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

And a note: find my intro post about joining Pondathon II here!

Hello friends! Round 2 of the Pondathon II readathon is now over, so it’s time for a wrap up! I felt a little slumpy this round, so I didn’t read quite as much as in the first round. But I read some great books and really enjoyed them all! But before I tell you what I read, let’s see what the quests and rewards were for this round.

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!

You know I love science fiction – particularly space operas, and you also know I love queer books. So what’s even better than each of those?? WHEN THEY’RE MASHED TOGETHER!! So I made a book recommendation list with a ton of queer space books. I originally posted it on my bookstagram here, so sorry if you’re seeing it twice. But here I’ve included the Goodreads links so you can check them all out easily!

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.

Today (well, today as I’m writing this) I saw the following tweet:

This is something that I KNOW we can all relate to haha. This is extremely relevant to our topic today, since we chose to talk about backlist books that we meant to read in 2021. I have 10000% said the above almost word for word about all of these books. So I feel personally attacked by this tweet lol. But anyway, read on to find out which books I STILL NEED TO READ. And then go berate me into reading them hehe.