A note on this blog's organization

Since I first started this blog, I've read over 600 books. I decided to organize them by sections, so to navigate to specific blog entries, review the sections below. To look for a specific book, you can check the list below, then use it to find the right page of the blog. Alternatively, you can try typing the book title or author's name in the search bar at the top left of this blog, but that seems to only pull from 'Conquering the Classics' and '101 and Beyond'.

Book Bingo #12 - 2024 - Hygge Cozy Winter Magic Fantasy Book Bingo

Book Bingo #12 -  2024 - Hygge Cozy Winter Magic Fantasy Book Bingo (40 books in total, 0 crossovers with '101 and Beyond' list)


This was another one of my own creation, and as you can see, it grew a bit ;) I loved reading around a season again.

In case you can't read my handwriting, here's the list of books and titles (top down, left to right). The blurbs are from the author's websites or bookstores. When possible, I've linked to the author's page to purchase a copy from them directly or an independent seller. Or use the library! Or buy local! As you wish. ;)

Category: Set in winter
    • An all-new collection of winter-themed mysteries from the master of the genre.

Category: Cozy mystery
    • In a peaceful retirement village, four unlikely friends meet weekly in the Jigsaw Room to discuss unsolved crimes; together they call themselves the Thursday Murder Club. When a local developer is found dead with a mysterious photograph left next to the body, the Thursday Murder Club suddenly find themselves in the middle of their first live case. As the bodies begin to pile up, can our unorthodox but brilliant gang catch the killer, before it’s too late?
Category: Holiday cheer
    • Vivian Forest has been out of the country a grand total of one time, so when she gets the chance to tag along on her daughter Maddie's work trip to England to style a royal family member, she can't refuse. She's excited to spend the holidays taking in the magnificent British sights, but what she doesn't expect is to become instantly attracted to a certain private secretary and his charming accent and unyielding formality. Malcolm Hudson has been the Queen's private secretary for years and has never given a personal, private tour...until now. He is intrigued by Vivian the moment he meets her and finds himself making excuses just to spend time with her. When flirtatious banter turns into a kiss under the mistletoe, things snowball into a full-on fling. Despite a ticking timer on their holiday romance, they are completely fine with ending their short, steamy fling come New Year's Day...or are they?
Category: Dickens
    • When Nicholas Nickleby is left penniless by the death of his father, he appeals to his Uncle Ralph to help him and his mother and sister. But Ralph conceives a violent hatred of the young man, and his schemes of persecution haunt Nicholas through a series of picaresque adventures, including a job as a tutor at a horrific school for unwanted boys run by the cruel Wackford Squeers and a stint as a member of the eccentric Crummles family theater troupe. Without shying away from the grimmer aspects of the world Nicholas encounters on his path to eventual happiness, the story remains one of Dickens’s most high-spirited and exuberant.

Category: Sci-fi/space
    • Ocean's Echo is a romantic space adventure featuring fake-soulbonding and psychic soldiers, set in the same universe as Winter's Orbit but standing alone. When Tennal - a rich socialite, inveterate flirt, and walking disaster - is caught using his telepathic powers for illegal activities, the military decides to bind his mind to someone whose coercive powers are strong enough to control him. Enter Lieutenant Surit, the child of a disgraced general. Out of a desperate need to restore a pension to his other parent, Lieutenant Surit agrees to be bound to Tennal and keep him conscripted in the army, a task that seems impossible even for someone with Surit's ability to control minds. Tennal just wants to escape, but Surit isn't all that he seems. And their bond may just be the key to their freedom.

Category: Features snow
    • One night, after the first snowfall of the year, a boy named Jonas wakes up and discovers that his mother has disappeared. Only one trace of her remains: a pink scarf, his Christmas gift to her, now worn by the snowman that inexplicably appeared in their yard earlier that day.  Inspector Harry Hole suspects a link between the missing woman and a suspicious letter he’s received. The case deepens when a pattern emerges: over the past decade, eleven women have vanished—all on the day of the first snow. But this is a killer who makes his own rules . . . and he’ll break his pattern just to keep the game interesting, as he draws Harry ever closer into his twisted web. With brilliantly realized characters and hair-raising suspense, international bestselling author Jo Nesbø presents his most chilling case yet—one that will test Harry Hole to the very limits of his sanity.

