I remembered that I'm an adult with free will, tools and hands and I can make my own board art/illustrations/end papers for books that aren't very popular but I love them.
This is Morkeleb the Black from Dragonsbane by Barbara Hambly. As it turns out it's one of my favorite books of all time. I don't want to talk too much about the book itself, you probably just should go give it a read and form your own opinions. All in all I simply love it and I think about it regularly.
This isn't any particular scene from the book or series, just a compilation of my feelings and imagery from the book 💙
Print and sticker [and a timelapse] in March on Patreon.
oh no the book I'm reading is part one of a trilogy and I don't have the other two. well shoot I guess I'll just have to read this other book by the same author . . .
The Ladies of Mandrigyn: a sorcerer has taken over a territory and enslaved all the men in the mines. The women try to hire a mercenary group to help reclaim their territory and free the men but the group declines. Too high risk, low reward. So the women do the next best thing: kidnap the leader of the mercenaries, put a curse on him, and say they'll only take it off if he trains all the women to fight so they can reclaim the territory themselves.
116 118 books of various lengths! (I finished two between drafting this post and actually posting it lol.) At least (but possibly only) one graphic novel.
Best book you’ve read so far in 2026:
Look, it's very hard to grade book 50-something in the Perry Mason series, a nonfiction book about butts, and Hands of the Emperor all against each other on the same scale, which is why I avoid any ratings systems. Still, some books I read that I do think are objectively quite good (but won't be everyone's favorite!) are:
Hands of the Emperor (Victoria Goddard)
About the B'nai Bagels (E. L. Konigsburg)
Chalice (Robin McKinley)
Best sequel you’ve read so far in 2026:
I read a lot of series, so this is hard, but if you narrow this to books that are literally book 2 of a series, I would have to say Wolf-Speaker (Tamora Pierce) or Bee Sting Cake (Victoria Goddard)
New release you haven’t read yet but want to:
Well I just read Platform Decay so now I can't use it for this one. Is The Poet Empress a new release? It seems to be, and I plan to read it soon.
Most anticipated release for the second half of the year:
I don't really keep track of these things except in very specific cases. I do see from Barbara Hambly's blog/Facebook posts that she's finished a draft of a new Benjamin January book, and I don't know when the actual release date will be but I'm excited for that eventually.
Biggest surprise favorite new author (debut or new to you):
I still don't quite understand this - what is supposed to be the surprising part? I guess I did check out HOTE years ago, get intimidated at the length (silly, seeing as I used to read 1000 page books much more regularly), and return it unfinished, so it's vaguely surprising that I'm now enjoying Victoria Goddard's stuff so much, but also I always figured I would like it from what I've seen on here, I just had to actually read it!
Newest fictional crush:
This is a carry over from last year, but I s'pose I have a sort of crush on Robert Macdonald from the detective series by E. C. R. Lorac (written 1930s - 1950s), not in that I want to enter a (fictional) relationship with him (tbh I headcanon him as aroace, though I doubt this was intended by the author) but that I want to write fanfiction where interesting things happen to him.
Book that made you cry:
Oh, I think B'nai Bagels did! In the last page or so. And also I might have similarly teared up at HOTE, when Kip's mom sings the lay about the son returning home...
Most beautiful book you’ve bought so far this year (or received):
I actually have bought a few books lately, but none are like special editions or super fancy. Oh, I got a free copy of a really pretty picture book called Outside Your Window that I might pass on to my godson.
Book that made you happy:
So many books! That's why I read, really. I'm really enjoying the Greenwing & Dart series; also the Pen & Des series (very different duo but they feel related in how I enjoy them); recently, the Mrs. Pollifax books were a lot of fun; I got my hands on a new Barbara Hambly this year (Death in the Palace, in her Silver Screen mystery series), which is always welcome to me; the Sarah Tolerance books seem to be written for me :).
What books do you need to read by the end of the year?
I don't really plan that far ahead or set myself deadlines, but I am trying to read a few things I own before I move in like a month and a half (to decide whether to hang onto them); this would including finishing My Beloved World (Sonia Sotomayor) and hopefully finally River-Horse (William Least Heat-Moon) and The Lost Art of Reading Nature's Signs (Tristan Gooley)
Who has or hasn't done this? @agardenandlibrary I expect you've been tagged and I missed it, but just in case. @wearethekat, if you want! Anyone else who wants! Take this as an open tag, and tag me if you do it :)
@dags-over-caravans tagged me for this, and hoo boy was it a doozy trying to narrow down my book choices.
The instructions are simple: show me who you are via the books that have stayed with you. The top four, all time. Tell me why you chose them. That’s it, that’s all. Pick the four most meaningful books to you, according to whatever measure(s) you value, and reveal your innermost depths.
I'm not exactly sure these are my "top four of all time," but they're definitely up there. Books that either meant something to me at the time that I read them, or prompted something, or are otherwise a book I will go back to for a re-read at times (more often than the others on my shelves).
And I'm going to tag @shadrachanki (good luck narrowing your collection down), @himluv, @brynriith, @jadeandroses, and @mama-qwerty, if you guys want to play along. Or just make faces at my narrow genre selection because I know what I like and this is what I read for fun (unlike what I read for my English degree). ;)
Warning: if you're upset by damage to books, view with caution. These are photos of my actual copies on my shelves, and some of them are...rather old and well-loved. I regret nothing.
