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!

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.

One of the best things about blogging is being in the blogging world and reading the wonderful posts by all the other book bloggers out there. So today I decided I’m going to share some of my recent favorite posts from other blogs! I hope you enjoy (and that you go follow all of the blogs I mention!).

I don’t know if many of you keep track of who the publisher is for the books you read, but in general I don’t. There are so many! And the big publishing houses publish so many books it’s hard to keep track. There are a few exceptions for me, and today I’ll be recommending one in particular: Tor.com Publishing!