As someone who primarily gravitates toward fantasy with moody/gothic/dark vibes, most of the books on my TBR fit very nicely into fall and winter, and even earlier spring (New England stays cold for awhile y'all). But now that we're mid-summer, I find myself having a very hard time choosing what to read because the vibes don't fit the season, and it feels like a jarring contrast to bring something dark down to the pool with me. It's truly not about what other people think or anything like that, I can physically feel a weird disconnect when what I'm ready feels dark, cold, and slow and the outside feels like the opposite of that.

Of course I can read other genres, but I feel like what most easily fits summer are fluffier, contemporary romance reads, and no hate to the genre at all but it's just really not my jam. Ideally I'd be reading mermaid or mermaid-adjacent fantasies all summer, but I don't have very many on my physical TBR (although I can certainly see if my library has any...).

Does anyone else struggle with this? Does anyone have good summertime fantasy recs? Please feel free to comment any and all related thoughts!

Peter Murdoch and his bird’s-nest hair, scarecrow limbs balanced atop a rickety bicycle, looked like he’d never tried at anything in his life. He was simply born brilliant, all that knowledge poured by gods without spillage into his brain. Alice couldn’t stand him.

I can’t either. Calling her “naughty girl” is absolutely wildly cringey. I would burn the building down if a colleague addressed me as such. Unfortunately, I feel like he might be a love interest.

Otherwise, this is entertaining! I thought this bit was really funny:

Dante’s account was so distracted with spiteful potshots that the reportage got lost within. T. S. Eliot had supplied some of the more recent and detailed landscape descriptions on record, but The Waste Land was so self-referential that its status as a sojourner’s account was under serious dispute. Orpheus’s notes, already in archaic Greek, were largely in shreds like the rest of him. And Aeneas—well, that was all Roman propaganda.

As someone who primarily gravitates toward fantasy with moody/gothic/dark vibes, most of the books on my TBR fit very nicely into fall and winter, and even earlier spring (New England stays cold for awhile y'all). But now that we're mid-summer, I find myself having a very hard time choosing what to read because the vibes don't fit the season, and it feels like a jarring contrast to bring something dark down to the pool with me. It's truly not about what other people think or anything like that, I can physically feel a weird disconnect when what I'm ready feels dark, cold, and slow and the outside feels like the opposite of that.

Of course I can read other genres, but I feel like what most easily fits summer are fluffier, contemporary romance reads, and no hate to the genre at all but it's just really not my jam. Ideally I'd be reading mermaid or mermaid-adjacent fantasies all summer, but I don't have very many on my physical TBR (although I can certainly see if my library has any...).

Does anyone else struggle with this? Does anyone have good summertime fantasy recs? Please feel free to comment any and all related thoughts!