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.

So apparently May 15th was International Day of Families. NATURALLY this means that we had to pick found family as our Happy Place 5 topic this month! You (probably) already know that I’m a huge sucker for found family. Luckily, my friends are as well so we are all very happy to have this as our topic this month haha. As you may have noticed, I am posting this month’s post on the last day of the month. May has been kind of a hard month for me, so I haven’t been able to do much blogging. But I did want to share my choices with you!! Since I don’t have much energy I’m just going to post the Goodreads summary for each book, but I really hope you check them all out. So what are my choices??

The Happy Place who? The Happy Place 5 what? Guess what y’all – it’s time for a new regular feature on the blog! The Happy Place 5 is going to be a monthly series where a few friends and I post 5 of our favorites books for a certain topic or theme. For example, you can see that this month’s topic is “Books that Kept Us Afloat in 2020.” The name came 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.

Okay, now that I’ve explained this new feature, let’s get to January’s topic! There’s no mincing words, 2020 was a shitshow for everyone. I naturally turned to books as an escape from the real world. There are definitely a handful that were really comforting for me during the year. So I’m going to share them with you, and hopefully they can do the same for you!

This post will be short and sweet, but titles are something that give me joy! And these days, I take any little piece of joy I can get. For this I specifically chose “long” book titles, which I defined to myself to be longer than five words. I was going to do many different lengths but the post was kinda getting out of hand haha.

Sometimes book titles are very obvious in how they connect to the story, and sometimes they have like a secret meaning that you don’t get until you read further in. I love both styles of title! How do authors come up with such amazing titles? I feel like it’s a gift. Anyway enough of me rambling about titles, here’s my list of favs!

• The Long Way to a Small Angry Planet (by Becky Chambers)
• The House in the Cerulean Sea (by T.J. Klune, my review here)
• Down Among the Sticks and Bones (by Seanan McGuire, Shari’s review here)
• The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (by Robert Louis Stevenson)
• When the Tiger Came Down the Mountain (by Nghi Vo, my review here)
• The Order of the Pure Moon Reflected in Water (by Zen Cho)
• A Big Ship at the Edge of the Universe (by Alex White, my review here)
• The Restaurant at the End of the Universe (by Douglas Adams)
• The Only Thing Worse Than Me is You (by Lily Anderson)
• An Astronaut’s Guide to Life on Earth (by Chris Hadfield)
• Dusk or Dark or Dawn or Day (by Seanan McGuire)
• Everyone’s a Aliebn When Ur an Aliebn Too (by Jomny Sun)

What are some of your favorite book titles?

Hello friends! I hope you are all staying healthy and indoors – and relatively sane (as sane as we can be). I don’t know about you, but my reading has drastically slowed down because of everything happening. In March I only read 3 books, and April hasn’t been much better. I’ve been focusing on doing things that make me happy! And obviously reading makes me happy, but I’m finding it hard to concentrate and read sometimes.

As I said I’ve been trying to do things that make me happy – and by that I really mean reading or watching or playing things that make me feel all warm and fuzzy inside! Like, all the cute feels. So I’m here to recommend a variety of things that make me feel that way, in case you also need recs for things like that!

A magical island. A dangerous task. A burning secret.
Linus Baker leads a quiet, solitary life. At forty, he lives in a tiny house with a devious cat and his old records. As a Case Worker at the Department in Charge Of Magical Youth, he spends his days overseeing the well-being of children in government-sanctioned orphanages.
When Linus is unexpectedly summoned by Extremely Upper Management he's given a curious and highly classified assignment: travel to Marsyas Island Orphanage, where six dangerous children reside: a gnome, a sprite, a wyvern, an unidentifiable green blob, a were-Pomeranian, and the Antichrist. Linus must set aside his fears and determine whether or not they’re likely to bring about the end of days.
But the children aren’t the only secret the island keeps. Their caretaker is the charming and enigmatic Arthur Parnassus, who will do anything to keep his wards safe. As Arthur and Linus grow closer, long-held secrets are exposed, and Linus must make a choice: destroy a home or watch the world burn.
An enchanting story, masterfully told, The House in the Cerulean Sea is about the profound experience of discovering an unlikely family in an unexpected place—and realizing that family is yours.

Thank you to Tor Books (via NetGalley) for providing me with this ARC in exchange for an honest review!

FIRST OF ALL – look at the blurb okay?? “This book is very close to perfect.” – Seanan McGuire AKA MY QUEEN. How could anyone NOT want to read this book based on that alone?? Okay fine, if that wasn’t enough, then this bit from the synopsis might reel you in:

“…he’s given a curious and highly classified assignment: travel to Marsyas Island Orphanage, where six dangerous children reside: a gnome, a sprite, a wyvern, an unidentifiable green blob, a were-Pomeranian, and the Antichrist.”

To me that is like the perfect cast of characters haha. And Linus himself! He’s such a softie – albeit a boring one at the onset of the book. But wow does he grow into himself! This book is truly a shining example of a character driven novel – and after reading about 20% of it, I knew it would go on my list of favorite books. It was a true joy to read, and made my heart all warm and fuzzy.