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

Welcome to the October edition of The Happy Place 5! It’s fall everyone! So of course we chose the topic “fall vibes” for this month’s post. That’s a very broad topic, I know. But this way it allows for tons of different interpretations! Could be ghosts, could be cozy falls vibes, or spooky reads, and on an on. I decided to write about witchy books! I also decided to do two sets of five books today – I know, I need to calm down. One set will be books I’ve read, and the other are books that I want to read! So what are my picks?

It’s been a while since I’ve shared some of these mini reviews! Okay fine, it’s been a while since I shared any reviews in general. I thought this would be a great way to start doing it again. These aren’t all of my most recent reads. But! They are ones that I wanted to highlight and ones that stuck out to me. Also I just realized that each one is a different genre!! We’ve got contemporary, horror, fantasy, and science fiction. I guess I read across quite a few genres, not just sci-fi and fantasy!

You know what’s absolutely RIDICULOUS? The fact that it is literally the year 2020 right now. How did that happen?? It’s the twenties now!! Again. Time to bring back the roaring twenties I guess. And that means it’s also time to take a look back at the books I read in 2019! I love sharing my top books, obviously, but I’m including a little bit more about authors I discovered and etc because how can you encapsulate an entire year in just a list of your top ten books?? Answer: you can’t. So here’s just a bunch of stuff about the books I read this year!

Have you discovered any new favorite authors recently? I HAVE. Thanks to @xcrini (on Instagram; also here on Twitter), recommending her books all the time, I finally read and fell in love with Katrina Leno. It actually messed up my February wrap up, because I read both Summer of Salt and Everything All at Once on the last day of February after I had already published my wrap up, oops. They were just THAT GOOD that I had to read them both in one sitting. And like, look at those covers?!??! THEY’RE BEAUTIFUL.