the romance, but I am honestly fascinated by a story that takes a character and truly breaks it down the way that this story does. I liked the world building enough that I think I will keep reading into the second book, but the romance felt a little bit off to me. I just didn't gel with the main couple as a couple as much as I thought I would.

Empire of the Vampire

by Jay Kristoff

Started on: Feb 21, 2026

Finished on: Mar 15, 2026 (739 pages long)

I'm not always in the mood for a big book like this, but I did enjoy this book quite a bit. I liked the twists and turns that were taken through the story that was being told. I know that there are more books in this series, the next of which is already on its way to me, but I'm hoping that there will be even more twists and turns as we go through the next one. Dark, religious, with a bite of humanity amongst it all. It really made me feel something strongly at times. There are beautiful passages and the illustrations of the characters throughout are wonderful (but also it made it difficult to read when I was out and about in the world).

Pale Blue Dot

by Carl Sagan

Started on: Mar 8, 2026

Finished on: Mar 14, 2026 (381 pages long)

I have been spending the last couple of months thinking about the world at large and how I fit into it. This book in some ways unsettled me and other ways comforted me. I am a part of a small thing in the universe and while I would like to leave the parts of the world that I touch better than how I left them, I also think it's important to remember that much of what I do is functionally just fluff in the universe. It keeps me from taking it too seriously, from thinking too much of what I'm doing. I'm just doing the little things that make me feel human. And maybe one day we will make it to space. Maybe one day, humanity will become more. I will write and tell stories that push them forward, but I won't be there to see it happen. But even if I impact one person, I think that's enough.

Nightshade and Oak

by Molly O'Neill

Started on: Mar 7, 2026

Finished on: Mar 7, 2026 (400 pages long)

Yes I read this in one sitting give or take. Yes that is a little bit fast. Yes that does color my view of this work, but overall, I think that this work isn't a terrible one. It's just a little bit messy and a little bit of the kind of folklore that I wanted to hear more about. There were some sections that I felt were a little rushed when I would have liked more details and others that dragged slower than I would have liked, but overall, those issues were very minor and I really enjoyed reading through this story. The bittersweet ending has me feeling a sort of way, but it was a good time.

Daily Rituals: How Artists Work

by Mason Currey

Started on: Feb 21, 2026

Finished on: Feb 25, 2026 (278 pages long)

I think the most fascinating part of being a creative is all the time that I spend thinking about all the other creatives out there in the world. There's so many different things that people do and I am constantly wanting to learn about them. This book let me take a little peek into a number of different people's habits and how they existed in their creative space. It's surprising how many of these people had lives just like I do, even if some of the details have slid around a little bit. It's a little bit of a comfort to know that I'm not alone in many habits and I've gathered some new habits that I want to try out for myself.

The Great Gatsby

by F. Scott Fitzgerald

Started on: Feb 20, 2026

Finished on: Feb 21, 2026 (180 pages long)

It has been quite a while since I originally read this book in school and this felt like a book that I should return to at some point. There's quite a bit that I haven't remembered from my past reading of this book, but that doesn't feel like a bad thing. I devoured it in two days, diving back into the story and thinking hard about what it's like to want something so bad. The important thing to me is that there is no character without flaw. Every character has something going on. The complexities of the lives of everyone around Nick and the way that they all cling to past things. Some eventually move, some don't. Gatsby certainly didn't and it caused his downfall. There's more to it that I see now, the regret and longing that I didn't understand more than a decade ago. It was worth revisiting, just for those small new moments that felt sharper and more poignant to me now as a more settled adult (although who am I kidding, I'm anything but settled. I too am longing for and holding onto parts of my past.).

Digital Minimalism

by Cal Newport

Started on: Feb 13, 2026

Finished on: Feb 20, 2026 (284 pages long)

So I was mainly reading this book as I already thought that I had turned around to having a little more digital minmalism in my life. I had already done some of the suggestions within the book and I was also interested to see Newport's suggestions compared to what felt right for me as he is self-described as not really online at all. So that was part of the interest of reading the book for me. But I found that there was a lot that I didn't agree with him on just because I already knew what the online world had done differently since the point of this book being published and now. It was also that I have lived a very different life and the ways that the internet is embedded into my life aren't as bad as Newport says, but they're also not great either. So there's some advice that I would scale back. There's also some assumptions around connections across the world that I think need a little bit more insight from those that live online rather than just people that moved people they knew in person to relationships that they maintained over the internet because they moved. There's a lot of nuance in this and while I liked this book, there's just a lot of things missing from how I would go about processing the internet in our current day and age.

The Raven Scholar

by Antonia Hodgson

Started on: Feb 1, 2026

Finished on: Feb 16, 2026 (648 pages long)

I'd seen this book shown around on the internet and although it was advertised as a kind of Dark Academia, it just looked like a really good high fantasy book. I really liked some of the world building and how everything was done, but I kind of wish that it was longer to dive into what happened afterwards a little more in depth. I don't know, it was an interesting thing of I got a lot of details around some basic parts of life in the world, but what I was really looking for was more about the pantheon of gods and how their involvement (or not) played into other things in the world. AA couple good twists and turns amongst it. Looking forward to when the next book comes out.

