I am going to read horror books all July

The only thing I can stomach the idea of reading at the present moment is horror, which seems like an antithetical statement…but a true one nonetheless. Last month it was romance, this month it’s everything horror. I’ve been thinking a lot about this quote from Bela Lugosi and how much I love it. “It is women who love horror. Gloat over it. Feed on it. Are nourished by it. Shudder and cling and cry out-and come back for more.” Not to say that the whole vibe is gender-exclusive, because obviously not, but I still really love this. Point to the point is this: I want to be my own goth girlfriend and to get there I am going to read a bunch of horror novels next month (but absolutely no Stephen King because no). Ok. So here are the books.

Fear Street Series by R.L. Stine

If you have yet to hear of Fear Street, all you need to know is that it is a huge series of pulp fiction horror for teens by R.L. Stine, published in the 90s before Goosebumps had even hit the shelves. For some reason, my middle/jr. high school (this is about 10-14 years old here in the US) librarian had a pretty good selection of these books, with the AMAZING covers and scandalous taglines. My classmates and I would snatch them up the second someone else had checked them back in. I will always be grateful for administration never questioning 11 year olds reading books with bloody bikini tops and scalpels on the covers. Halloween Party is still my absolute favorite! Cue the autumn winds and glorious smell of the Scholastic Book Fair.

Anyway, there is going to be an entire trilogy of movies coming to Netflix in July based on Fear Street and it’s time for me to hit the ground running reading every book I can from the series. They aren’t masterpieces of literature or anything, but they are amazing if you can appreciate the campiness of it all.

Lovesickness by Junji Ito

An innocent love becomes a bloody hell in another superb collection by master of horror Junji Ito.

Junji Ito is a legendary horror manga artist who creates gross, grisly, morbid stories that are so discombobulating that I can’t look away. I’ve been slowly working through his backlist and this one finally got put on hold for me at the library. I’ll be immediately reading this once I pick it up and try not to be freaked out by the very real possibility of Rib Women coming to find me in my dreams.

 

Ring Shout by P. Djèlí Clark

I’m just going to leave the blurb here, because it sounds so amazing on it’s own.

D. W. Griffith is a sorcerer, and The Birth of a Nation is a spell that drew upon the darkest thoughts and wishes from the heart of America. Now, rising in power and prominence, the Klan has a plot to unleash Hell on Earth.

Luckily, Maryse Boudreaux has a magic sword and a head full of tales. When she’s not running bootleg whiskey through Prohibition Georgia, she’s fighting monsters she calls “Ku Kluxes.” She’s damn good at it, too. But to confront this ongoing evil, she must journey between worlds to face nightmares made flesh–and her own demons. Together with a foul-mouthed sharpshooter and a Harlem Hellfighter, Maryse sets out to save a world from the hate that would consume it.

Goddess of Filth by V. Castro

“Five of us sat in a circle doing our best to emulate the girls in The Craft, hoping to unleash some power to take us all away from our home to the place of our dreams. But we weren’t witches. We were five Chicanas living in San Antonio, Texas, one year out of high school.”

One hot summer night, best friends Lourdes, Fernanda, Ana, Perla, and Pauline hold a séance. It’s all fun and games at first, but their tipsy laughter turns to terror when the flames burn straight through their prayer candles and Fernanda starts crawling toward her friends and chanting in Nahuatl, the language of their Aztec ancestors.

Um. Yes! I don’t even have anything to say. I just hope the book lives up to this blurb.

Some other horror books I want to read…

This post was a bit different for me, but I have been feeling a tad uninspired and horror novels made me feel excited about reading again after a month of slogginess. Do you have any good horror, thriller, etc recommendations or are they genres you tend to avoid?

