Stephany Writes

Categories: Books

What I’m Reading (2.14.22)

Happy Monday! I have today off work because I always take the day after the Super Bowl off. It’s my own special holiday! I am debating between using today to do my monthly 5K or get some things done around my apartment. I’m going to play it by ear and see how I feel!

Last week, I finished two books and both of them were five-star reads. There’s a really good chance they’ll make my favorites list at the end of the year, too. So far, February has been an all-star reading month for me! Here are the reviews of what I read:

Piecing Me Together by Renee Watson (★★★★★)

I couldn’t have loved a book more if I tried. It was the kind of book I just wanted to hug when I finished it because it touched me in such a deep way. Jade is a high school student who goes to a private school on scholarship. She has to take the bus to school because she lives in a different area of town, and deal with being one of the few Black students (and one of the few poor students) in her school. When she gets an opportunity to join Woman to Woman, a mentorship program for Black teen girls, she is paired with a mentor, Maxine, who will change her life for the better. This is the kind of book that places a sharp focus on Black excellence and Black joy without shying away from topics like racism, police brutality, the “angry Black woman” trope. It’s so well-written and beautiful, and I highly recommend it! (#ownvoices, print, Amazon)

Like a Love Story by Abdi Nazemian (★★★★★)

This YA novel was deeply impactful. It follows three friends as they navigate relationships, family, racism, and homophobia with the backdrop of the AIDS crisis of the 1980s. Reza is new to NYC, having moved with his mother from Toronto to the home of his new stepdad. He’s navigating a new school, a new family, and his sexual identity as a gay teen while also seeing so many articles about AIDS and how being gay can be a death sentence for some. He meets Art, another gay teenager, and his best friend Judy on his first day of school and they quickly form a close bond. And then Reza starts dating Judy in an effort to remain closeted and stifle his growing feelings for Art, and things grow increasingly complicated for the trio. This book was a masterpiece that puts a new face to the AIDS epidemic: how it affected young, closeted gay teenagers who were seeing so many gay men die from a disease and how the public interacted with people with AIDS. It’s beautiful in its exploration of queerness, the way family can support you and disappoint you, which is something I am intimately familiar with, and I was just rooting for all three of these crazy kids from beginning to end. A must-read, in my opinion. (#ownvoices, audiobook, Libby)

What I’m Reading This Week

What are you reading?

Categories: Books

What I’m Reading (2.9.22)

Happy Wednesday, friends! I know I promised to re-start my weekly reading recaps on Monday, but I needed another day to finish the two books I’m reviewing below. One of the reasons I stopped doing my weekly recaps is that sometimes I felt like I was rushing to finish books so I would have something to write about on Mondays. I’m going to try not to do that, which means these recaps may be later in the week than I planned. Now that we have that out of the way, let’s dig into the books I just finished. Both were 5-star reads for me!

Unfollow: A Journey from Hatred to Hope by Megan Phelps-Roper (★★★★★)

This memoir from a former member of the Westboro Baptist Church (she’s the granddaughter of the founder) is our February selection for book club, and it was fascinating. I’m sure everyone knows about WBC and their horrific picketing outside of events and military funerals, even the funerals of the children killed at Sandy Hook. Their signs are upsetting so I won’t repeat any of them here, but suffice it to say that WBC believes that any terrible event (like a mass shooting at an elementary school) was from God because we have gravely sinned. Megan Phelps-Roper left the church when she was 26 after spending her entire life entrenched in the cult-like atmosphere of WBC—she started picketing at a startlingly young age and eventually became WBC’s premier voice on social media. It is through social media and meeting people who wanted to genuinely converse with her and challenge her beliefs that she started to really question WBC’s mission and what she truly believed. I truly commend Megan for leaving the church because that takes a level of bravery and courage that most people don’t possess—not only to change what she believed, but also to lose almost her entire family in the process. (Those who leave WBC can no longer be in touch with people inside WBC, so Megan hasn’t spoken to her parents and many of her siblings since she left a decade ago.) In the book, Megan talked a lot about free speech and how even hate speech is protected under the First Amendment (she’s firmly in the camp that hate speech should be protected). It was reallllly uncomfortable for me to read this part of the book, to recognize that even people spewing truly hateful rhetoric are essentially protected under law. I’m still gathering my thoughts about what I think about this because, on the one hand, I can see where Megan is coming from and understand the slippery slope that can happen when we start placing limits on free speech. On the other hand, hate speech can lead to serious violence and cause serious harm to those who are being talked about. That is also a slippery slope. In any event, I think this will make for a very lively book club discussion!

