You can post your own bookish hot take down below. Please remember to be kind and respectful while doing so 👏🏻

My bookish hot take: Is it just me or is almost every fantasy novel har deadly trials/competitions… ballroom scene in the middle of it…?

So far, I pretty much like this confession style of writing. For Constanta to refer Dracula as "you" probably means that their relationship was abusive.

A lot of the youtubers I watch have subscriptions to services like Book of the Month and think the idea of getting special book mail is very exciting and totally see the appeal! Do you guys have any subscriptions that you think are fun? 🍵👀 Personally since I can't afford to do that but still am feeling a bit of fomo, I've decided I'm going to keep up to date with Aardvark's monthly selections and just borrow them from the library :)

What the title of the post says. I feel that the fear and the thrill is in that "blink and you miss it" aspect of horror, and even if it's something unsettling, your imagination can only take you to a certain level. For me, horror is a distinctively visual medium, because so often books just can not do what a camera can. People may argue that what's left for imagination is always more horrifying than what you can see, but for me a book just can not bring forward a fear so distinguished and so peculiar that my heart starts skipping a beat.

Am I the only one feeling like that? If not, please tell me some good horror again. Right now I am reading "Gone to see the river man" and as interesting and "gory" this book is, without going into any spoilers, it doesn't scare me. It makes me sad.

I'd love to do two things with this.

One: The Discussion! Topic: Book Covers. Do book covers matter to you? Do you pick books based on covers, do you not care about covers at all, what kinds of covers catch your eye both in the good or bad way, what kind of covers give you a bit of an ick, all that goodness.

Two: Sharing is Caring! What is your favourite book cover? Share the book / cover / edition with us, both for reading inspiration and for others to comment on!

I'll start.

Covers aren't my primary concern in a book especially because I read ebooks a lot. However, when I do browse around sites like pagebound or physical stores, I find my eye drawn to the more simplistic but striking covers. Simple colour patterns, not too busy, with maybe a simple illustration, pattern or silhouette on it. Immediate turnoffs are super generic covers (whaaat, your zombie or crime novel shows a vaguely spooky graveyard with nothing that's visually relevant to the book? you don't say!). And of course, it goes without saying, the usage of AI art is an immediate and permanent turnoff and the author earns a place on my personal no-go list. I'm also not the biggest fan of the typical 'white lady swooning in white man's arms' romance style covers, or cover art that is overly busy.

On to some of my favourites that are good examples of the kind of cover art I really, really dig. Erin Morgenstern's The Night Circus covers are stunning - any edition, any cover variant I've seen so far. Black, white, red, silhouettes, utterly gorgeous, total perfection.

Richard Osman's The Thursday Murder Club, where all books have the same cover layout with different colour highlights, really pulls my eyes.

Suzanne Collins' The Hunger Games books, where you have the golden Mockingjay pin against a solid colour background, with the other books in the series having a very similar style to match.

As someone who was raised on and is actively trying to unlearn transactional love, the way literally everything in here is "you scratch my back and I'll scratch yours" is horrible. Everyone coming out of this school is going to have only learned toxic relationship traits! 😭

I actually loved Lipton. Plus one teaspoon of creamer and four Splenda. Like a milkshake My tea-fueled heart is shedding a silent tear