One challenge that is very popular on bookstagram is the “12 book recommendations from 12 friends” challenge. I think the idea is to read one of those 12 for each month of the year. I wanted to do it this year, but I did it a little differently. Since you know that one of my goals is to reduce my physical TBR, I had my friends choose books from my physical TBR!

If you know me and my reading tastes, you know that I will read any and all books that involve necromancy or bone magic. Fall is slowly creeping up on us – very slowly, in my case (desert life…). And obviously necromancy and bone magic are both pretty spooky! So I decided to compile a short list of books that involve one or the other! I bet you can guess one or two of the ones I’m going to include haha. Read on to see if you guessed correctly!

Hi friends! Are any of you video gamers in addition to being readers? I follow some other great bloggers who talk both books and video games, such as Caitlin at Realms of My Mind, and Kirsten at Video Games as Literature. Go check them out!

I came to video games late in life, since my parents weren’t big on them. I mostly game on my Nintendo Switch, but I’ve watched my boyfriend play quite a few games on the PlayStation (4 and 5). There are tons of games that have really great storylines and characters, and a lot of them make me want a book adaptation haha. And vice versa, I’ve read a lot of books that I think would make really interesting games! That inspired me to do a post all about pairing video games and books that have similar themes, settings, characters, etc. Sooo yeah that’s what I’m doing today! I hope you enjoy this post, it was fun to write and combine two of my hobbies.

As many of you know, I am participating in the Pondathon, a year-long story-driven readathon hosted by The Quiet Pond. You can find the intro post that I wrote here.

It is now round three of the Pondathon, which means we have a new side quest! This quest is given to us by Cuddle, the resident otter of The Quiet Pond. The prompts are:

1. Read a book by a woman (including non-binary women and femme) author of color during Women’s History Month
2. Read a book by a Black author for Black History Month

There is also a secret achievement – to read a book by a Black woman/non-binary woman/femme author. For more information, check out the full side quest post on The Quiet Pond here!

So I’m here to help you “win” this quest! I’ve got a bunch of book recs for you that fit these two prompts. I’ve split them up into books by Black authors, and books by women (inc. non-binary women and femmes) of color. In the Black author section, I’ve made a note of the books that fulfill the secrete achievement! So let’s get to the books!!

I mentioned in my November 2021 wrap up that I had watched the Netflix show called Arcane – and immediately loved it. It’s based on lore from the game League of Legends. But don’t worry!! You don’t need to know anything about the game to love the show. The animation and artwork is beautiful, and the story is AMAZING. Just look at this!!! Isn’t it beautiful?

The show became SUPER popular, and lots of my (real life and bookstagram) friends ended up watching it too. It’s been so much fun to discuss it with them. I had wanted to do a collab post with my friend Gretal (Instagram // blog // Twitter) for a while, so I was like, Gretal listen. WHAT IF!! We did a book rec post based on Arcane?? And she said “omg yes okay” which is a direct quote. So here we are!! We picked out a handful of major themes from the show, and created recs based on each of those themes. And obviously these are great books in general, so they’re really just general book recs for everyone even if you haven’t watched the show!

But you should watch it.

Gretal: Take it from me, who is notoriously bad at watching anything. Arcane is a must watch!