Category: Featuring books
    • The Great Recession has shuffled Clay Jannon out of his life as a San Francisco Web-design drone—and serendipity, sheer curiosity, and the ability to climb a ladder like a monkey has landed him a new gig working the night shift at Mr. Penumbra's 24-Hour Bookstore. But after just a few days on the job, Clay begins to realize that this store is even more curious than the name suggests. There are only a few customers, but they come in repeatedly and never seem to actually buy anything, instead "checking out" impossibly obscure volumes from strange corners of the store, all according to some elaborate, long-standing arrangement with the gnomic Mr. Penumbra. The store must be a front for something larger, Clay concludes, and soon he's embarked on a complex analysis of the customers' behavior and roped his friends into helping to figure out just what's going on. But once they bring their findings to Mr. Penumbra, it turns out the secrets extend far outside the walls of the bookstore.
Category: Cozy fantasy
    • In the tranquil fields and meadows of long-ago England, there is a small hamlet that has stood on a jut of granite for 600 years. Just to the east stands a high stone wall, for which the village is named. Here, in the hamlet of Wall, young Tristran Thorn has lost his heart to the hauntingly beautiful Victoria Forester. And here, one crisp October eve, Tristran makes his love a promise -- an impetuous vow that will send him through the only breach in the wall, across the pasture... and into the most exhilarating adventure of his life.
Category: Witchy magic
    • Five octogenarian witches gather as an angry mob threatens to demolish Moonshyne Manor. All eyes turn to the witch in charge, Queenie, who confesses they’ve fallen far behind on their mortgage payments. Still, there’s hope, since the imminent return of Ruby—one of the sisterhood who’s been gone for thirty-three years—will surely be their salvation. But the mob is only the start of their troubles. One man is hellbent on avenging his family for the theft of a legacy he claims was rightfully his. In an act of desperation, Queenie makes a bargain with an evil far more powerful than anything they’ve ever faced. Then things take a turn for the worse when Ruby’s homecoming reveals a seemingly insurmountable obstacle instead of the solution to all their problems.
Category: Genre-bending
    • Jane has lived a mostly ordinary life, raised by her recently deceased aunt Magnolia, whom she counted on to turn life into an adventure. Without Aunt Magnolia, Jane is directionless. Then an old acquaintance, the glamorous and capricious Kiran Thrash, blows back into Jane’s life and invites her to a gala at the Thrashes’ extravagant island mansion called Tu Reviens. Jane remembers her aunt telling her: “If anyone ever invites you to Tu Reviens, promise me that you’ll go.” What Jane doesn’t know is that at Tu Reviens her story will change; the house will offer her five choices that could ultimately determine the course of her newly untethered life. One choice leads Jane into a heist mystery. Another takes her into a spy thriller. She finds herself in a gothic horror story, a space opera, and an extraordinary fantasy realm. Every choice comes with a price; at Tu Reviens, anything is possible.
Category: By a Danish author
    • We, the Drowned is the story of the port town of Marstal, Denmark, whose inhabitants sailed the world from the mid-nineteenth century to the end of the Second World War. The novel tells of ships wrecked and blown up in wars, of places of terror and violence that continue to lure each generation. The result is a brilliant seafaring novel, a gripping saga encompassing industrial growth, the years of expansion and exploration, the crucible of the first half of the twentieth century, and most of all, the sea.
Category: Read while baking
    • After her life falls apart, recruitment consultant Layla Patel returns home to her family in San Francisco. But in the eyes of her father, who runs a Michelin starred restaurant, she can do no wrong. He would do anything to see her smile again. With the best intentions in mind, he offers her the office upstairs to start her new business and creates a profile on an online dating site to find her a man. She doesn’t know he’s arranged a series of blind dates until the first one comes knocking on her door…
Category: Read by the fire
    • Fable has been cursed by what the people in her village call the Blight, a twisted enchantment that leaves her without a face of her own. To stay alive, Fable has to steal the faces of others, making her an outcast that no one trusts. When the fierce Blighthunter Vycorax comes to kill Fable to stop her curse from spreading, Fable narrowly escapes by fleeing into the thorny woods surrounding her small village. The treacherous forest has been ruled by a demon-prince for centuries, a deadly place trapped in time. Fable—and her opinionated feline companion, Moth—is the first to dare enter in a very long time. There, she encounters a tediously chatty skull, dangerously meddlesome deities, and a beast so powerful it tears at the fabric of reality, leaving nothingness in its horrible wake. Fable will soon discover that, in the Mirrorwood, nothing is quite like the stories say, and the perilous realm may be the only chance she has to break her curse and find her true self.
