Hello, and welcome back to Your Book Friend! I’m writing this while looking out at the lightly snow-dusted trees on our drive and wishing for spring. Don’t get me wrong, I love a good snow — but it feels like we should be done with all that now, even if the equinox is still a few days away. 

It does feel extra cozy to sit inside under the blankets in our cabin and read with snow on the ground, though, so I won’t complain too much. Let’s get on with the reading updates!

(Full disclosure: This post uses Bookshop.org affiliate links. Books marked with an asterisk were received as complimentary review copies).

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Recent Reads

I finished Mike Chen’s Vampire Weekend last week. I enjoyed it overall, but found it sort of lost momentum for me as I got towards the end. It’s weird, because a lot of the book is sort of quiet and mundane, but it was once things started getting “exciting” that I felt less interested in reading it. 

This could also just be circumstantial, since I started it while our power was out and really all I could do during the day was read, so once I had the TV at my disposal I didn’t feel like reading for a bit. I remember having a similar feeling about his book We Could Be Heroes, though, so perhaps it’s something else I haven’t quite put my finger on. 

After reading about vampires it only felt natural to move to witches, so I grabbed my BOTM copy of Weyward by Emilia Hart. It’s funny, because I hadn’t heard of it at all until I chose it as my birthday month add on, but now I’m seeing it everywhere. It was even the banner ad on Bookshop when I popped over to grab my affiliate links for this post. 

I had a suspicion I’d love this multi-generational saga about women who have witchcraft in their blood, and I definitely did. I tore through it pretty quickly and then felt quite sad it was over. I loved getting to know these women and see how their stories connected and echoed across generations. It was hard to read at times given some of the subject matter, but nevertheless may well go down as a favorite read of the year for me. 

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Current Reads

I just finished Weyward last night and found I needed a bit of time before picking something else up, so I haven’t started my next fiction read just yet. 

On the nonfiction front, I’m continuing on with Alex Mar’s Witches of America. There’s some interesting information in it, but I continue to be a bit put off by the tone at times, and find some of the writing genuinely confusing (there are time jumps that I don’t feel are always signaled clearly). Nevertheless, I want to finish it, so on I go. 

Audiobook wise I’ve kind of stalled. I just can’t quite find anything that feels like the right book to listen to for my current mood, so I’m back to podcasts instead for a bit .

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Up Next & On to You

I’ll be starting Play the Fool* by Lina Chern next. It’s a mystery, which is a genre I don’t read that often, but I couldn’t resist the pitch of “cynical tarot reader tries to solve a murder” so here I am. I’m very excited to dig in to this one. 

What about you, book friends? What have you been reading lately and how are you liking it?