gingerailet

19; a moody reader who reads way too many books at once and is trying to keep up with college work while also finishing her TBR list (spoiler: i'll never finish that shi)

1411 points

0% overlap

My Taste

In the Company of Witches (Evenfall Witches B&B, #1)

Reading...

This Is Not a Book About Benedict Cumberbatch: The Joy of Loving Something--Anything--Like Your Life Depends On It

10%

Forest Euphoria: The Abounding Queerness of Nature

15%

48%

82%

gingerailet made progress on...

13h

Forest Euphoria: The Abounding Queerness of Nature

Patricia Ononiwu Kaishian

15%

gingerailet is interested in reading...

16h

We Could Be Rats

Emily R. Austin

A moving story about two very different sisters, and a love letter to childhood, growing up, and the power of imagination—from the bestselling author of Everyone in This Room Will Someday Be Dead and Interesting Facts About Space. Sigrid hates working at the Dollar Pal but having always resisted the idea of growing up into the trappings of adulthood, she did not graduate high school, preferring to roam the streets of her small town with her best friend Greta, the only person in the world who ever understood her. Her older sister Margit is baffled and frustrated by Sigrid’s inability to conform to the expectations of polite society. But Sigrid’s detachment veils a deeper turmoil and sensitivity. She’s haunted by the pains of her past—from pretending her parents were swamp monsters when they shook the floorboards with their violent arguments to grappling with losing Greta’s friendship to the opioid epidemic ravaging their town. As Margit sets out to understand Sigrid and the secrets she has hidden, both sisters, in their own time and way, discover that reigniting their shared childhood imagination is the only way forward. What unfolds is an unforgettable story of two sisters finding their way back to each other, and a celebration of that transcendent, unshakable bond.

gingerailet is interested in reading...

Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal?

Jeanette Winterson

Witty, acute, fierce, and celebratory, Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal? is a tough-minded search for belonging, for love, identity, home, and a mother. Jeanette Winterson's novels have established her as a major figure in world literature. She has written some of the most admired books of the past few decades, including her internationally bestselling first novel, Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit, the story of a young girl adopted by Pentecostal parents that is now often required reading in contemporary fiction. Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal? is a memoir about a life's work to find happiness. It's a book full of stories: about a girl locked out of her home, sitting on the doorstep all night; about a religious zealot disguised as a mother who has two sets of false teeth and a revolver in the dresser, waiting for Armageddon; about growing up in an north England industrial town now changed beyond recognition; about the Universe as Cosmic Dustbin. It is the story of how a painful past that Jeanette thought she'd written over and repainted rose to haunt her, sending her on a journey into madness and out again, in search of her biological mother.

gingerailet is interested in reading...

The Botany of Desire: A Plant's-Eye View of the World

Michael Pollan

Every schoolchild learns about the mutually beneficial dance of honeybees and flowers: The bee collects nectar and pollen to make honey and, in the process, spreads the flowers’ genes far and wide. In The Botany of Desire, Michael Pollan ingeniously demonstrates how people and domesticated plants have formed a similarly reciprocal relationship. He masterfully links four fundamental human desires—sweetness, beauty, intoxication, and control—with the plants that satisfy them: the apple, the tulip, marijuana, and the potato. In telling the stories of four familiar species, Pollan illustrates how the plants have evolved to satisfy humankind’s most basic yearnings. And just as we’ve benefited from these plants, we have also done well by them. So who is really domesticating whom?

gingerailet is interested in reading...

Ferns: Lessons in Survival From Earth’s Most Adaptable Plants

Fay-Wei Li

gingerailet is interested in reading...

The Comfort of Crows: A Backyard Year

Margaret Renkl

From the beloved New York Times opinion writer and bestselling author of Late Migrations comes a “howling love letter to the world” (Ann Patchett): a luminous book that traces the passing of seasons, personal and natural. In The Comfort of Crows , Margaret Renkl presents a literary fifty-two chapters that follow the creatures and plants in her backyard over the course of a year. As we move through the seasons—from a crow spied on New Year’s Day, its resourcefulness and sense of community setting a theme for the year, to the lingering bluebirds of December, revisiting the nest box they used in spring—what develops is a portrait of joy and joy in the ongoing pleasures of the natural world, and grief over winters that end too soon and songbirds that grow fewer and fewer. Along the way, we also glimpse the changing rhythms of a human life. Grown children, unexpectedly home during the pandemic, prepare to depart once more. Birdsong and night-blooming flowers evoke generations past. The city and the country where Renkl raised her family transform a little more with each passing day. And the natural world, now in visible flux, requires every ounce of hope and commitment from the author—and from us. For, as Renkl writes, “radiant things are bursting forth in the darkest places, in the smallest nooks and deepest cracks of the hidden world.” With fifty-two original color artworks by the author’s brother, Billy Renkl, The Comfort of Crows is a lovely and deeply moving book from a cherished observer of the natural world.

gingerailet paused reading...