    • What started out as a survey of the twelve leading American history textbooks has ended up being what the San Francisco Chronicle calls “an extremely convincing plea for truth in education.” In Lies My Teacher Told Me, James W. Loewen brings history alive in all its complexity and ambiguity. Beginning with pre-Columbian history and ranging over characters and events as diverse as Reconstruction, Helen Keller, the first Thanksgiving, the My Lai massacre, 9/11, and the Iraq War, Loewen offers an eye-opening critique of existing textbooks, and a wonderful retelling of American history as it should—and could—be taught to American students.
    Category: Myth or fable
      • In the house of Helios, god of the sun and mightiest of the Titans, a daughter is born. But Circe is a strange child--not powerful, like her father, nor viciously alluring like her mother. Turning to the world of mortals for companionship, she discovers that she does possess power--the power of witchcraft, which can transform rivals into monsters and menace the gods themselves. Threatened, Zeus banishes her to a deserted island, where she hones her occult craft, tames wild beasts and crosses paths with many of the most famous figures in all of mythology, including the Minotaur, Daedalus and his doomed son Icarus, the murderous Medea, and, of course, wily Odysseus. But there is danger, too, for a woman who stands alone, and Circe unwittingly draws the wrath of both men and gods, ultimately finding herself pitted against one of the most terrifying and vengeful of the Olympians. To protect what she loves most, Circe must summon all her strength and choose, once and for all, whether she belongs with the gods she is born from, or the mortals she has come to love.
    Category: Chosen for its cover
      • The Overstory, winner of the Pulitzer Prize in Fiction, is a sweeping, impassioned work of activism and resistance that is also a stunning evocation of—and paean to—the natural world. From the roots to the crown and back to the seeds, Richard Powers’s twelfth novel unfolds in concentric rings of interlocking fables that range from antebellum New York to the late twentieth-century Timber Wars of the Pacific Northwest and beyond. There is a world alongside ours—vast, slow, interconnected, resourceful, magnificently inventive, and almost invisible to us. This is the story of a handful of people who learn how to see that world and who are drawn up into its unfolding catastrophe.
    Category: Urban fantasy
      • The Man in Black fled across the desert, and the gunslinger followed. So begins Book I of Stephen King’s iconic fantasy series, The Dark Tower. Part sci-fi novel, part futuristic dystopia, part spaghetti Western, and part high fantasy vision, The Gunslinger tells the story of Roland Deschain, Mid-World’s last gunslinger, who is tracking an enigmatic magician known only as the man in black. Following his quarry across the demon-infested Mohaine Desert, Roland confronts a mad preacher woman and her murderous flock, holds palaver with a speaking demon, and finally befriends a young boy from our world named Jake Chambers. Jake joins Roland on his quest, but while Roland travels with his young companion Jake, the man in black travels with Roland’s soul in his pocket.
    Category: Afro-futurism
      • It is a time of calamity in a major metropolitan city’s Department of Elevator Inspectors, and Lila Mae Watson, the first black female elevator inspector in the history of the department, is at the center of it. There are two warring factions within the department: the Empiricists, who work by the book and dutifully check for striations on the winch cable and such; and the Intuitionists, who are simply able to enter the elevator cab in question, meditate, and intuit any defects.
    Category: Features fairies
      • [Just sharing the plot for the first one, so as not to spoil!] 
        • Jude was seven years old when her parents were murdered and she and her two sisters were stolen away to live in the treacherous High Court of Faerie. Ten years later, Jude wants nothing more than to belong there, despite her mortality. But many of the fey despise humans. Especially Prince Cardan, the youngest and wickedest son of the High King. To win a place at the Court, she must defy him–and face the consequences. In doing so, she becomes embroiled in palace intrigues and deceptions, discovering her own capacity for bloodshed. But as civil war threatens to drown the Courts of Faerie in violence, Jude will need to risk her life in a dangerous alliance to save her sisters, and Faerie itself.
    Category: Battle for a throne
