Let's say you're on a first date, and your date asks you what your favourite book is. What book are you bringing up, and why?

Stolen Lives: Twenty Years in a Desert Jail by Malika Oufkir The daughter of a former aide to the king of Morocco, who was executed after a failed assassination attempt on the ruler, describes how she, her five siblings, and her mother were imprisoned in a desert penal colony for twenty years. OR Reader, I Married Him: Stories Inspired by Jane Eyre by Tracy Chevalier Part of a remarkable family that produced three acclaimed female writers at a time in 19th-century Britain when few women wrote, and fewer were published, Brontë has become a great source of inspiration to writers, especially women, ever since. Now in Reader, I Married Him, twenty of today’s most celebrated women authors have spun original stories, using the line from Jane Eyre as a springboard for their own flights of imagination. Vote below! :)

IM TRYING TO CHUG THROUGH THIS. GENUINELY. I'm trying so hard to just get this done so I can meet my goal. This is so painful to get through. I genuinely don't care about anything that's happening. I'm reading other books as chasers so I can get through this final stretch. I am too deep in and I just want to finish it and never touch this again. I will forever hate this book. I don't even feel like giving this a 3 star. Genuinely, the prose isn't even impressing me enough to give it that. This might just be a 1 star because of how painful this is. I usually only give 1 star to truly terrible books that did their jobs terribly. Things like Iron Widow. But this is genuinely so painful to get through to the point I'm checking the chapter numbers to see how much I have to read until it's over. Ursula K. Le Guin has such wonderful prose to the point that she could write about an average man's daily life and I would be invested. This is such a snoozefest that not even the prose can make me want to continue this. This reads like someone reading out loud a county newspaper in a monotone voice. Genuinely.

Dude. That review I read was right. There is really nothing to this book other than flowery prose. This is genuinely the worst. The prose is great. But that's really it. Prose alone doesn't make a 5 star book. Everything else has to back it up. And everything else is genuinely bad. The characters don't do anything. At all. Bunny and Henry are pretty much the only characters. Richard is barely interesting. He just seems like he's kinda there. Same with everyone else. Bet you didn't care about anyone else huh? Exactly. And the setting and mood is great. But there is nothing all that great about this. The plot is pretty mid ngl. I read the rest beyond this point on Wikipedia and I'm shocked that this is all there is to the book. That's it. That's all. Side note, yeah this book could lose about 200 pages. We didn't need them. At all. Just a bunch of nothing. Also what is with the random racism?? We didn't even need that. That character and that entire plot line was pretty much meaningless. The message is already so obvious and clear. I seriously don't understand the point of any of this. Genuinely. I swear she just wanted another excuse to write the n-word with the r. Because who calls Arab people "Sand n-words"? Like are we deadass. What was the point of that? It was barely even an interesting or good message but surprisingly enough that's one of the few interesting things that happen in this overly long snoozefest. What a waste of a Libby loan!

What is the book you're looking forward to read after your current one?

Elias is reminding a whole lot of salahudin from All My Rage (her YA novel) a bit too much. It feels like theyre both the same person