A Wicked Kind of Husband by Mia Vincy (★★★★★)

Self-published romance novels are usually a miss for me, but I gave this one a chance because Anne Bogel raved about it on her podcast. The cover is completely ugly, haha, but this is a good lesson to never judge a book for its cover! This book was phenomenal! I just loved every minute I spent enmeshed in the worlds of Joshua and Cassandra. Their banter was perfectly written and the way they moved from enemies to cautious friends to lovers to husband and wife was so beautiful. There was something so sweet about their love for one another, especially considering they both had their own demons to face before they could fully commit to each other. Their meet-cute was also something I’ve never seen in a romance before: what if you had married a man and only spent one night with him before he left you for months… and the next time you see him, neither of you even recognizes one another? AHH! So good! This is one I want to press into the hands of every historical romance lover I know!

What I’m Reading This Week

  • Like a Love Story by Abdi Nazemian (audio) – I have just a few hours left in this YA novel about two gay teenagers growing up in the late 1980s and how the AIDS epidemic affects their love story. I am really worried the ending is going to rip me apart.
  • Piecing Me Together by Renee Watson (print) – I just started this novel (another YA!) yesterday and I’m flying through it. It’s so well-written!

What are you reading?

Categories: Books

What I Read in January

Happy Wednesday, friends! I had a very good reading month to kick of 2022 with 11 books read. There were a lot of 3-star reads in the mix, so it wasn’t a total knockout month, but I’m okay with that. Hopefully, things will get better as the months go on.

Also, to the surprise of maybe nobody, I’ve decided to bring back my weekly reading recaps. I know, I know. How many times am I going to stop doing them, only to bring them back? One of the reasons I stopped doing weekly reading recaps is because I wanted to do a monthly reading wrap-up post and thought it might be overkill if I did weekly recaps and a monthly wrap-up. But… so what if it is? This is my blog and I get to write about what I want! So starting next week, you’ll start seeing weekly reading recaps on Mondays and at the end of every month, I’ll post a wrap-up post where I’ll reflect on what I read and give some updated reading stats.

Alright, with that out of the way, let’s dive into my January reviews:

Overall Favorite Read of January

The Banker’s Wife by Cristina Alger (★★★★★) – This thriller was phenomenal! It was smartly written, propulsive, and filled with characters who were easy to root for. (Who else is tired of the unreliable female narrator? *raises hand*) When the novel begins, Annabel has just been informed that her husband has been killed in a plane crash, but the more she learns about the crash and her husband’s life as a banker, the shadier things seem. Meanwhile, Marina is working on the story of a lifetime with her mentor when tragedy strikes, and she has to decide if the truth is worth the pain. It’s a fast-moving thriller that taught me a lot about offshore banking and the secret business dealings of the supremely rich, and the conclusion was super satisfying. Give it a try!

Favorite Romance of January

Battle Royal by Lucy Parker (★★★★☆) – Lucy Parker is probably my all-time favorite romance novelist. All of her books have been 4- or 5-star reads for me. She just knows how to write funny banter, great characters, and hot sexytimes. And there’s just a way she writes her male characters that just makes me fall head over heels for them. This book was no different! In Battle Royal, Dominic and Sylvie are enemies who have competing bakeries located across the street from one another. When Princess Rose announces her engagement, Dominic and Sylvie are now not only fighting in their bakeries, but also for the most lucrative cake-baking contract of all. I loved every single thing about this novel: the banter between the characters, all of the fun baking anecdotes, and how Dominic and Sylvie fell in love. These two crazy kids are going to make it, I think.

Other Favorites of January

Columbine by Dave Cullen (★★★★★) – I have never been so happy to finish a book than I was to finish Columbine. This book was hard, heavy, and I firmly believe contributed to my anxiety spiral early in the month. (As a highly sensitive person, books can affect me on a deep level.) It’s also insanely well-researched and well-written. Dave Cullen takes readers through the entire Columbine massacre, using police reports, journals and videos from the killers, and interviews. From the days leading up to the massacre, to what it was like to be in the school during it, to how the students, teacher, police, public, and media reacted in the days, weeks, and months after the shooting. It’s not easy reading in the least, but the subject matter is important and necessary, and I appreciate all of the hard work that went into researching and writing this book.

All the Devils Are Here by Louise Penny (★★★★★) – What another fascinating mystery from Louise Penny. This series is just so good. This book is the sixteenth in the Chief Inspector Armand Gamache series, and I know it can be intimidating to start a series with so many books in it, but man, I really recommend it. I’ve been very slowly working my way through the series (I read the first novel in 2017!) and I really enjoy them on audio. I don’t like talking too much about the plot because I feel like it can give away specific details that people who are reading earlier in the series may not want to know. Suffice it to say that there was so much to love here: a complicated father/son relationship, a sweet godson/godfather relationship, and a thrilling mystery with an ending that totally surprised me!