      • When nineteen-year-old huntress Feyre kills a wolf in the woods, a beast-like creature arrives to demand retribution. Dragged to a treacherous magical land she only knows about from legends, Feyre discovers that her captor is not truly a beast, but one of the lethal, immortal faeries who once ruled their world. As she dwells on his estate, her feelings for the faerie, Tamlin, transform from icy hostility into a fiery passion that burns through every lie and warning she’s been told about the beautiful, dangerous world of the Fae. But an ancient, wicked shadow over the faerie lands is growing, and Feyre must find a way to stop it . . . or doom Tamlin—and his world—forever.
    Category: Magic school
    • Fourth Wing - Rebecca Yarros [don't worry, I read the next two as well for the next bingo :)]
      • Twenty-year-old Violet Sorrengail was supposed to enter the Scribe Quadrant, living a quiet life among books and history. Now, the commanding general—also known as her tough-as-talons mother—has ordered Violet to join the hundreds of candidates striving to become the elite of Navarre: dragon riders. But when you’re smaller than everyone else and your body is brittle, death is only a heartbeat away...because dragons don’t bond to “fragile” humans. They incinerate them.
    Category: Features a forest
      • Winter lasts most of the year at the edge of the Russian wilderness, and in the long nights, Vasilisa and her siblings love to gather by the fire to listen to their nurse’s fairy tales. Above all, Vasya loves the story of Frost, the blue-eyed winter demon. Wise Russians fear him, for he claims unwary souls, and they honor the spirits that protect their homes from evil. Then Vasya’s widowed father brings home a new wife from Moscow. Fiercely devout, Vasya’s stepmother forbids her family from honoring their household spirits, but Vasya fears what this may bring. And indeed, misfortune begins to stalk the village. But Vasya’s stepmother only grows harsher, determined to remake the village to her liking and to groom her rebellious stepdaughter for marriage or a convent. As the village’s defenses weaken and evil from the forest creeps nearer, Vasilisa must call upon dangerous gifts she has long concealed—to protect her family from a threat sprung to life from her nurse’s most frightening tales.
    Category: Sleuth repeatedly admonished not to sleuth
      • Welcome to Cherry Glen--where the gossip's juicy, the veggies are organic, and murder's always in season! With a heart full of hope, Shiloh Bellamy trades her big-city hustle for the rolling fields of her Michigan hometown, dreaming of turning her family's crumbling farm into a darling farm-to-table haven. Though when Shiloh's only investor turns up dead--face-down in her flower bed, no less!--her fresh start starts to wilt. Everyone knows her father had a grudge against the investor, and word travels fast in her small town. Now, Shiloh must clear her family's name and track down the real killer before her new life is uprooted for good.
    Category: Small town with eccentric people
      • The inspiration for this novel came years ago in a song. After hearing the Beatles' "Blackbird" for the first time, it haunted me, and I played it obsessively. I was captivated with the concept of broken wings and how emotional wounds can keep many from being able to metaphorically fly. And if blackbirds could, what would they sing to us in the dead of the night? What do we most want to hear? Blackbird research led me quickly to the Song of Sixpence with its “four and twenty blackbirds baked in a pie,” and then a tidbit in Celtic folklore revealed that blackbirds were considered guardians and messengers of the "Other world.” With that, the heart of this book took form. What if blackbirds with their songs could pass messages from dearly departed loved ones through, of all things, pie, to bring comfort and love to those left behind? 
    Category: Poirot mystery
      • On Christmas Eve at Gorston Hall, the Lee family’s festivities are shattered by a deafening crash of furniture and a high-pitched wailing scream. Upstairs—in a locked bedroom—the tyrannical patriarch Simeon Lee lies dead in a pool of blood, his throat slashed. When Hercule Poirot offers to assist, he finds an atmosphere not of mourning but of mutual suspicion. It seems everyone had their own reason to hate the old man, but which one of them turned a special occasion into an occasion for homicide? The suspects will indeed be stirring this Christmas Eve...
    Category: Animal as a main character
      • Flora 717 is a worker bee born into the lowest caste of her totalitarian hive society. Though prepared to sacrifice everything for the Queen and work herself to death, she is a survivor who escapes internal massacres, religious purges, and can even successfully confront a huge marauding wasp. With each act of bravery her status grows, revealing both the enemies within, and the sinister secrets that rule the hive. But when Flora’s devotion to a life of service is overwhelmed by fierce and forbidden maternal love, she must break the most sacred law of all, and embark on a collision course with everything she holds most dear.
