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??

I can’t remember where I saw this prompt – I really should have written it down right when I started drafting this post. Oh well. But anyway it was about listing your favorite authors from A-Z! A lot of my favs have names that begin with the same letter so it was fun to go through the books I’ve read and remember authors that I love but don’t talk about much, or ones whose books I read long ago. I’ll list their names and a little bit about which books of theirs I love!

Guess what? Yes, it’s my birthday! I was looking for fun tags to do and I found this one from Antonia @ Always Books. So let’s get started!

1) Birthday Cake (A book with a plot that seems cliché but you adore it anyway)

Hmm I think it’s not so much the plot – because that was pretty novel – but the general idea of urban fantasy, and the kickass heroine. But the Kate Daniels series! I think the basic idea of warrior girl fights bad guys and there’s werewolves and vampires is a pretty cliché premise, but oh man you guys! This series is so much more than that basic premise. Even the werewolves and vampires are totally not like what you’d think. And Kate herself is THE BEST. So yeah. I love this series haha. Also – there’s nothing wrong with loving cliché things!

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!

Hello friends! I said I was back to blogging and then didn’t post for weeks – classic. Haha well you know, life just gets busy sometimes! But since it is now December – dang!! – I thought I’d get back to it and share a wrap-up of my reads and etc from the past month.

Do you ever set monthly TBRs? I used to, but I kinda feel like that puts too much pressure on me to read certain things, so I don’t do it anymore. I’ve been working on reading all of my owned books, so really what I’ve been doing is trying to read books I have and not buy too many new ones. This proves difficult since I’m fortunate enough to have easy library access 😂so I cheat on my “owned books” goal with library books.

This month, I read 4 books that I owned and 3 books from the library! Over all of those, I read 2986 pages, and had an average rating of 4.1. I also have now read 101 books this year! I wasn’t expecting to hit that so early, since the past few years I’ve reached around 100ish right at the end of the year. So let’s get to the good stuff – the books themselves!