Miss Moriarty, I Presume? by Sherry Thomas (★★★★★) – Another mystery series! This one’s backlist isn’t as extensive as the Chief Inspector series. This book is the sixth—and latest—in the Lady Charlotte series. It reimagines Sherlock Holmes as a woman, and I have loved every single book in the series. They’re historical mysteries, so they have a really unique element to them that you don’t always get from the mystery genre. Also, this book had such a surprising twist near the end that made me want to speed up my audiobook listening speed so I could get to the conclusion faster. Whew!

More January Reads

  • While We Were Dating by Jasmine Guillory (★★★☆☆) – You guys, I’m just not a Jasmine Guillory fan. I read her first book and didn’t love it, but had heard good things about this book, so I gave it a try. And I was just mostly bored by the plot and spent more time editing the writing than enjoying the reading experience. I’m happy that Jasmine’s books are so popular because we need more Black romance writers, but she’s just not for me.
  • The English Wife by Lauren Willig (★★★☆☆) – This literary mystery had such a sense of place and I loved how everything was revealed, but it was verrrrry slow-moving and could have been at least 50 pages shorter.
  • The Bad Muslim Discount by Syed M. Masood (★★★☆☆) – This book was fine, but nothing outstanding. I found both of the main characters hard to root for, though I did enjoy the humor that was slipped in between some of the heavier moments.
  • A Lot Like Adios by Alexis Daria (★★☆☆☆) – Oof, I usually enjoy Alexis Daria’s romances, but this one was not good. I never felt a real connection to either of the main characters, and there was a fanfiction element that I could have done without.
  • A Very Large Expanse of Sea by Tahereh Mafi (★★★☆☆) – I was excited to read this YA love story, but it just fell a bit flat for me. I loved the Muslim representation, but the whole time I was reading this book, I felt annoyed with the main character and the choices she was making.
  • My Cone and Only by Susannah Nix (★★★★☆) – This was such a fun, best friends-to-lovers romance! The chemistry between the two main characters was sizzlin’ and I couldn’t get enough of them.

January Book Stats

  • # of books read: 11
  • Fastest read: While We Were Dating by Jasmine Guillory (6 days)
  • Slowest read: All the Devils Are Here by Louise Penny (13 days)
  • Star average: 3.7
  • % of books by or about BIPOC or the LGBT community: 55%
  • Sources: Libby (6), library (2), Book of the Month (2), Target (1)
  • Formats: print (5), e-book (3), audiobook (3)
  • Abandoned books: 1 (I’ll Give You the Sun by Jandy Nelson—I feel really guilty for abandoning this book, but it was just not working for me.)
  • Goodreads goal check-in: I set a goal of 135 books this year and currently, I am 1 book ahead of schedule!

What was the best book you read in January?

Categories: Books

What I Read in December

I read 13 books in December. !!! One of my highest reading months in a really long time. I credit having the last week of the month off work and listening to more audiobooks than usual (4). I’m not going to give you detailed reviews of all of these books, but I picked out 5 to discuss. The other 8 will get a short review snippet. 🙂

Overall Favorite Read of December

Writers & Lovers by Lily King (★★★★★) – You guys, I am shocked by how much I loved this book. I honestly expected to hate it because it gets mixed reviews and is a character-driven novel. Character-driven novels don’t always work for me, but this one most certainly did. I think listening to the audiobook definitely helped, as I could just dip in and out of it while I was driving around and doing things around the apartment. This book is about Casey, who is an aspiring novelist. She spends her mornings working on her novel and her evenings working as a server at a restaurant. Her life is in upheaval, following the sudden loss of her mom and an unexpected breakup. She’s just trying to keep her life together, and she doesn’t always do a great job of it. Some reviewers mentioned that Casey is a hard character to like, but I found her to be so fresh and relatable and easy to root for. I could see so much of myself in her, between her writing aspirations, her money woes, her relationship with her mom. When I finished this book, I just let out a happy sigh because I enjoyed it so, so much. I’m glad I gave this book a try because it ended up making my favorites list in 2021!