    Category: Set in London
      • It’s a week before Christmas, and Louisa Graham is working twelve hour shifts at a bakery on Manhattan's Lower East Side. When a young cooking show assistant comes in from the rain and begs to buy all the cinnamon rolls on her tray, she doesn’t know what to do. Louisa is just the baker, and they aren't hers to sell. But the show burned the rolls they were supposed to film that day; so she agrees. The next morning, Louisa finds out that her cinnamon rolls were a hit, but the star of the show was allergic, and the whole crew is supposed to leave for London that afternoon. They want Louisa to step in for their annual Christmas Eve Dinner TV special at Claridge's. It’s a great opportunity, and Digby Bunting, Louisa’s famous baking idol, will be there. Even if he does seem more interested in her than her food. And then there’s Kate, the show's beautiful producer. On their first day in London she runs into the skinny boy she jilted at St. Andrew's in Scotland ten years ago. Now he’s a handsome, brilliant mathematician, and newly divorced. Their familiar spark is still there, but so is the scar of how they left things. Kate and Louisa are busy preparing for the show, but old and new flames are complicating their work.
    Category: Full series
      • [Again, just sharing the first one's plot so as not to spoil!]
        • Avery Grambs has a plan for a better future: survive high school, win a scholarship, and get out. But her fortunes change in an instant when billionaire Tobias Hawthorne dies and leaves Avery virtually his entire fortune. The catch? Avery has no idea why - or even who Tobias Hawthorne is. To receive her inheritance, Avery must move into sprawling, secret passage-filled Hawthorne House, where every room bears the old man's touch - and his love of puzzles, riddles, and codes. Unfortunately for Avery, Hawthorne House is also occupied by the family that Tobias Hawthorne just dispossessed. This includes the four Hawthorne grandsons: dangerous, magnetic, brilliant boys who grew up with every expectation that one day, they would inherit billions. Heir apparent Grayson Hawthorne is convinced that Avery must be a con-woman, and he's determined to take her down. His brother, Jameson, views her as their grandfather's last hurrah: a twisted riddle, a puzzle to be solved. Caught in a world of wealth and privilege, with danger around every turn, Avery will have to play the game herself just to survive.
    Category: Features dragons
      • The House of Berethnet has ruled Inys for a thousand years. Still unwed, Queen Sabran the Ninth must conceive a daughter to protect her realm from destruction – but assassins are getting closer to her door. Ead Duryan is an outsider at court. Though she has risen to the position of lady-in-waiting, she is loyal to a hidden society of mages. Ead keeps a watchful eye on Sabran, secretly protecting her with forbidden magic. Across the dark sea, Tané has trained to be a dragonrider since she was a child, but is forced to make a choice that could see her life unravel. Meanwhile, the divided East and West refuse to parley, and forces of chaos are rising from their sleep.
    Category: Future bestseller/#1 in a series
    • Terminus - M. Katerina Rose (a.k.a. me lol)
      • I queried this quite a few times but have not had interest, and I haven't been back to revisit them in a few years, so no blurb yet. I'll add if/when I draft!
    Category: Future bestseller/#2 in a series
    • Harbinger - M. Katerina Rose
      • I queried this quite a few times but have not had interest, and I haven't been back to revisit them in a few years, so no blurb yet. I'll add if/when I draft!
    Category: Bonus
      • First Son Alex Claremont-Diaz is the closest thing to a prince this side of the Atlantic. With his intrepid sister and the Veep’s genius granddaughter, they’re the White House Trio, a beautiful millennial marketing strategy for his mother, President Ellen Claremont. International socialite duties do have downsides—namely, when photos of a confrontation with his longtime nemesis Prince Henry at a royal wedding leak to the tabloids and threaten American/British relations. The plan for damage control: staging a fake friendship between the First Son and the Prince. Alex is busy enough handling his mother’s bloodthirsty opponents and his own political ambitions without an uptight royal slowing him down. But beneath Henry’s Prince Charming veneer, there’s a soft-hearted eccentric with a dry sense of humor and more than one ghost haunting him. As President Claremont kicks off her reelection bid, Alex finds himself hurtling into a secret relationship with Henry that could derail the campaign and upend two nations. And Henry throws everything into question for Alex, an impulsive, charming guy who thought he knew everything: What is worth the sacrifice? How do you do all the good you can do? And, most importantly, how will history remember you?
    My Reflections on this Book Bingo