The War of Art

by Steven Pressfield

Started on: Feb 10, 2026

Finished on: Feb 12, 2026 (165 pages long)

This book has been lingering around for my to-read list for quite a while as something that might get me to stand up and do the writing that I want to do. And I'm not going to say that it's going to fix me, but it has inspired me. I always do the thing scared, but there's something about using that fear as part of what guides me and keeps me going that I hadn't really considered. The work will be hard and the work will be tough, but we will get there. We will make the things that we are meant to make. And we will get there no matter what it takes.

Keep Going

by Austin Kleon

Started on: Feb 7, 2026

Finished on: Feb 8, 2026 (201 pages long)

There a lot of words that I could say here, but I'm still in the process of figuring out how to exist here and how I want to work going forward. I want to write more and I want to do more, but it's been tough to find the right way to do it. It's been tough to find the right way to keep going with it all. Maybe I'll find it soon.

How To Steal Like An Artist

by Austin Kleon

Started on: Feb 6, 2026

Finished on: Feb 7, 2026 (141 pages long)

This is not my first time reading this book, nor will it be my last. The first time I read it was in a college class on creative writing and the place of habit and play within the practice of writing. I learned more about what I wanted to take from other people from that class. Now I'm returning to the book as someone that is stealing all the time from other people out there in the world. And what I've learned is that I need to lean into the constellation of people that I've been looking up to a little bit more, look a little bit deeper, and to just keep digging into all the ideas that are out there.

A Brief History of Black Holes

by Becky Smethurst

Started on: Jan 22, 2026

Finished on: Feb 6, 2026 (264 pages long)

I've always been fascinated by space and I've been trying to learn more about space recently. So this was one of my first stops along looking at cool pictures of space. The story-telling within this is helpful for someone that isn't as well versed with the ways of space and the science therein. But I enjoyed connecting the constellation of people and ideas that came together to give us our modern concept of black holes.

This Is How You Lose The Time War

by Amal El-Mohtar and Max Gladstone

Started on: Jan 26, 2026

Finished on: Jan 31, 2026 (198 pages long)

This is not the first time I've read this book. I love this book. It's such a fun look into the depths of two opposites of a battle and how those opposites aren't as opposite as they first appear. Red and Blue are fascinating characters that explore the different parts of what it means to be a person, to experience things, to love in a world that only wants them to be tools. And ultimately how at the end, you must betray that which was 'important' in order to focus on what is actually important. It is a love story in letters told back and forth through time, messages left in bones, in seeds, in fire across time and space. And it grabs my mind and sinks it into the swamp of conflicted emotions that stew around both these characters as they figure out who they actually are and what they want to do.

The Veldt and There Will Come Soft Rains

by Ray Bradbury

Started on: Jan 27, 2026

Finished on: Jan 27, 2026 (~12 pages long total)

I've been listening to and watching a lot of videos about our future and how technology has helped and hurt us. One of those video essays mentioned both of these short stories. Ultimately, it's one of those things that I've continued to go back to over and over again. These stories are a pair in my heart. One showing the direction people-changing effect, the other showing that the technology may persist without us, but it will never replace our presences in our homes and lives. Of course, the technology advancing is also part of what destroys all of us in the end, but we were still people there. These stories came out in 1950, but the stories feel more and more like they should have come out this year. I want to keep analyzing the way that Bradbury looks at our future and our technology. This is especially interesting as some of the pieces that I'm looking at are 75 years old. So much has changed, but this author really saw our future coming.

The Enchanted Greenhouse

by Sarah Beth Durst

Started on: Jan 6, 2026

Finished on: Jan 17, 2026 (375 pages long)

Sometimes you just need something quiet and soft in your life. This is one of those reads for me. It wasn't the most exciting read, but I like the quiet calm of the world that Durst has created. I liked the dramatics of the first book. This one doesn't have as much going on with a much smaller cast, but still some interesting stakes. It's not a loud romance, but a quiet one. Still strongly felt, but not as in your face as some other romances. It wasn't my favorite read, but it is far from the worst.

The Last Unicorn

by Peter S. Beagle

Started on: Nov 15, 2025

Finished on: Jan 4, 2026 (297 pages long)

I have a very long personal history with The Last Unicorn, but in particular, the movie from the 80s. I would check it out all the time from the Library as a kid. Like it was an everytime I went to the library kind of ordeal. I will say that nothing has changed. I will come back to this book again and again, I think. There's something beautiful about seeing something so beautiful have such an impact on the world around it and how that impact is reflected back onto it at the end. The Last Unicorn changed me in ways that I could never quite explain. And I have never stopped looking for the unicorns in all the most unlikely places and in the spray of the ocean waves.