Favorite Romance of December

In a Holidaze by Christina Lauren (★★★★★) – The fact that I read this book a few days before Christmas was probably the main reason I loved this book so much. I was deep in my holiday feels and this book gave me everything I was looking for. In this novel, Mae is leaving her annual Christmas celebration with her family and the two other families that have been celebrating the holidays together since Mae was born. She’s in a funk, so she sends a plea to the Universe: “Please. Show me what will make me happy.” And the next thing she knows, she wakes up on a plane and it’s as if the last week never happened. She continues to loop back in time, again and again, as she tries to figure out how to get out of this Groundhog Day scenario and find her true love. It’s a really sweet, sappy romance with a truly amazing setting (a snowy cabin in Utah!) and great characters. I just loved it so much! It’s not going to be for everyone, but it gave me the holiday romance magic I was looking for.

Other Favorites of December

Concrete Rose by Angie Thomas (★★★★☆) – A prequel to Thomas’s smash hit, The Hate U Give, Concrete Rose tells the origin story of Star’s father, Maverick. When he’s 17, he finds out that he’s the father of a 3-month-old baby—a baby from a woman who is not his girlfriend. Maverick tries to juggle new fatherhood (he becomes the sole caretaker of the baby), finishing his last year of high school, and life in a gang, but he’s drowning fast. Then, tragedy strikes and he’s not prepared for what comes next. This story is a difficult one, a hard one, but a hopeful one, too. I know from reading THUG that Maverick gets his life together and becomes an all-around amazing dad to his kids. I know that his girlfriend eventually forgives him, marries him, and gives him a few more babies. I listened to this book on audio and it was excellent. I could really feel Maverick’s emotion and heart in that format. As another reviewer said, I don’t know if I would have enjoyed this book as much as I did if I hadn’t already developed a fondness for Maverick from THUG, but it was still a great read that I’m glad I got around to in 2021.

Birth: The Surprising History of How We Are Born by Tina Cassidy (★★★★☆) – For some reason, I thought this was going to be a book about pregnancy, but it was more a study on the history of the obstetrics field. And it was fascinating. It delves into how women’s bodies developed to be able to push a human baby out of them (fun fact: that’s why babies are so helpless in their first few months of life; their brains can’t grow any bigger or else women wouldn’t be able to push them out!), the history of the C-section (stay for the story of the woman who performed HER OWN C-SECTION AT HOME), and how the obstetrics field evolved throughout the years (there was a time when a doctor would go from patient to patient without washing his hands, leading to lots of disease and death that was blamed on women). I was utterly enthralled by this book and everything women had to go through before an actual obstetrics field was developed and standards put in place.

The Undocumented Americans by Karla Cornejo Villavicencio (★★★★★) – What an astounding collection of essays. I listened to this on audio, read by the author who has such a lovely, soothing voice. In this collection, Villavicencio talks about the plight of undocumented Americans—and not the ones you might expect. She spends time with day laborers, learns about 9/11 volunteers, and forms relationships with undocumented children and teenagers. I found the essay about the Flint water crisis to be particularly hard-hitting. There is so much about Flint that we don’t know about, and I think the author did an exceptional job of drawing us into the plight and the reverberating effects. I was also touched by the essay on the difficulties faced by the aging undocumented population. While I don’t have an aging parent yet (my mom is only 56), I do think about what it will mean to be her caretaker when she is elderly. Those with undocumented parents face an array of difficulties, though, that I won’t need to worry about and many children find that their parents want to move back to their home countries during this period of their lives. This book was truly excellent. It taught me so much, revealed some of my own biases, and renewed my fervent desire for immigration reform.

More December Reads

December Book Stats

  • # of books read: 13
  • Fastest read: Paperback Crush by Gabrielle Moss (3 days)
  • Slowest read: An Offer From a Gentleman by Julia Quinn (12 days)
  • Star average: 3.9
  • % of books by or about BIPOC or the LGBT community: 23%
  • Sources: Libby (5), Amazon (5), library (1), Thriftbooks (1), Book of the Month (1)
  • Formats: print (6), e-book (3), audiobook (4)
  • Abandoned books: 0
  • Goodreads goal check-in: I did not make my goal of 150 books, but that was a huge stretch goal. My Goodreads goal for 2022 is set at 135.

What’s the last great book you read?

Categories: Best Of, Books

Best of 2021 | Reading Stats

Happy Monday, friends! It’s time for my last “Best of 2021” post. Today, I’m digging into my reading stats. As a reminder, I keep a very detailed spreadsheet of everything I read. 2021 was the seventh year of keeping this spreadsheet, and it’s truly become a regular part of my reading life. Each book has its own line where I list the title, author, start and finish dates, format, rating, diversity metrics, genre, source, publishing date, and a few other stats. It makes it really easy to pull together this post every year, and it’s just a fun way to look back on my reading!

So, let’s dive in to my 2021 reading stats!

