Finished reading: Her Body and Other Parties by Carmen Maria Machado 📚

A bunch of excellent and chilling stories. Horror and make it literary. Uncertainty that is maddening but then that’s kind of the point.

Finished reading: Future Tense: Why Anxiety Is Good for You (Even Though It Feels Bad) by Tracy Dennis-Tiwary 📚

A helpful framing of normal, baseline anxiety as a source of information that can spur us to creativity and action.

Finished reading: The Blazing World by Margaret Cavendish 📚

A 17th Century bit of philosophical fantastical adventure.

Finished reading: The Hacienda by Isabel Cañas 📚

Great all the way through but extra compelling for the last third. Like Mexican Gothic, it uses Gothic tropes of a spooky house and a mysterious husband to interrogate colonialism in Mexico. Highly recommend.

Finished reading: The Haunting of Hill House by Shirley Jackson 📚

Keeping this Gothic train rolling. This one is excellent, of course.

Finished reading: The Turn of the Screw by Henry James 📚

Another Gothic. Governesses, am I right?

Finished reading: “The Fall of the House of Usher” by Edgar Allan Poe 📚

Making my pivot to Gothic now that it’s October. (I skipped my usual campus novels in September and stuck with romance.)

This one’s a classic, of course. But I like “The Cask of Amontillado” and “The Masque of the Red Death” better.

Finished reading: We Could Be So Good by Cat Sebastian 📚

I loved it so much, finished it in under 48 hours. “Newsies for shippers” is an apt description. I love people being sweet on each other and making happiness when they feared it just wasn’t out there for them.

Finished reading: An Island Princess Starts a Scandal by Adriana Herrera 📚

So good! Manuela is going to marry a wealthy man, for the good of her family. But first, she’s going to spend six weeks in Paris, having Sapphic adventures.

As with all the best romances, this book is about two people who make each other grow as much as it’s about falling in love.

🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥 Hotter than steamy, very explicit.

Highly recommend.

Finished reading: From Bad to Cursed by Lana Harper 📚

Loved it even more than Payback’s A Witch. Full review coming later this week.