I absolutely loved The Bone season series by Samantha Shannon. What other urban fantasy books are fun and addicting? Looking for excellent world building too. Thanks!

Good afternoon Bookaholics!

Your question of the day may be quite a debate....

Do you think booktube/booktok are helping reading or hindering it? This can be for you personally or for the reading community as a whole 🤔

I'm getting more into annotating my books [books I own. Not library books] while I read. I don't need any tips but I am looking for like recommendations for good pens that write smooth and won't bleed through or smudge, highlighters that don't bleed or run out fast, sticky notes [or good pens for the transparent sticky notes because so many smudge], etc.

My current pen is the Sharpie S-Gel 0.7 I love them but they can bleed through a little and sometimes they do skip.

I have so many different highlighters and the main issue I have is that they run out so fast, but the ones that don't fade fast usually bleed through. I need a good balance.

The only pens I've found that work on the transparent sticky notes are BIC intensity ultra fine point but the dry time for them can be so finicky.

Any other recs for annotating are welcome too.

Hello readers! I can feel a bit of a slump coming up because it’s starting to feel like a routine of picking a book up, rather than actually WANTING to 🥲

As by the caption of this post, I’m looking for fantasy / romantasy recommendations 💕 (I also like sapphic stories!)

I don’t like overly smutty / spicy books such as fourth wing and acotar. I’ll read a book where it has a small amount of spice I can easily skip over.

I love ✨ :

royal / medieval fantasy Fae / folk fantasy Themes of war Kingdoms Books that have elements of romance, but where it isn’t the main focus. Redhead mmc’s 🤞🏻

My favourite reads for a look at my taste😋 :

The folk of the air series (The cruel prince) once upon a broken heart caraval Red queen Shadow and bone trilogy throne of glass The shepherd king duology (one dark window)

As a mood reader, I often look around my (very, very wonderfully full!) shelves and find I am not quite in the mood to read a single book on them. I love gathering more recommendations to add to the ever growing pile (and to cater for niche moods and vibes!), so I love to ask people what’s on their shelf to read next.

What is the next book on your TBR/reading plan?

So something I noticed is that a lot of people whose careers are focused on book reviews and discussion don't end up getting high recognition for the books they've written themselves

The most recent example is Cindy Pham whose debut got a mostly negative response

Which I find really interesting considering Cindy's videos do a decent job at dissecting bad writing (even though to me at least Cindy focuses too much on line to line critiques than the full book overall, but I only watch their videos time to time)

And then I remembered book/writing creators like Jenna Moreci (I found one channel that dissed her book in like 6 seperate hour long videos) and others also get mostly mid receptions of their own books

In my opinion, I think that while the skill of dissecting someone's writing is still connected to the act of writing itself, it is still a seperate skill, and doesn't mean one is automatically good at both, but people think it does so they write a book regardless of their skill level

And I'm not trying to say that "content creators can't write books" because xjz wrote iron widow and is a youtuber and I've seen a lot of love for iron widow

I just think that people who percieve themselves as skilled in a thing don't always know how weak their skills are

What do you all think?

I love the playful language thus far! The opening scene with the mirror dragged me right in. In fact, this on top of reading Playful by Cas Holman made me realize that playfulness is one of the aspects of a book and its writing that tends to draw me in.

However, I have seen the warnings about there being a transphobic plot twist at the end. I considered DNF but I love the language so much I want to see for myself. I’ve heard good things about the author and I didn’t spend any money on this book (free donation at my library) so that definitely factors in. I am transgender though so I am anticipating being angry about the ending. I’d be curious if the author has ever spoken on it or if at the time of publication there wasn’t any discussion or backlash of it? Again, I’m intrigued by the language (and a Massachusetts setting) so I’m going to give it a shot.