hekareadsbooks

A girl who loves purses, horror books, cheese, and sleeping.

230 points

0% overlap

My Taste

This Savage Song (Monsters of Verity, #1)

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spoilers

hekareadsbooks

Apr 04, 2025

3.0

Enjoyment: 3.5Quality: 3.0Characters: 3.5Plot: 2.5

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Weird Girl Horror

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hekareadsbooks

Mar 17, 2025

5.0

Enjoyment: 4.0Quality: 5.0Characters: 5.0Plot: 3.5

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Books I Am Scared To Start

The Witches of New York (Witches of New York, #1)

hekareadsbooks wants to read...

Night Film

Marisha Pessl

On a damp October night, 24-year-old Ashley Cordova is found dead in an abandoned warehouse in lower Manhattan. Though her death is ruled a suicide, veteran investigative journalist Scott McGrath suspects otherwise. As he probes the strange circumstances surrounding Ashley's life and death, McGrath comes face-to-face with the legacy of her father: the legendary, reclusive cult-horror film director Stanislaus Cordova--a man who hasn't been seen in public for more than thirty years. For McGrath, another death connected to this seemingly cursed family dynasty seems more than just a coincidence. Though much has been written about Cordova's dark and unsettling films, very little is known about the man himself. Driven by revenge, curiosity, and a need for the truth, McGrath, with the aid of two strangers, is drawn deeper and deeper into Cordova's eerie, hypnotic world. The last time he got close to exposing the director, McGrath lost his marriage and his career. This time he might lose even more.

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The Book Eaters (International Edition)

Sunyi Dean

Out on the Yorkshire Moors lives a secret line of people for whom books are food, and who retain all of a book's content after eating it. To them, spy novels are a peppery snack; romance novels are sweet and delicious. Eating a map can help them remember destinations, and children, when they misbehave, are forced to eat dry, musty pages from dictionaries. Devon is part of The Family, an old and reclusive clan of book eaters. Her brothers grow up feasting on stories of valor and adventure, and Devon—like all other book eater women—is raised on a carefully curated diet of fairy tales and cautionary stories. But real life doesn't always come with happy endings, as Devon learns when her son is born with a rare and darker kind of hunger—not for books, but for human minds.

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The Historian

Elizabeth Kostova

To you, perceptive reader, I bequeath my history....Late one night, exploring her father's library, a young woman finds an ancient book and a cache of yellowing letters. The letters are all addressed to "My dear and unfortunate successor," and they plunge her into a world she never dreamed of, a labyrinth where the secrets of her father's past and her mother's mysterious fate connect to an inconceivable evil hidden in the depths of history. The letters provide links to one of the darkest powers that humanity has ever known and to a centuries-long quest to find the source of that darkness and wipe it out. It is a quest for the truth about Vlad the Impaler, the medieval ruler whose barbarous reign formed the basis of the legend of Dracula. Generations of historians have risked their reputations, their sanity, and even their lives to learn the truth about Vlad the Impaler and Dracula. Now one young woman must decide whether to take up this quest herself--to follow her father in a hunt that nearly brought him to ruin years ago, when he was a vibrant young scholar and her mother was still alive. What does the legend of Vlad the Impaler have to do with the modern world? Is it possible that the Dracula of myth truly existed and that he has lived on, century after century, pursuing his own unknowable ends? The answers to these questions cross time and borders, as first the father and then the daughter search for clues, from dusty Ivy League libraries to Istanbul, Budapest, and the depths of Eastern Europe. In city after city, in monasteries and archives, in letters and in secret conversations, the horrible truth emerges about Vlad the Impaler's dark reign and about a time-defying pact that may have kept his awful work alive down through the ages.

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Weird Girl Horror

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DNF

hekareadsbooks

Mar 17, 2025

DNF

2.0

Enjoyment: Quality: Characters: Plot:

DNF @ 30%. I don't care what happens to these characters.

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Lamelyss

Thoughts from 7%

I feel like it could be good but god this book is so long to start????

hekareadsbooks DNF'd a book

Hum

Helen Phillips

From the National Book Award–longlisted author of The Need comes an extraordinary novel about a wife and mother who—after losing her job to AI—undergoes a procedure that renders her undetectable to surveillance…but at what cost? In a city addled by climate change and populated by intelligent robots called “hums,” May loses her job to artificial intelligence. In a desperate bid to resolve her family’s debt and secure their future for another few months, she becomes a guinea pig in an experiment that alters her face so it cannot be recognized by surveillance. Seeking some reprieve from her recent hardships and from her family’s addiction to their devices, she splurges on passes that allow them three nights’ respite inside the Botanical Garden: a rare green refuge where forests, streams, and animals flourish. But her insistence that her son, daughter, and husband leave their devices at home proves far more fraught than she anticipated, and the lush beauty of the Botanical Garden is not the balm she hoped it would be. When her children come under threat, May is forced to put her trust in a hum of uncertain motives as she works to restore the life of her family. Written in taut, urgent prose, Hum is a work of speculative fiction that unflinchingly explores marriage, motherhood, and selfhood in a world compromised by global warming and dizzying technological advancement, a world of both dystopian and utopian possibilities. As New York Times bestselling author Jeff VanderMeer says, “Helen Phillips, in typical bravura fashion, has found a way to make visible uncomfortable truths about our present by interrogating the near-future.”