1. The Prydain Chronicles, Lloyd Alexander (specifically The Black Cauldron)
When I was in middle school in the mid-90s, I received a book order form to purchase books for the summer (the only time I recall receiving one specifically for summertime, rather than during the school year). Among the titles in the catalogue were the four-book Tripods series by John Christopher, of which I had only just read the first book and wanted to read the rest, so I ordered those.
Obviously, this is not those books.
That's because the company apparently was out of stock of those four books, so instead they sent me four other books at random as consolation. I know two of them were a pair of Dr. Dolittle books, and then there was another I don't recall, but the fourth was The Black Cauldron, with the Disney art on the cover. I thought it looked interesting, so I read it.
I had no clue who this irritating Ellideer character was, or why I should care about Doli being able to turn invisible now, or why Eilonwy was apparently a princess but living on a farm, but it was still engaging, and I loved the book so much I sought out the others at my school library (which is when I managed to actually get my hands on a copy of The Book of Three and learn most of those answers—Ellideer was new to that story). Every now and then, I go back and re-read the whole series just for fun, and frankly, if there ever was a Disney live-action remake I'd want to see, it would be for them to actually do a good job with The Book of Three and The Black Cauldron instead of the mashup we got.
Also, this series is a good example of an unfortunately common trend I suffered when I was a preteen/teen: I kept starting book series somewhere other than at the start.
2. The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings, J. R. R. Tolkien
I'm lumping these together. Sue me.
In eighth grade, my English class read The Hobbit as one of our assigned books for the year. I loved it so much I finished the whole dang thing while the bulk of the class was still at the halfway point. Then my teacher mentioned there was a trilogy of books set after The Hobbit, and my friend told me she had a copy of them, so I begged her to let me borrow them. She loaned me The Fellowship of the Ring, I blazed through it, and then (because she still wasn't done with The Two Towers yet) I begged my parents to buy me the boxed set. This is not that boxed set, because my husband also had a copy, and we liked his cover art (the John Howe covers that coincided with the movie releases, I believe) better.
I blame this for my love of fantasy as a whole. It was starting to form before this, but Tolkien clinched it.
3. The Slient Tower, Barbara Hambly
Yes, I know there are two books in the photo. The Silicon Mage is the sequel, and is one I re-read almost as much as The Silent Tower, which is why I included it (Dog Wizard, the third book, is fine, but not as re-readable for me, and the cover art is...weird).
This is probably the most physically abused book on my shelves, but it was in that condition when it was given to me when I was in middle school. My uncle had been given it by someone else (I don't even know who), but he wasn't really a reader (dyslexia, I don't blame him), so he passed it on to me because he knew I liked books. And I loved this one.
Essentially, it's an isekai. Joanna is a computer programmer (circa the 80s) in California, but ends up kidnapped through a magical portal into a fantasy world, where she has to work with a guardsman whose charge has disappeared and a dangerous mage who has escaped his prison in order to get home. I really like Barbara Hambly's prose (not seen in this photo: several other Hambly novels on my shelves, in two other series), and this one was interesting for our primary protagonist not being a "heroic" type but rather a nerdy type (and the aforementioned dangerous mage being...a lot different than the usual archetypes).
4. Dragonsinger, Anne McCaffrey
Again, additional books in the photo because Dragonsinger is second in a trilogy (remember I mentioned I have an uncanny knack for picking up book series in the middle somewhere? Yeah).
This isn't what got me into Anne McCaffrey's books, but it's kind of what cemented it. I got started with Moreta: Dragonlady of Pern, which...is certainly a weird place to start reading the Dragonriders books (see note about starting in the wrong place; I did it twice with this setting). Then I saw Dragonsinger in a Scholastic book order and decided to get it because same series, right? And again, I had no clue what was going on at first, but I got hooked quickly anyway. I really liked the story of Menolly adjusting to life at the Harper Hall, even if I didn't know the circumstances behind her getting there.
(I later found Dragonsong in my ninth grade English textbook, which was neat.)
Honorable Mentions:
Two more books I wanted to include, for different reasons.
Which Witch?, Eva Ibbotson
I first read this in third grade. I ended up picking up this copy as an adult because I remembered the book and went looking up reviews, only to bust up laughing with my best friend over the one-star reviews that accused this book of copying Harry Potter (because it had witches and wizards in Britain, and obviously Harry Potter was the first book to have that dontcha' know?).
Which Witch? was originally published in 1979.
Anyway, there's a wizard who wants a legacy, so he's told he needs to get married so he can have a child, and of course the country's vilest wizard needs to marry a truly powerful and awful witch, right? So he holds a contest for the local coven to compete to be his bride. Go read it. It's fun.
This one sticks with me because I still remember doing a little diorama of one of the scenes in the book, and despite the 10+ year gap between when I first read it and when I finally bought a copy, it still came to mind every now and then in the sense of "man, I really enjoyed that book."
Just Stab Me Now, Jill Bearup
My newest favorite book (and the least beat-up on this list). This book started as a series of YouTube shorts by Jill Bearup (you can watch the shorts as a single video here, with novel inserts). I was following along with the shorts, and then excited when she agreed to give writing the book a try (when people asked), and I do not regret preordering it. It's fun. It's got fanfictiony tropes, and a little bit of fourth-wall breaking (sort of; it's complicated), and I enjoyed the read tremendously.
Hey dags, I managed to go 50/50 on men vs. women in the main list. Makes me wonder what the ratio on the rest of my shelves looks like, considering it's 99.99% sci-fi/fantasy.
