shannon

625 points

0% overlap

My Taste

Reading...

Normal Women: Nine Hundred Years of Making History

Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge and the Teachings of Plants

shannon finished reading and left a rating...

shannon

Jan 09, 2026

3.0

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

📚

🍷

I'm just not a romance girlie

shannon made progress on...

Funny Story

Emily Henry

100%

shannon commented on a post from the Pagebound Club forum

dorouu

Fav niche genres?

I've been looking through my 2025 books and I've seen two types of books in my 5-star reads for the year. I hadn't seen any lists on here for them yet so I made them, but I'm wondering if anyone else has any favorite nice genres/themes in books? Here's my two:

Decolonial fantasy/sci-fi- The two big ones being Blood Over Bright Haven by M.L. Wang and Babel by R.F. Kuang. The first is show and not tell, the second is very tell and then show. (Interesting that two of my favorite authors are Chinese American women who use author names w initials- I guess I wanna be like them)

Mixed perspectives- some how, for some reason, I ended up reading FOUR books this year that had first, second, and third person perspectives- or some mix that had more than one type. All of the perspectives in one book is a lot! These being, The Everlasting by Alix E Harrow, The Spear Cuts Through Water by Simon Jimenez, Wild Dark Shore by Charlotte McConaghy, and Harrow the Ninth by Tamsyn Muir. And they were all 5-star reads. So idk. I thought I wouldn't like it but all the authors which utilized this did a really good job?

Also taking recs for books in these categories that I can add to the lists!!

shannon commented on a post from the Pagebound Club forum

courtwriteshalfdraft

does anyone ever just totally blank out on a book?

i'm curious if this is just me, but i was scrolling through old presentations the other day and found my sophomore year presentation for The Potrait of a Lady by Henry James (a book i chose to read for our quarterly reading assignment) and don't remember anything about reading the book, where i got the book from, or giving the presentation. this also happened to me with Shadow and Bone- i found a stack of old library receipts, and that book was on there and i was like... i READ THAT? (turns out yes. yes i did.)

this is so odd to me because i can remember random details from a book i read years ago but can't remember entire books i've read. so i'm genuinely curious: has anyone else experienced book amnesia?

shannon started reading...

Funny Story

Emily Henry

A shimmering, joyful new novel about a pair of opposites with the wrong thing in common. Daphne always loved the way her fiancé Peter told their story. How they met (on a blustery day), fell in love (over an errant hat), and moved back to his lakeside hometown to begin their life together. He really was good at telling it…right up until the moment he realized he was actually in love with his childhood best friend Petra. Which is how Daphne begins her new story: Stranded in beautiful Waning Bay, Michigan, without friends or family but with a dream job as a children’s librarian (that barely pays the bills), and proposing to be roommates with the only person who could possibly understand her predicament: Petra’s ex, Miles Nowak. Scruffy and chaotic—with a penchant for taking solace in the sounds of heart break love ballads—Miles is exactly the opposite of practical, buttoned up Daphne, whose coworkers know so little about her they have a running bet that she’s either FBI or in witness protection. The roommates mainly avoid one another, until one day, while drowning their sorrows, they form a tenuous friendship and a plan. If said plan also involves posting deliberately misleading photos of their summer adventures together, well, who could blame them? But it’s all just for show, of course, because there’s no way Daphne would actually start her new chapter by falling in love with her ex-fiancé’s new fiancée’s ex…right?

shannon started reading...

Normal Women: Nine Hundred Years of Making History

Philippa Gregory

The #1 New York Times bestselling historical novelist delivers her magnum opus—a landmark work of feminist nonfiction that radically redefines our understanding of the extraordinary roles ordinary women played throughout British history. Most histories have been written by men, about men, relegating women—with the exception of a few queens—to the shadows of time. Now, bestselling author Philippa Gregory reveals the importance of ordinary women, providing a more balanced and truer chronicle that expands and adds rich detail to the story of Great Britain. In Normal Women, Gregory draws on an enormous archive of primary and secondary sources to rewrite British history, focusing on the agency, persistence, and effectiveness of everyday women throughout periods of social and cultural transition. She sweeps from the making of the Bayeux tapestry in the eleventh century to the Black Death in 1348—after which women were briefly paid the same wages as men, the last time for seven centuries—to the 1992 ordination of women by the Church of England, when the church accepted, for the first time, that a woman could perform the miracle of the mass. Through the stories of the female soldiers of the civil war, the guild widows who founded the prosperity of the City of London, highwaywomen and pirates, miners, ship owners, international traders, the women who ran London theaters and commissioned plays from Shakespeare, and the "female husbands" who married each other legally in church and lived as husband and wife, Gregory redefines "normal" female behavior to include heroism, rebellion, crime, treason, money-making, and sainthood. As she makes clear, normal women make history. Normal Women will include black-and-white illustrations throughout and a full-color insert.

shannon commented on a post from the Pagebound Club forum

thissillygirlthought

Non-fiction narrators!

Help!

I want to at least do 6 non-fictions next year and for me the key is audiobooks (with a good narrator)! Please send me your recommendations!

I had a friend recommend Anthony Bourdain’s Kitchen Confidential so I have already noted that but literally any genre within non-fiction! I do like medieval history and ancient history! I’ve enjoyed some autobiographies! I work in a specialist cancer hospital so don’t mind a bit of medical and love films&music!