Post from the Soft Core forum

hekareadsbooks

DNF update.

DNF at 40%. While I am enjoying the character's inner dialogue and her relationship with Dino, things are not progressing.

hekareadsbooks DNF'd a book

Soft Core

Brittany Newell

A young woman’s madcap search for her missing ex-boyfriend takes her into the sexual underground in Brittany Newell’s savage, tender Soft Core.Ruth is lost. She’s living in a drafty Victorian with her ex-boyfriend Dino, a ketamine dealer with a lingerie habit, overdosing on television and regretting her master’s degree. When she starts dancing at a strip club, she becomes Baby Blue, seductress of crypto bros, outcasts, and old lovers alike. Plunged into this swirling underworld of beautiful women, fast cash, ungodly hours, and strangers’ secrets, Baby’s grip on reality begins to loosen. She is sure she can handle it—until one autumn morning when Dino disappears without a trace. Thus begins a nocturnal quest for the one she still loves—through the misty hills of San Francisco; in dive bars and bus depots; at the BDSM dungeon where she takes a part-time gig. Along the way, she meets Simon, a recluse who pays her for increasingly bizarre favors; a philosophizing suicide fetishist named Nobody; and Emeline, the beautiful and balletic new hire who reminds Baby of someone . . . A brutally funny, propulsive story of power, fantasy, love, and loss, Brittany Newell’s Soft Core is an ode to the heartbroken and unhinged, to those whose appetites lead them astray. It is a hallucinogenic romp about a girl coming undone, whose longing for friendship, romance, and revenge will take her over the edge and back again.

hekareadsbooks started reading...

Bat Eater and Other Names for Cora Zeng

Kylie Lee Baker

In this explosive horror novel, a woman is haunted by inner trauma, hungry ghosts, and a serial killer as she confronts the brutal violence experienced by East Asians during the pandemic. Cora Zeng is a crime scene cleaner, washing away the remains of brutal murders and suicides in Chinatown. But none of that seems so terrible when she’s already witnessed the most horrific thing possible: her sister, Delilah, being pushed in front of a train. Before fleeing the scene, the murderer shouted two words: bat eater. So the bloody messes don’t really bother Cora—she’s more bothered by the germs on the subway railing, the bare hands of a stranger, the hidden viruses in every corner, and the bites marks on her coffee table. Of course, ever since Delilah was killed in front of her, Cora can’t be sure what's real and what’s in her head. She pushes away all feelings and ignores the advice of her aunt to prepare for the Hungry Ghost Festival, when the gates of hell open. But she can't ignore the dread in her stomach as she keeps finding bat carcasses at crime scenes, or the scary fact that all her recent cleanups have been the bodies of East Asian women. As Cora will soon learn, you can’t just ignore hungry ghosts.

hekareadsbooks started reading...

Soft Core

Brittany Newell

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The Blood Traitor (The Prison Healer, #3)

Astraia0112358

Thoughts from 5% (page 22)

This is so depressing. I really hope she gets her happy ending. On another note, the writing is way better in this book already than the other ones.

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Najlaa

“What I felt most was the absence of explanations.”

“What they call freedom is just an illusion. They make you believe you have choices, but in the end, the walls are always there.” The atmosphere is bleak, cold, and filled with mystery, yet somehow, it’s hauntingly captivating. Dark and depressing? Exactly the type of books that would pull me from a reading slump. From the very first page, I felt trapped in this world—where everything is unknown, and every answer only leads to more questions. How difficult it is to try to define something (the world) with no past or reference to make sense of it. It hit me reading it that women can feel and relate to one another no matter who different. An Arabic woman reading the work of a French author in English. I wonder what in our nature or the cards we were dealt made us feel for one another when the big moments hit. “Even when I was free, I wasn’t truly free. I had nothing, no direction, no purpose. I was a body moving forward, but to where?”

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hannah

Theories? (Spoilers in comments!)

If you have finished this book, what are your theories on what is/was happening? What stood out to you? SPOILERS IN COMMENTS!

hekareadsbooks finished reading and left a rating...

The Secret History of the Rape Kit: A True Crime Story

hekareadsbooks

Mar 14, 2025

4.5

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

hekareadsbooks commented on a post from the Founder Announcements forum

jenniferPagebound

Update 3/11/25 (new feature alert!)

Hi everyone! So exciting to see so many new friends here in the community. With all the new signups, we want to give everyone a quick way to find similar users. One of the best and most rewarding things about Pagebound is the reader friendships we find here, so we hope this list of similar users sparks some bookish connections 💜 A link to the "Readers with similar taste" page is now on the Discover People page (or, click here). This has been a highly requested feature since day 1; we will work on making this more robust in the future (showing users with the highest overlap %) but for now, we'll show you users with similar My Taste books. Huge thanks to everyone who has shared us on socials and helped spread the word to friends! Happy reading, Jennifer & Lucy 💙💜

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