Don’t mind me slightly panicking over here that it’s May tomorrow. It’s fine. IT’S FINE. Cue nervous laughter. Of course, end of the month means it’s time for a wrap up! I’ve noticed that each month I feel like I haven’t read that much, but it turns out to be quite a decent number. Maybe this is because I read so quickly, I don’t actually spend that much time reading? I don’t know haha. But overall I had a very enjoyable reading month! And I also watched a good show and played some great games!

What Did I Read?

Tropes. Ohhhh tropes. There are ones we love, ones we hate, and everything in between. Of course there are tons of popular ones, such as enemies to lovers, love triangles, found family, only one bed, etc. These ones are all pretty generic and broad, and can be found in many books. We all know that I’m a fan of found family and enemies to lovers in particular.

Aside from the generic ones, I’m sure we all have a handful of verrrrry specific tropes that we love. These can be harder to pinpoint, since if they are specific then they are necessarily more rare than the generic tropes. I love the idea of these!! So I wanted to make a list of my favorite trope “deep cuts.” For all of these I tried to list at least one book that has the trope, but my memory is sooo bad haha. So like, I know I’ve absolutely read all of these but just can’t remember which specific books I’ve seen them in.

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 April!! This month my friends and I are discussing under-hyped books. Of course, under-hyped can be hard to define, depending on what social media you use. So we decided that for this post at least, we will define under-hyped as having fewer than 1000 ratings on Goodreads. I really had to go searching for some of these haha. So without further ado, here’s my list! And just to note, they all had fewer than 1000 ratings at the time I wrote this post, but hopefully some of them have crossed that point since then!

IT’S MY BIRTHDAYYYYY!!! This tag is from Antonia @ Always Books, and I actually did it last year on my birthday (find it here). I figured, why not do it again and see how my answers differ this year! So let’s get started!

Although I missed the first day of Lunar New Year, I know that at least in Chinese tradition the new year celebration lasts for 15 days. So really, I’m only a little bit late to the festivities, as today (Feb. 26) is the last day (Lantern Festival). I originally wanted to make a post about books that take place during LNY, but ummmm I didn’t know of any haha. SO you get to have a good smattering of my favorite Asian authors (and a few authors I need to read)! Lunar New Year is celebrated in many different Asian cultures, so I wanted to include authors of many different Asian heritages.