The Top 3 Most Impactful Nonfiction Books I’ve Read So Far

This week, I was thinking about books that have a substantial impact on me. Quite a few of these books have been nonfiction works or memoirs that hold a special place on my brain and continue to echo their impact in my life and way of thinking. They are mostly all also very US-centric, so I’m looking forward to reading more nonfiction works in the future that feature authors and issues of other countries and cultures. For now though, here are some of the nonfiction works that have truly stuck with me since I first read them.

The Heartbeat of Wounded Knee by David Treuer

“This book is meant to tell the story of Indian lives, and Indian histories, in such a way as to render those histories and those lives as something much more, much greater and grander, than a catalog of pain.” 

I read this book a couple years ago and truly have not been the same since. This non-fiction work by Ojibwe author David Treuer tells the history of Native American life from the Wounded Knee massacre to present, with personal anecdotes interspersed throughout. This is a great place to start if you a curious about learning of the effect of colonialism on indigenous people in the US and forming a framework of knowledge about this topic. I truly think this is a must-read for people living in the United States.

I think about the things that I learned from this book so often as I live my life on land that was plundered from indigenous tribes. It’s quite a hefty book, but one that I am so glad that I read and that I plan on revisiting in the future.

Eloquent Rage: A Black Feminist Discovers Her Superpower by Brittney Cooper

“When I talk about owning eloquent rage as your superpower, it comes with the clear caveat that not everyone is worth your time or your rage.”

This is a book I have been wanting to reread for quite some time. It taught me so much the first time I read it several years ago and has continued to influence my thought processes on many issues. Brittney Cooper is a phenomenal writer and discusses feminism, respectability politics, systemic oppression, and more in a way that is understandable and intersectional. To say that I was angry reading her essays and experiences is a bit of an understatement. Just looking at the quotes from this collection on Goodreads is jogging my memory on how hard-hitting her writing is. Moving this one farther up on my TBR asap!

Good and Mad: The Revolutionary Power of Women’s Anger by Rebbeca Traister

“In the United States, we have never been taught how noncompliant, insistent, furious women have shaped our history and our present, our activism and our art. We should be.”

Continuing on the topic of “women’s anger”, I first read Good and Mad around the same time I read Eloquent Rage. Traister discusses the the power the collective anger of women has had on politics and society throughout history and the attempts to stifle this anger to prevent change. She also doesn’t shy away from discussing when women’s anger impacted others in a less than positive way. Also, another win for intersectionality! It annoys me so much when non-fiction books ignore non-white issues and figures, but Good and Mad does not do this at all. Reading this book made me feel powerful and angry and I will be revisiting the audiobook of it sometime soon.

Are there any nonfiction works that have remained in your mind since you first read them? Anything that has had a lasting impact on you? Let me know in the comments so I can add some more books to my TBR!

February 2021 Anticipated Releases

Hello there, how are you doing? Well, I’m here to give you even more books coming out in February to stack onto your TBR. I know there are a lot of these posts floating around, but I needed to throw my own into the mix. There are quite a few books coming out next month that I’ve been excitedly awaiting since last year, these are just a tiny portion of them! *sweats*

We Run the Tides by Vendela Vida

Genre: Historical Fiction/YA

Release Date: February 9th, 2021

An achingly beautiful story of female friendship, betrayal, and a mysterious disappearance set in the changing landscape of San Francisco 

Teenage Eulabee and her magnetic best friend, Maria Fabiola, own the streets of Sea Cliff, their foggy oceanside San Francisco neighborhood. They know Sea Cliff’s homes and beaches, its hidden corners and eccentric characters—as well as the upscale all-girls’ school they attend. One day, walking to school with friends, they witness a horrible act—or do they? Eulabee and Maria Fabiola vehemently disagree on what happened, and their rupture is followed by Maria Fabiola’s sudden disappearance—a potential kidnapping that shakes the quiet community and threatens to expose unspoken truths.