A Christmas Carol

Charles Dickens

'If I had my way, every idiot who goes around with Merry Christmas on his lips, would be boiled with his own pudding, and buried with a stake of holly through his heart. Merry Christmas? Bah humbug!' Introduction and Afterword by Joe Wheeler To bitter, miserly Ebenezer Scrooge, Christmas is just another day. But all that changes when the ghost of his long-dead business partner appears, warning Scrooge to change his ways before it's too late. Part of the Focus on the Family Great Stories collection, this abridged edition features an in-depth introduction and discussion questions by Joe Wheeler to provide greater understanding for today's reader. "A Christmas Carol" captures the heart of the holidays like no other novel.

gingerailet wrote a review...

gingerailet

Feb 17, 2026

5.0

Enjoyment: 4.5Quality: 5.0Characters: 4.5Plot: 5.0

😭

🚬

🪷

"Let no one mistake us for the fruit of violence--but that violence, having passed through the fruit, failed to spoil it."

If anyone ever ask me for a book recommendation, I fear I will always think of this book first. Although it hasn't got a heavy writing style, it most certainly touches heavily on corners of my heart I didn't know they needed to be touched. I had to take different time outs while reading it and just stare at the wall for a few minutes. Maybe walk around here and there too. Vuong's writing style is so incredibly lyrical and sensitive, It felt as if listening to a beautiful acoustic song. The ones that make you cry after a long and hard day, being able to let it all out and feel that sad relief in your chest. It most certainly is a book about hardships, about coming from a family of immigrants while also being gay. It's about love and about having a name. About conquering your own name. About still managing to make a life after seeing so many people give up their owns to war. Inward and outward. It most certainly is a gorgeous book, even If only briefly.

gingerailet finished a book

On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous

Ocean Vuong

On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous is a letter from a son to a mother who cannot read. Written when the speaker, Little Dog, is in his late twenties, the letter unearths a family's history that began before he was born — a history whose epicenter is rooted in Vietnam — and serves as a doorway into parts of his life his mother has never known, all of it leading to an unforgettable revelation. At once a witness to the fraught yet undeniable love between a single mother and her son, it is also a brutally honest exploration of race, class, and masculinity. Asking questions central to our American moment, immersed as we are in addiction, violence, and trauma, but undergirded by compassion and tenderness, On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous is as much about the power of telling one's own story as it is about the obliterating silence of not being heard. With stunning urgency and grace, Ocean Vuong writes of people caught between disparate worlds, and asks how we heal and rescue one another without forsaking who we are. The question of how to survive, and how to make of it a kind of joy, powers the most important debut novel of many years.

gingerailet is interested in reading...

A Room of One’s Own

Virginia Woolf

A Room of One's Own is an extended essay by Virginia Woolf. First published on the 24th of October, 1929, the essay was based on a series of lectures she delivered at Newnham College and Girton College, two women's colleges at Cambridge University in October 1928. While this extended essay in fact employs a fictional narrator and narrative to explore women both as writers and characters in fiction, the manuscript for the delivery of the series of lectures, titled Women and Fiction, and hence the essay, are considered nonfiction. The essay is seen as a feminist text, and is noted in its argument for both a literal and figural space for women writers within a literary tradition dominated by patriarchy.

Post from the Forest Euphoria: The Abounding Queerness of Nature forum

gingerailet

Thoughts from 8% (page 14)

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gingerailet is interested in reading...

A Tale for the Time Being

Ruth Ozeki

In Tokyo, sixteen-year-old Nao has decided there's only one escape from her aching loneliness and her classmates' bullying, but before she ends it all, Nao plans to document the life of her great-grandmother, a Buddhist nun who's lived more than a century. A diary is Nao's only solace—and will touch lives in a ways she can scarcely imagine. Across the Pacific, we meet Ruth, a novelist living on a remote island who discovers a collection of artifacts washed ashore in a Hello Kitty lunchbox—possibly debris from the devastating 2011 tsunami. As the mystery of its contents unfolds, Ruth is pulled into the past, into Nao's drama and her unknown fate, and forward into her own future. Full of Ozeki's signature humour and deeply engaged with the relationship between writer and reader, past and present, fact and fiction, quantum physics, history, and myth, A Tale for the Time Being is a brilliantly inventive, beguiling story of our shared humanity and the search for home.

gingerailet made progress on...

Forest Euphoria: The Abounding Queerness of Nature

Patricia Ononiwu Kaishian

Post from the Forest Euphoria: The Abounding Queerness of Nature forum

gingerailet

Thoughts from 7% (page 12)

spoilers

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gingerailet made progress on...

