You may have noticed that my last post was a frightening TWO WEEKS ago - that's right, I took a big break. This was partly to give myself more time for writing my beautiful and lucrative YouTube videos, but also because I was getting a bit tired out by writing posts every day (or almost every day). A woman must rest, after all.
But now I must present you with my beautiful reading plans. I just reached the exciting milestone of 31 books read so far in 2026, which makes this year my second biggest reading year of all time (after 2016's incredible 53), and this only makes me more excited about all the books I'm going to read in the second half of the year.
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| A beautiful book stack by clumsy.words on Instagram. |
I keep thinking about categories of books I want to read more of, topics I want to read about more extensively, and so here are some of the book groupings I've come up with for future reads. Each category contains four enticing books.
1. SEAFARING / NASTY AWFUL TERRIBLE SEA
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| Scary! |
Right now I'm reading a non-fiction book about a crazy shipwreck called 'The Wager: A Tale of Shipwreck, Mutiny and Murder' by David Grann. This is my second recent horrible 1700s sea type book, after the incredible 'The Zorg' by Siddarth Kara. I think I might be becoming a sea freak (or indeed, very interested in the worst and most perilous human nasties - The Zorg was a chilling slavery story).
In any case, I'd like to read more sea-adjacent stories. In 'The Wager', David Grann offers lots of interesting linguistic connections - 'under the weather' came from the practice of putting sick sailors below deck. Literally under, and away from, the weather. Cool. Here are my coveted sea reads:
- Moby Dick - Hermann Melville
- Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Seas - Jules Verne
- The Odyssey - Homer
- Nostromo: A Tale of the Seaboard - Joseph Conrad
2. BLACK AUTHORS
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| I love this picture of Octavia Butler. |
I've been really wanting to focus on black authors, but in particular there are a few notable black authors I'm really excited to read (or, in the case of James Baldwin, read more of). These are very famous picks, which goes to show that I'm not well-read when it comes to work from black writers. It'll be great to change that.
- Parable of the Sower - Octavia Butler
- Jazz - Toni Morrison
- Giovanni's Room - James Baldwin
- White Teeth - Zadie Smith
3. ROMANTASY
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| Oh God... oh fuck. |
This crunchy new genre smash has intrigued me for a while. I've heard so much talk about it, so much weird and nasty dismissal of it as a low genre for idiot women, and indeed some sort of disgusting hideous perversion (always funny to hear this coming from men, the world's primo consumers of the seedy, violent productions of the global human trafficking industry). I suspect that romantasy books broadly won't be for me, but I'd like to gain a certain amount of familiarity with them.
So these are a few to read:
- A Court of Thorns and Roses - Sarah J. Maas
- Bride - Ali Hazelwood
- Fourth Wing - Rebecca Yarros
- The Knight and the Moth - Rachel Gillig
4. POETRY
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| Whitman, looking sexy. |
Finally, I'd like to expand my knowledge of some classic poets, so:
- Leaves of Grass - Walt Whitman
- The Waste Land and other Poems - T.S. Eliot
- Songs of Innocence and of Experience - William Blake
- The Rime of the Ancient Mariner - Samuel Taylor Coleridge
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Please wish me great luck and pleasure. Perhaps I shall, one day, rank the books on this list.
oh nice, welcome back ! i must admit i thought it was very weird when i kept checking the new posts of the blogs i follow i didn't see you there for a few days !! i'm glad you're back hehe (resting is so important, you're right).
ReplyDeletei really need to get out this crazy reading slump i'm in... i'm in the middle of 2 sagas and i can't stop thinking about them, but i just can't read idk why...
i do enjoy romantasy, is very silly and super easy to read, i usually read them when i want to have fun but i don't feel like using my brain, is very much like trashy reality tv... altho, heads up, i didn't like any of the ones you chose hahah
Do you have any you'd recommend? Yes yes I will be here in one way or another. Just try to shake my blog every now and then, in case something falls out.
Deleteif you want the full effect, like a real cringy trashy fantasy porn i think my favorite is the Vicious Lost Boys saga by nikki st. crowe, a peter pan retelling, it's so much fun, and the second part of the saga (Devourer of Men) actually has cool queer representation, which is something that most of these books lack.
Deletei also enjoy the Mead Mishaps series by Kimberly Lemming, specially "That Time I Got Drunk and Saved a Demon", but there's a little bit of satire on those, they're funny and self-aware, it's definitely romatasy, but they're missing the crazy vibes of a book that was written completely seriously despite its silly nature, making them less cringy. and to me a key point of romantasy is feeling insane and cringing a lot, so idk if i would place them on the same category.
either way, all the ones you chose are beloved by the masses so you might actually enjoy them ! i just had trouble liking the characters, so it was hard for me to care about the stories.
Interesting, thank you!
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