Thank you to Jana at That Artsy Reader Girl for hosting/organizing Top Ten Tuesday!

I love this topic!!! Rereading books is great, but often you can’t capture the same emotions and shock that you feel when you read a book for the first time. It was interesting to think about which books I’d choose, and the reasoning behind them. I wish there was some way we could actually do this though haha.

I saw my friend Kori do this on her bookstagram, so I thought I’d do the same thing here! If you want to see her post, you can find it here. Thanks for sharing that Kori ❤️. Here is a preview of some of the books that I’ll be talking about!

The Happy Place 5 is a monthly series where a few friends and I post 5 of our favorites books for a certain topic or theme. The name is 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.

Happy June and happy Pride month! Naturally we had to celebrate queer voices in the book community this month. We also chose to highlight BIPOC characters as well, since we would like to uplift those stories! I’ve read quite a few, but there are some that I wanted to highlight that I haven’t read yet. There are soooo many queer BIPOC stories on my TBR and I’m a little overwhelmed haha. I just want to read them all right now!!! But sadly I can only really read one book at a time haha. But anyway!!! Here are my picks. The first three are ones I’ve read, and the last two are to be read!

March was kind of a hard month for me. A lot of things going on in the world, one year pandemic anniversary, stressful stuff about my thesis, etc. You get the idea. So obviously, I didn’t have very many blog posts haha. I wanted to let you know what I was up to this month though, so here’s a wrap up/look back for my March! I’m toying with the idea of including more than just book-focused posts in the future. So I’m going to be talking about other media in this post as well – I hope you enjoy it all!

Hooooo boy. What a book. What a magnificent masterpiece of a book. I’m not this will be a review, so much as me rambling and spewing thoughts. I think a lot of people went into this one expecting it to be a romcom type of book. However, it is more of a coming of age/exploration of adulthood with some romance. The main focus is Grace and her journey, rather than the romance (though that is definitely a part of her journey). I just. Ugh. Reading this as someone who is nearing the end of an astrophysics PhD (like Grace) and experiencing burnout, depression, and anxiety (like Grace) hit so me so hard. It really made me feel SEEN.