    As with the other book bingos, I won't blog separately on each of these books, as it has been a long time since I read many of these, and I wouldn't want to give them short shrift. What I will do instead is share passages I liked and/or general reflections from this bingo board. 

    I'll preface this by saying that I believe I borrowed many of these books from the library, and at least one I listened to on audiobook, so I don't have notes on every book. Please don't take this as a sign of me not liking these books, it's just been a few years.
    • Thursday Murder Club
      • This was a delightful read, and I also very much enjoyed the movie version.
        • This is where the ghosts are, where the habits still bustle, and where the whispers have sunk into stone.
    • Royal Holiday
      • As I mentioned with one of her other works, this author is the sister of my friend's friend (lol that sounds like a ridiculous connection, but whatever) and I greatly enjoyed it. Delighted to see more representation in romance, in terms of age & racial diversity, and it was a well-spun story.
    • Nicholas Nickleby
      • Definitely an enjoyable read, but not my all-time favorite Dickens. See other Dickens posts for a ranking. ;) 
        • Such is the sleight of hand by which we juggle with ourselves and change our very weaknesses into our most magnanimous virtues!
    • Ocean's Echo
      • Such a fun read! My siblings and I all ended up reading it and enjoying it, and I think my older sister, Lexie, read more in the series!
        • A lit fuse didn't stop being a lit fuse just because it had decided to burn politely.
        • He could barely be likeable for an hour at a time.
    • Mr. Penumbra's 24-Hour Bookstore
      • Amusingly, I think I had read this book already, but I didn't realize it until about halfway through. Definitely a fun read! Not a reflection on the book, either, that I didn't remember it - I tend to lose plots after I've read them and enjoy the re-remembering.
    • Stardust
      • I remember enjoying this book, but I think I must have borrowed it from the library, as I don't have any notes or a copy.
    • Jane, Unlimited
      • This book was fun. I loaned it to a friend and she did not care for it, lol. I enjoyed the sort of choose your own adventure of it. 
        • A storm can be a cozy thing when one isn't in it.
    • We, The Drowned
      • 'I have a dream place. Do you know what a dream place is?' He shook his head. 'It's a place where you dream.
      • Did they ever wonder why they sailed? Was it duty, conviction, or something deeper that kept propelling them into the danger zone?
    • Marriage Game
      • I really enjoyed this, but I think perhaps I loaned my copy to someone, because I don't seem to have it. 
    • Lies My Teacher Told Me
      • EVERYONE SHOULD READ THIS BOOK. ALL OF IT. 
        • There is a reciprocal relationship between truth about the past and justice in the present.
        • History is furious debate informed by evidence and reason.
        • Textbooks should show that neither morality nor immorality can simply be conferred upon us by history.
        • Presenting a controversy seems somehow radical. It invites students to come to their own conclusions.
        • The antidote to feel-good history is not feel-bad history but honest and inclusive history.
        • Textbooks still write to comfort descendants of settlers.
        • Our history textbooks still obliterate the interracial, multicultural nature of frontier life.
        • Nothing ever causes anything. Things just happen.
        • It is almost unimaginable how racist the United States became during the nadir.
        • When textbooks make racism invisible in American history, they obstruct our already poor ability to see it in the present.
        • Topics I found particularly stimulating - syncretism, exploring the Native slave trade in America, the role of Native Americans in 'settling' the West, the 'magnolia myth', downplaying slavery in the North, history of labor & strikes, government skullduggery
          • If we recognized American Indians as important intellectual antecedents of our political structure, we would have to acknowledge that acculturation has been a two-way street, and we might have to reassess the assumption of primitive Indian culture that legitimizes the entire conquest.
          • Textbooks cannot show the influence of slavery on our foreign policy if they are unwilling to talk abut ideas like racism that might make whites look bad.
          • By downplaying covert and illegal acts by the government, textbook authors narcotize students from thinking about such issues as the increasing dominance and secrecy of the executive brance.
      • Circe
        • That is what exile meant: no one was coming, no one ever would.
        • I touched the thought like a bruise, testing its ache.
        • I believed that she would rather set the world on fire than lose.
        • 'You have always been the worst of my children,' he said. 'Be sure you do not dishonor me.' 'I have a better idea. I will do as I please, and when you count your children, leave me out.' yassssssss.
        • 'You are not frightened?' 'You warned me it was not safe,' he said. 'I do not think being frightened will help.