Suspenseful and poignant, We Run the Tides is Vendela Vida’s masterful portrait of an inimitable place on the brink of radical transformation. Pre–tech boom San Francisco finds its mirror in the changing lives of the teenage girls at the center of this story of innocence lost, the pain of too much freedom, and the struggle to find one’s authentic self. Told with a gimlet eye and great warmth, We Run the Tides is both a gripping mystery and a tribute to the wonders of youth, in all its beauty and confusion.

Honey Girl by Morgan Rogers

Genre: Contemporary Fiction/Romance (it’s been marketed as romance, but it’s not exactly romance from what I’ve read so far- ARC review coming soon!)

Release Date: February 23rd, 2021

A refreshingly timely and relatable debut novel about a young woman whose life plans fall apart when she meets her wife.

With her newly completed PhD in astronomy in hand, twenty-eight-year-old Grace Porter goes on a girls’ trip to Vegas to celebrate. She’s a straight A, work-through-the-summer certified high achiever. She is not the kind of person who goes to Vegas and gets drunkenly married to a woman whose name she doesn’t know…until she does exactly that.

This one moment of departure from her stern ex-military father’s plans for her life has Grace wondering why she doesn’t feel more fulfilled from completing her degree. Staggering under the weight of her father’s expectations, a struggling job market and feelings of burnout, Grace flees her home in Portland for a summer in New York with the wife she barely knows.

In New York, she’s able to ignore all the annoying questions about her future plans and falls hard for her creative and beautiful wife, Yuki Yamamoto. But when reality comes crashing in, Grace must face what she’s been running from all along—the fears that make us human, the family scars that need to heal and the longing for connection, especially when navigating the messiness of adulthood.

Review for this one coming soon. My initial thoughts in one word: healing. I’m loving it!

Wild Rain by Beverly Jenkins 

Genre: Historical Romance

Release Date: February 9th, 2021

The second novel in USA Today bestselling author Beverly Jenkins’ compelling new Women Who Dare series follows a female rancher in Wyoming after the Civil War.

A reporter has come to Wyoming to do a story on doctors for his Black newspaper back east. He thinks Colton Lee will be an interesting subject…until he meets Colton’s sister, Spring. She runs her own ranch, wears denim pants instead of dresses, and is the most fascinating woman he’s ever met.

But Spring, who has overcome a raucous and scandalous past, isn’t looking for, nor does she want, love. As their attraction grows, will their differences come between them or unite them for an everlasting love?

Beverly Jenkins is my absolute favorite historical romance writer. Her books mesh history and romance together so well, I would highly highly recommend reading her books if you are new to the genre or haven’t read any of her books. Forbidden and Rebel are a great place to start. I already have this new book pre-ordered (and I NEVER pre-order anything).

Gray Hair Don’t Care by Karen Booth

Genre: Contemporary Romance

Release Date: February 8th, 2021

Everything went wrong. And then she went gray.

At 47, newly divorced makeup artist Lela Bennett is dreading her next steps. Dating. Meeting people. Not letting herself go. But then she runs into Donovan James and tries something different—sleeping with her sexy crush from college. Unfortunately, in a stupor Lela confesses she was in love with Donovan all those years ago. He responds by leaving while she sleeps. The next morning, her gray hairs are practically taunting her. She knows she has to get it together. Forget men. Embrace her age. Own her gray.

Donovan James is a marketing genius, but his ex-wives will tell you—nothing freaks him out like feelings. Three years after his one-night stand with Lela, he’s focused on his daughter’s lifestyle company, but unprepared to meet the face of the beauty division. It’s Lela. With stunning silver locks and new confidence, she’s no longer swayed by his charms. When business starts booming, the universe seems intent on throwing them together time and again. And suddenly, two people convinced that romance was behind them are wondering if love could be what’s next.

The guy on the cover looks like Keanu Reeves. That’s enough, I’m sold. I’m also excited to see a romance featuring mature main characters over the age of 40. I AM READY.

There are so many more books coming out in February, like A Dark and Hollow Star, that I’m keeping my eye on. Let me know what books you are looking out for next month. My notepad is ready, my pen is poised!