Please throw me your best - Thankyou in advance kind PageBound people!

shannon finished reading and left a rating...

shannon

Dec 29, 2025

2.0

Enjoyment: 2.0Quality: 3.5Characters: Plot:

🏔️

A sad but not very interesting story

shannon made progress on...

Into the Wild

Jon Krakauer

100%

shannon started reading...

The Mountains Sing

Nguyễn Phan Quế Mai

With the epic sweep of Min Jin Lee’s Pachinko or Yaa Gyasi’s Homegoing and the lyrical beauty of Vaddey Ratner’s In the Shadow of the Banyan, The Mountains Sing tells an enveloping, multigenerational tale of the Trần family, set against the backdrop of the Việt Nam War. Trần Diệu Lan, who was born in 1920, was forced to flee her family farm with her six children during the Land Reform as the Communist government rose in the North. Years later in Hà Nội, her young granddaughter, Hương, comes of age as her parents and uncles head off down the Hồ Chí Minh Trail to fight in a conflict that tore apart not just her beloved country, but also her family. Vivid, gripping, and steeped in the language and traditions of Việt Nam, The Mountains Sing brings to life the human costs of this conflict from the point of view of the Vietnamese people themselves, while showing us the true power of kindness and hope.

shannon TBR'd a book

Say Nothing: A True Story of Murder and Memory in Northern Ireland

Patrick Radden Keefe

In December 1972, Jean McConville, a thirty-eight-year-old mother of ten, was dragged from her Belfast home by masked intruders, her children clinging to her legs. They never saw her again. Her abduction was one of the most notorious episodes of the vicious conflict known as The Troubles. Everyone in the neighborhood knew the I.R.A. was responsible. But in a climate of fear and paranoia, no one would speak of it. In 2003, five years after an accord brought an uneasy peace to Northern Ireland, a set of human bones was discovered on a beach. McConville's children knew it was their mother when they were told a blue safety pin was attached to the dress--with so many kids, she had always kept it handy for diapers or ripped clothes. Patrick Radden Keefe's mesmerizing book on the bitter conflict in Northern Ireland and its aftermath uses the McConville case as a starting point for the tale of a society wracked by a violent guerrilla war, a war whose consequences have never been reckoned with. The brutal violence seared not only people like the McConville children, but also I.R.A. members embittered by a peace that fell far short of the goal of a united Ireland, and left them wondering whether the killings they committed were not justified acts of war, but simple murders. Patrick Radden Keefe writes an intricate narrative about a notorious killing in Northern Ireland and its devastating repercussions.

shannon started reading...

Into the Wild

Jon Krakauer

Librarian's Note: An alternate cover edition can be found here In April, 1992, a young man from a well-to-do family hitchhiked to Alaska and walked alone into the wilderness north of Mt. McKinley. His name was Christopher Johnson McCandless. He had given $25,000 in savings to charity, abandoned his car and most of his possessions, burned all the cash in his wallet, and invented a new life for himself. Four months later, a party of moose hunters found his decomposed body. How McCandless came to die is the unforgettable story of Into the Wild. Immediately after graduating from college in 1991, McCandless had roamed through the West and Southwest on a vision quest like those made by his heroes Jack London and John Muir. In the Mojave Desert he abandoned his car, stripped it of its license plates, and burned all of his cash. He would give himself a new name, Alexander Supertramp, and, unencumbered by money and belongings, he would be free to wallow in the raw, unfiltered experiences that nature presented. Craving a blank spot on the map, McCandless simply threw away the maps. Leaving behind his desperate parents and sister, he vanished into the wild.

shannon finished reading and left a rating...

shannon

Dec 23, 2025

4.0

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

✍️

♀️

📚

shannon made progress on...

The Book Club for Troublesome Women

Marie Bostwick

100%

shannon finished reading and left a rating...

shannon

Dec 21, 2025

4.0

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

🏝️

🐠

🤖

shannon commented on a post from the Pagebound Club forum

suzybee

Top book of 2025? ✨

I know it's only mid-December but I've just been putting together my top 10 reads for 2025 and I wanted to hear what your #1 would be for this year! 🌟

Mine was definitely The Safekeep by Yael van der Wouden 🍐

HBU? 💖

shannon started reading...

Playground

Richard Powers

A magisterial new novel from the Pulitzer Prize–winning and New York Times best-selling author of The Overstory and Bewilderment. Four lives are drawn together in a sweeping, panoramic new novel from Richard Powers, showcasing the Pulitzer Prize–winning author of The Overstory at the height of his skills. Twelve-year-old Evie Beaulieu sinks to the bottom of a swimming pool in Montreal strapped to one of the world’s first aqualungs. Ina Aroita grows up on naval bases across the Pacific with art as her only home. Two polar opposites at an elite Chicago high school bond over a three-thousand-year-old board game; Rafi Young will get lost in literature, while Todd Keane’s work will lead to a startling AI breakthrough. They meet on the history-scarred island of Makatea in French Polynesia, whose deposits of phosphorus once helped to feed the world. Now the tiny atoll has been chosen for humanity’s next adventure: a plan to send floating, autonomous cities out onto the open sea. But first, the island’s residents must vote to greenlight the project or turn the seasteaders away. Set in the world’s largest ocean, this awe-filled book explores that last wild place we have yet to colonize in a still-unfolding oceanic game, and interweaves beautiful writing, rich characterization, profound themes of technology and the environment, and a deep exploration of our shared humanity in a way only Richard Powers can.

shannon set their yearly reading goal to 52