This Is Not a Book About Benedict Cumberbatch: The Joy of Loving Something--Anything--Like Your Life Depends On It

Tabitha Carvan

10%

gingerailet started reading...

This Is Not a Book About Benedict Cumberbatch: The Joy of Loving Something--Anything--Like Your Life Depends On It

Tabitha Carvan

Why We Can't Sleep meets Furiously Happy in this hilarious, heartfelt memoir about one woman's midlife obsession with Benedict Cumberbatch, and the liberating power of reclaiming our passions as we age, whatever they may be. Tabitha Carvan was a new mother, at home with two young children, when she fell for the actor Benedict Cumberbatch. You know the guy: strange name, alien face, made Sherlock so sexy that it became one of the most streamed shows in the world? The force of her fixation took everyone--especially Carvan herself--by surprise. But what she slowly realized was that her preoccupation was not about Benedict Cumberbatch at all, as dashing as he might be. It was about finally feeling passionate about something, anything, again at a point in her life when she had lost touch with her own identity and sense of self. In This Is Not a Book About Benedict Cumberbatch, Carvan explores what happens to women's desires after we leave adolescence...and why the space in our lives for pure, unadulterated joy is squeezed ever smaller as we age. She shines a light onto the hidden corners of fandom, from the passion of the online communities to the profound real-world connections forged between Cumberbatch devotees. But more importantly, she asks: what happens if we simply decide to follow our interests like we used to--unabashedly, audaciously, shamelessly? After all, Carvan realizes, there's true, untapped power in finding your "thing" (even if that thing happens to be a British-born Marvel superhero) and loving it like your life depends on it.

gingerailet started reading...

Forest Euphoria: The Abounding Queerness of Nature

Patricia Ononiwu Kaishian

A thrilling book about the abounding queerness of the natural world that challenges our expectations of what is normal, beautiful, and possible.Growing up, Patricia Kaishian felt most at home in the swamps and culverts near her house in the Hudson Valley. A child who frequently felt out of place, too much of one thing or not enough of another, she found acceptance in these settings, among other amphibious beings. In snakes, snails, and, above all, fungi, she saw her own developing identities as a queer, neurodivergent person reflected back at her—and in them, too, she found a personal path to a life of science.In Forest Euphoria, Kaishian shows us this making of a scientist and introduces readers to the queerness, literal and otherwise, of all the life around us. Fungi, we learn, commonly have more than two biological sexes—and some as many as twenty-three thousand. Some intersex slugs mutually fire calcium carbonate “love darts” at each other during courtship. Glass eels are sexually undetermined until their last year of life, which stumped scientists once dubbed “the eel question.” Nature, Kaishian shows us, is filled with the unusual, the overlooked, and the marginalized—and they have lessons for us all.Wide-ranging, richly observant, and full of surprise, Forest Euphoria will open your eyes and change how you look at the world around you.

gingerailet made progress on...

On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous

Ocean Vuong

89%

gingerailet wrote a review...

gingerailet

Feb 14, 2026

4.5

Enjoyment: 5.0Quality: 4.0Characters: 4.5Plot: 4.0

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😢

🔥

FFFUUUUUUCCCKKKKKK i dont even know what to say.

let me start with Ilya's character. The author did such a good job at portraying his depression and as a psychology student I need to say that him engaging a lot in sex as a coping mechanism makes a lot of sense. I love how he was centered in this, I just wish that the author would've also talked more clearly about Shane's autism and his ED, his character kinda pissed me off a little in this especially in the way he treated Ilya and their relationship in some moments. But overall the character's developments were pretty good and spot on. I wish I get to see more of this on her next book. Also her writing improved a lot while also keeping it simple and her dialogues are sooo good too. I'm gonna miss this.

gingerailet finished a book

The Long Game (Game Changers, #6)

Rachel Reid

The sequel is finally here! Shane and Ilya’s story, first seen in Heated Rivalry, continues in this long-awaited hockey romance from Rachel Reid. To the world they are rivals, but to each other they are everything. Ten years. That’s how long Shane Hollander and Ilya Rozanov have been seeing each other. How long they’ve been keeping their relationship a secret. From friends, from family…from the league. If Shane wants to stay at the top of his game, what he and Ilya share has to remain secret. He loves Ilya, but what if going public ruins everything? Ilya is sick of secrets. Shane has gotten so good at hiding his feelings, sometimes Ilya questions if they even exist. The closeness, the intimacy, even the risk that would come with being open about their relationship…Ilya wants it all. It’s time for them to decide what’s most important—hockey or love. It’s time to make a call. Game Changers Book 1: Game Changer Book 2: Heated Rivalry Book 3: Tough Guy Book 4: Common Goal Book 5: Role Model Book 6: The Long Game

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