I love hearing about what my friends are reading! It’s one of the best ways to learn about new books that I might like. That gave me the idea to do a post celebrating my friends and the books that they loved this year. I asked my friends to pick up to 7 of their favorite reads of the year, and say a bit about them if they wanted. I hope you find some great new books to check out from this list, I know I did. Also, this ended up being a lot longer than I expected haha but it’s worth it I promise!

The Happy Place who? The Happy Place 5 what? Guess what y’all – it’s time for a new regular feature on the blog! The Happy Place 5 is going to be a monthly series where a few friends and I post 5 of our favorites books for a certain topic or theme. For example, you can see that this month’s topic is “Books that Kept Us Afloat in 2020.” The name came from a Discord group that I am a part of – we created the space to have a positive environment for a handful of close friends. All of us are bookworms, and many of us are bookstagrammers and bloggers, so we decided to start a blog post series together! I’ll link my friends blogs and posts for this month’s topic at the end of this post.

Okay, now that I’ve explained this new feature, let’s get to January’s topic! There’s no mincing words, 2020 was a shitshow for everyone. I naturally turned to books as an escape from the real world. There are definitely a handful that were really comforting for me during the year. So I’m going to share them with you, and hopefully they can do the same for you!

Hugo award–nominated author Stina Leicht has created a take on space opera for fans of The Mandalorian and Cowboy Bebop in this high-stakes adventure.
Persephone Station, a seemingly backwater planet that has largely been ignored by the United Republic of Worlds becomes the focus for the Serrao-Orlov Corporation as the planet has a few secrets the corporation tenaciously wants to exploit.
Rosie--owner of Monk’s Bar, in the corporate town of West Brynner, caters to wannabe criminals and rich Earther tourists, of a sort, at the front bar. However, exactly two types of people drank at Monk’s back bar: members of a rather exclusive criminal class and those who sought to employ them.
Angel--ex-marine and head of a semi-organized band of beneficent criminals, wayward assassins, and washed up mercenaries with a penchant for doing the honorable thing is asked to perform a job for Rosie. What this job reveals will effect Persephone and put Angel and her squad up against an army. Despite the odds, they are rearing for a fight with the Serrao-Orlov Corporation. For Angel, she knows that once honor is lost, there is no regaining it. That doesn’t mean she can’t damned well try.

Let me start by saying – THIS SHIT SLAPS!!! If you are not up to date with internet lingo (and I do not blame you AT ALL if you aren’t), that means – THIS BOOK IS AWESOME. I had SUCH a blast reading it, what a fun ride. There are spaceships, epic fights, badass women, queer protagonists, alien species, and! The best thing of all! FOUND FAMILY wweeeeeewwwwww. This was my first read of 2021 and lemme tell you, we are off to a great start babyyyyyy.

Ummmm so APPARENTLY according to my calendar it is the last day of 2020! To be honest, I’m kinda just sitting here shocked that it’s over. It feels like 2020 was an eternity. So naturally, it’s time to look at what I read this year! I don’t like just doing a list of top books, so I have a few different sections to tell you about what I read.

This post will be short and sweet, but titles are something that give me joy! And these days, I take any little piece of joy I can get. For this I specifically chose “long” book titles, which I defined to myself to be longer than five words. I was going to do many different lengths but the post was kinda getting out of hand haha.

Sometimes book titles are very obvious in how they connect to the story, and sometimes they have like a secret meaning that you don’t get until you read further in. I love both styles of title! How do authors come up with such amazing titles? I feel like it’s a gift. Anyway enough of me rambling about titles, here’s my list of favs!

• The Long Way to a Small Angry Planet (by Becky Chambers)
• The House in the Cerulean Sea (by T.J. Klune, my review here)
• Down Among the Sticks and Bones (by Seanan McGuire, Shari’s review here)
• The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (by Robert Louis Stevenson)
• When the Tiger Came Down the Mountain (by Nghi Vo, my review here)
• The Order of the Pure Moon Reflected in Water (by Zen Cho)
• A Big Ship at the Edge of the Universe (by Alex White, my review here)
• The Restaurant at the End of the Universe (by Douglas Adams)
• The Only Thing Worse Than Me is You (by Lily Anderson)
• An Astronaut’s Guide to Life on Earth (by Chris Hadfield)
• Dusk or Dark or Dawn or Day (by Seanan McGuire)
• Everyone’s a Aliebn When Ur an Aliebn Too (by Jomny Sun)

What are some of your favorite book titles?