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

It’s been a few months since I last participated in Top Ten Tuesday! I love this prompt though, as it makes me actually write down release dates LOL. I’m normally really bad at keeping track of upcoming releases, but this post makes me be a little more on top of it. So what are the top ten books that I’m looking forward to for the rest of this year?

YES it is me ONCE AGAIN doing a post about retellings. I’m sorry!!! I just can’t get enough of them! (Ok let’s be real I’m not actually sorry haha.) This time I’m focusing on upcoming releases so that you can all fill your TBRs, and make some preorders (if you so desire). I’ll include the synopsis of each from Goodreads so you can get an idea of what each is about! I’m really excited for all of these because they seem to expand on whatever original tale they are retelling. By this I mean the authors have made the stories more diverse than the original. Some are queer, some center people of color rather than white characters, and some center non-cis men. Everything that I love to see!!!

It’s been a while since I’ve shared some of these mini reviews! Okay fine, it’s been a while since I shared any reviews in general. I thought this would be a great way to start doing it again. These aren’t all of my most recent reads. But! They are ones that I wanted to highlight and ones that stuck out to me. Also I just realized that each one is a different genre!! We’ve got contemporary, horror, fantasy, and science fiction. I guess I read across quite a few genres, not just sci-fi and fantasy!

Did you ever have a phase as a kid where you were obsessed with Greek mythology? I definitely did. And I’m starting to realize that I don’t think I’ve ever left that phase haha. Lately I’ve been more sucked in than usual, and I totally blame that on the video game Hades. You already know I’m a sucker for retellings, and in particular I love mythology retellings. I think I find them interesting because with fairytale retellings, you are generally sticking to one story, whereas with mythology retellings you have soooo much more to draw from. I think in this way, the author can really shine with their own original take on things from mythology.

Because I’ve been drawn back in, I wanted to make a post about Greek mythology retellings/stories in various forms of media. Obviously I’ll talk about books, but I know we all consume other forms of media so I wanted to add those in as well!

So…May is over. That’s a thing. I didn’t get much blogging done, as it was a hard month for me. But!! I did do a lot of reading. And gaming. Both are an escape for me, so naturally I’ve done a lot of both this month haha. So without further ado, let’s see what kinda stuff I did this month!

What Did I Read?

1. The Kingdom of Copper by S.A. Chakraborty
2. The Empire of Gold by S.A. Chakraborty
3. Counting Down with You by Tashie Bhuiyan
4. The Friend Zone by Abby Jimenez
5. People We Meet On Vacation by Emily Henry
6. Horrid by Katrina Leno
7. The Prison Healer by Lynette Noni
8. Lore by Alexandra Bracken

I had four favorites this month, which is half of the books that I read haha. Those being: The Kingdom of Copper, People We Meet On Vacation, Horrid, and Lore. I love that I these are across a few different genres! KoC and Lore are both fantasy, PWMOV is contemporary/romance, and Horrid is fantasy horror! I’m a massive horror baby, but Horrid wasn’t that scary. And I love Katrina Leno (which you can see from this post). If you are thinking about wanting to try horror, I highly recommend this book. Also, I’m in a huge Greek myth phase right now because of a game, so I picked up Lore. It was such a wild ride, and a great modern take on Greek mythology! I loved it.