A disclaimer – all of the Pondathon graphics were created by CW of The Quiet Pond and belong to her!

Hello friends! Instead of monthly wrap ups this year, I’m going to do Pondathon round wrap ups! If you are confused as to what the heck a Pondathon is, check out my intro post about it! Each round is ~roughly~ a month, so it’s basically the same thing. But instead of just sharing the books I read, I get to share the Pondathon quests I completed. And share my updated garden!! I’m excited. Round one has just finished so it’s time for my first wrap up.

BUT! FIRST! Since the Pondathon didn’t start until January 10th, I did read a few books before it started. Those were:

1. Along the Saltwise Sea by A. Deborah Baker (excellent middle grade adventure)
2. Vespertine by Margaret Rogerson (a new favorite book of mine!! Sabriel vibes)
3. Tides of Mutiny by Rebecca Rode (pirates! standalone! whee!)

Okay NOW on to the readathon stuff.

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

I think I’ve done a similar topic before, but it was actually like two years ago?? Which is weird. But anyway, world-building/settings is one of my favorite aspects of books. I mean, I read to escape the real world! So I love going to wild and wonderful places in my reads. There are so many great settings, but here are just ten books with ones that I love. I won’t summarize the books, I’ll just talk a little bit about the different settings. But of course I’ll link the Goodreads pages so you can check them out yourself!

Before I start, I want to say I got this idea from Michelle at Magical Reads! It’s such a wonderful idea Michelle!

Hopefully you saw my part one post yesterday with fantasy recs for emojis! If not, you’re welcome to check that one out here. There is no order at all to these posts haha. But anyway, the gist of the posts is: I had people give me an emoji, and for each one I chose a book to rec based on it! Some are straightforward, some I got creative with. I’ll write a little bit about why I chose each book! So here we go with part two of the fantasy recs!

Before I start, I want to say I got this idea from Michelle at Magical Reads! It’s such a wonderful idea Michelle!

Earlier this week I asked people on Bookstagram for some help with this post! I had people give me emojis, and in return I’d give a book rec for each emoji. Here are the resulting book recs! Well okay, this is part one because people sent A LOT of emojis oh my god. So part two will come tomorrow to make it easier to read and not get overwhelmed.

Some emojis are easier to pick books for, so for the harder ones I had to do a little interpretation. I’ll explain my reasoning a little bit so you understand why I chose each book for each emoji! And there will be a sci-fi edition (also in two parts) coming next week. So without further ado, here we go!

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.

Aaaaand just like that, it’s March. Which means! Yes, it’s time again for The Happy Place 5! This month we are talking about “Places you’d take a portal to in an instant.” To be honest, this one was kind of hard for me. Mostly because a lot of the settings in the books I read seem really cool but also really dangerous or scary lol. I tried to pick books where I’d be okay living there if there’s no portal back. Buuuuut really, I’m making this post assuming that I can portal back home if I want to hahaha.