Nitty-Gritty Details

  • Number of books read: 133 (-20 from 2020)
  • Number of pages read: 46,653 (-4,566 from 2020)
  • Money spent on books I read this year: $502.24 (+29.83). This amounts to $3.78 per book.
  • Percentage of books by and about BIPOC and the LGBTQIA+ community: 49, or 37% (+11% from 2020)
  • Number of books abandoned: 8 (-3 from 2020)

Format Breakdown

Last year, e-books were my most-popular format, but my e-book reading seriously fell to the wayside this year! Print reading was up 9%, e-books were down almost 17% (!), and audiobooks were up 7.5%. With the libraries closed and then functioning at greatly reduced capacity for most of 2020, I relied on e-books a lot more heavily than usual. Things are mostly back to normal now with the library, which is why my print reading bumped back up. In 2020, I also lost my commute in mid-March when we started working from home, which is when I mostly listened to audiobooks. But I’ve readjusted myself to this “new normal,” so I was able to get my audiobook listening time back in. I try to listen to at least two audiobooks a month, more if the audiobooks are short.

Genre Breakdown

Like every year, romance was my most popular category, although the percentage keeps falling every year (2% from 2020, 4% from 2019). My fiction reading took a real beating this year, so much so that my fiction/nonfiction reading is nearly neck and neck! My fiction reading was down 7.6% from 2020 and nonfiction also fell by a little over 1%. I read a bit more YA (up 3% from 2020) and mysteries/thrillers (up 4% from 2020). And this year, I added two new categories to my list that weren’t there in 2020: middle grade (1.5%) and science fiction/fantasy (3.7%). I can’t believe I read nearly 4% of the SFF genre. WHAT IS HAPPENING!

Source Breakdown

The majority of my books came from the library—around 59%, but that percentage is down 2% from last year. I read wayyy more print books from the library (+7.7%) than e-books from Libby (-9.1%). My next highest category is Amazon, which was up 2% from 2020. Coming in third is Book of the Month, which was also up 2% from 2020. Barnes & Noble, Thriftbooks, Target, and my local indie (Tombolo Books) followed behind (last year, I listed all of my bookstores as one line item, so I’m guessing I read slightly more books from bookstores). And rounding out the list are books I read using the Serial Reader app and that I got from a Little Free Library.

Month Breakdown

For the most part, I read 10-11 books per month. I had two months where I “only” read 9 books (as opposed to 2020, when I never read less than 11 books in a month). My best reading month was February—I read 15 books (it was also the month I did a readathon, so that helped!)

Ratings Breakdown

My 4- and 5-star ratings went up by 4% this year to 68.4%! Was I just more lenient with my ratings? Or am I getting really good at picking books I know I’ll love (and quickly abandoning those that aren’t working for me)? Who knows. My 5-star ratings went up by nearly 7%! My 4-star ratings stayed about the same, as did my 3-star ratings. My 2-star and 1-star ratings went down a bit. My average rating was 3.9 (last year, my average rating was 3.7).

Days to Read

Seven days is about my sweet spot when it comes to finishing books these days, mostly because I’m usually reading multiple books at one time. Twice, I was able to finish a book within 24 hours, but that’s very much an anomaly. I don’t consider myself a particularly fast reader (and I can easily get distracted by my phone); I just devote a lot of time to reading.

New Releases vs. Backlist

Last year, I read about the same number of new releases vs backlist books. This year, I read way more backlist! That feels much more normal to me, as I’m not the person always reading the latest new releases. I love backlist books!

Publishing Years

I like to keep track of publishing years, but I’m still not exactly sure how to use this info. This year, I listed out the past 5 years and then combined anything 2016 or beyond into one data point. The biggest number of books I read was from 2020, which makes sense, and 2021 books weren’t too far behind.

Odds and Ends

  • Oldest book (by pub date): The Count of Monte Cristo by Alexander Dumas (1844)
  • Newest book (by pub date): The Heart Principle by Helen Hoang (August 31, 2021)
  • Author I read the most: Louise Penny (5 books)
  • Book I spent the most money on: The House in the Cerulean Sea by T.J. Klune ($25)
  • Time spent listening to audiobooks: 247 hours, 35 minutes (but since I listen at 1.5x or 1.75x speed, my actual listening time is much less than that!)
  • Longest book: The Count of Monte Cristo by Alexander Dumas (1,275 pages)
  • Shortest book: White Rage: The Unspoken Truth of Our Racial Divide by Carol Anderson (178 pages)
  • Book that took me the longest to read: The Count of Monte Cristo by Alexander Dumas (214 days)

How many books did you read in 2021? Did you read more e-books, audiobooks, or print books?