When writing an upcoming post about book ratings, I started to think about average ratings on Goodreads. My rating for September Girls was a HALF of a star and the average Goodreads rating was 2.97. That is extremely low on Goodreads, obviously. I wanted to explore some of the books I’ve read with super low average Goodreads ratings, then see where my thoughts and rating stacked up. The Word for Yes by Claire Needell | I didn’t like this book and clearly the people of Goodreads agreed with me. This is the lowest average rating on Goodreads out of all the books I’ve read. I expected this to be a powerful and impactful story about the aftermath of a date rape, and how three sisters cope and move on together. That didn’t exactly happen and the story was very pointless, which is sad to say. It doesn’t help that the book was barely over 200 pages long and therefore a little too short to successfully tackle this topic. Sam and Ilsa’s Last Hurrah by David Levithan & Rachel Cohn | I feel a little bad for this book because it wasn’t THAT terrible? The concept was better than the execution, of course, but whatever. Like many of Cohn/Levithan’s books (when they write together), at least one character has to be a little too manic pixie dream-person or unrealistic. There’s too much forced quirkiness in their characters and that tends to ruin their books for me. Posh by Lucy Jackson | This is one […]

When writing my review for You Owe Me a Murder, I came to the realization that romance plotlines rarely work for me in mystery or thriller novels. I started to think hard about why this is the case, because I generally welcome romance from any kind of book that I can. A lot of books feel like romance is missing when it doesn’t exist, just because it’s my preferred genre! Here are some of the reasons it doesn’t work for me in this genre and some of the exceptions to the rule… (1) I don’t trust anyone A good mystery novel makes you second-guess everything and everyone. I like the books where there are a bunch of red herrings and mysterious elements, so I never know what’s true and what’s conjecture. I go into these books incredibly wary of each character because you never know who could be the villain or murderer. Because of this, I almost never get invested in specific characters in mystery books. That’s a whole other topic, I’m sure, but that certainly means that romance is not on my mind. When the MC trying to solve the mystery grows closer to another character and they start to fall for each other, I don’t trust the ship. What if that person is the murderer?! I’m not falling for that. I will not ship them in the slightest because I’m afraid that I could be sad or disappointed by their heel turn (to use a wrestling term, LOL). I […]

I was inspired by a recent comment on my post about my Seasonal Reading to write a post about this. It’s something I’ve never thought about before but it makes a lot of sense… What exactly does mood reading mean to you or to other people? SO many of us say we’re mood readers all the time, but it clearly doesn’t mean the same thing to everyone. Here’s the comment in question: Amy mentioned that mood reading, for her, is that she reads a genre or trope until she’s sick of it. She doesn’t read anything else until that “mood” passes and is fulfilled from multiple books. I LOVE knowing this – that everyone has their own way of dealing with mood reading, and even their own way to “define” it. I’ve talked a loooot about mood reading tendencies since I’ve started my blog. I’ve even discussed how I don’t really feel like I’m a mood reader anymore, at least on a book-to-book basis. I read seasonally, which is the post that brought this comment/thought to my mind, but is that even mood reading? Is it more seasonal reading, or is than offshoot of mood reading? WHAT IS MOOD READING?? History of Mood Reading To recap my thoughts on this topic, here are various ways I’ve discussed it over time (oldest posts to newest): Seasonal TBR Moods – 2016 It’s cool that this topic comes full circle because of me talking about “seasonal reading” and how that connects to mood […]