      • The Overstory
        • First there was nothing. Then there was everything.
        • But Now, that next best of times, is long, and rewrites everything.
        • There are things in here worse than wolves and witches, primal fears that no amount of civilizing will ever tame.
        • 'I hear myself best when I'm sleeping.'
        • They have lived like flighty and forgetful gods.
        • She descends into the real anguish of imaginary beings.
        • 'Can you feel it?' she asks, under the mayhem in the western sky.
      • The Gunslinger 
        • I enjoy Stephen King's fiction, but I especially enjoy his writing about writing. I loved On Writing many years ago, and I loved the introduction to this work.
          • Intro quotes
            • My pockets were empty, but my head was full of things I wanted to say and my heart was full of stories I wanted to tell. 
            • More than anything esle I wanted to get inside my readers' defenses, wanted to rip them and ravish them and change them forever with nothing but story.
            • More than anything else, I wanted to tell a tale of wonder.
          • Main text quotes
            • The gunslinger had been struck by a momentary dizziness, a kind of yawing sensation that made the entire world seem ephemeral, almost a thing that could be looked through.
            • He would keep going until something changed, and if nothing changed, hew ould keep going, anyway.
            • The only contingency he had not learned how to bear was the possibility of his own madness.
            • Life had gotten back on its own sweet keel.
            • But the boy survived his refusal to believe; he was a strong delusion.
            • Four oreo cookies - I was eating four oreo cookies, exactly, at the moment when I read a line about the character eating them, and it felt like the universe was giggling, or the powers that be were watching me, or something. It was wonderfully weird. 
            • They walked out into the steady smash of the sun.
            • After all those miles of bleak hardpan, the softness of the dark seemed nearly decadent.
            • He could see the color of his own madness.
            • To us, everything was dangerous, but what of that? Had we not been made to live forever?
            • 'Go then. There are other worlds than these.'
            • This is not the beginning but the beginning's end.
            • Yar. He darkles. He tincts. He is in all times. I love this line so much.
      • The Intuitionist 
        • Everyone has their own set of genies.
        • But who can resist the seductions of elevators these days, those stepping stones to Heaven, which make relentless verticality so alluring? 
        • She feels exposed, a voyeur in full moonlight on the clearest night of summer.
        • Escalator safety has ever received its due respect, probably because inspecting the revolving creatures is so monotonous that few have the fortitude, the stomach for vertigo, necessary to stare at the cascading teeth all day.
        • How quickly things can fall into medieval disorder.
        • The falling elevator's wake is sparks, thousands of them, raking the darkness all the way down.
        • It is late, a seat awaits.
        • She was too curious to be scared.
        • They are not ready now but they will be.
      • The Cruel Prince
        • I loved this, and I read the whole series. High recommend! I think I loaned out my copies, so no notes.
      • A Court of Thorns and Roses
        • Okay, I know that Maas has some problematic behaviors, and we are not excusing those. That said, I will say I'm a big ACOTAR fan. I will also say that in my mind, the ACOTAR series ends with Feyre and Rhysand, and when we start flipping narrators, I do not recognize this section as part of the canon. (kidding not kidding, iykyk)
          • When he finished, I tipped back my head and howled, my laughter like sunshine shattering age-hardened ice.
        • Fourth Wing 
          • I'm a fan. I will say I think we could use more character development beyond Violet and Xaden, but I'm for sure a fan. Looking forward to the next book!
          • The Bees 
            • This one was fascinating. It's told from the bees' perspective. 
              • 'This is a place of freedom!' Flora called out as she danced...'How can anyone dance freely or give of her best if the air smells of terror?'
              • 'In the Dreaming', one whispered. 'We took back our tongues.'
            • The Inheritance Games
              • I found this series to be an extremely fun read. High recommend!
            • The Priory of the Orange Tree 
              • This is a very interesting world, but I didn't love love the characters. Well, I liked one but then they got killed. So that was a bummer. It is some very interesting and intricate world-building, though.
            • Terminus & Harbinger 
              • These are my books, and they're still in progress, so I'm not sharing favorite lines (of my own work, lol) yet. Maybe someday! The 'future bestseller' category is aspirational, obvi ;)
            • Red, White, & Royal Blue 
              • So fun. So so fun.

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