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catherine ✿ | bookstagram

@cathreadsalot

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🦢 reading too much into everything, literally
📖 cr: tbd
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📍Toronto, Canada

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One thing I know for sure is that reading makes me a better person. These are some of the books that have shaped me over the years 🫶🏻

What's a book that shaped you?

These books taught me that your soulmates can be your friends, and that it's not limited only to romantic partners. This is something I really needed to learn as I got older and I'm so appreciative that these stories showed me that 💛

Whether they have older protagonists, or young ones with old souls, these books taught me that the best is yet to come 🫂

Everything could feel right, but be wrong. Sometimes your heart and your mind have conflicting opinions on that, and pride and ego get in the way. These books taught me how to spot an unhealthy dynamic from a mile away and have more empathy for people stuck in unhealthy relationship patterns, including myself.

These books taught me to appreciate the ordinary, because ordinary moments strung together can make for an extraordinary life. by @cathreadsalot

🌸Define your taste using only 5 books🌸

Thanks for the tag @imalilbookworm 🥰

♡ Ghosts - books about contemporary, realistic relationships / relationship issues
♡ Bunny - bizarre plots and characters
♡ The Bell Jar - classics/ sad girl books
♡ No Longer Human (tbr) - books with raw portrayals of human thinking, feeling, and emotion
♡ My Year of Rest and Relaxation - 'no plot, just vibes' books

Honorable mentions: historical fiction that teaches me something new about a place, culture, or people; books about female friendships (essentially the My Brilliant Friend series by Elena Ferrante)✨

I actually hadn't been reading a lot of books that define my taste before starting this account, so I'm really grateful I've been able to find my niche here because I've had a more fulfilling reading experience overall now that I understand my preferences better ☺️

Do we have anything in common? Any book recs based on my taste are highly welcomed! 📝😇

I also tagged a few friends but no pressure! by @cathreadsalot

Review – Conversations on Love by Natasha Lunn

Love. For such a small word, it sure does hold a lot of weight. We fantasize about it – obsessively wondering when it'll happen for us – and when we have it, we may not even know what to do with it: how to nurture it, balance it, be gentle with both it and ourselves as we navigate it.

Natasha Lunn explores all kinds of love in this book: self, familial, platonic. The book is divided into three parts: How do we find love? How do we sustain it? How do we survive losing it?

One day as I was reading this on the subway alone, there was a man making a scene who decided to sit right across from me on an empty cart. My heart was in my stomach, especially because there have been a lot of unprovoked attacks on women on the subway here this year. Not even one full stop went by before some men down the line came up and pretended to know me to escort me off the train for my safety.

That same day, not even an hour later, I sat at a McDonald's with my friends when a lady came up to us and asked if the pandemic was over. Guys. She told us she had not left her house in 3 years and doesn't have anyone to talk to, so she was asking random people. My heart traveled from my stomach to my throat. The thought of having no one to talk to, of not knowing the state of the world because no one visits you? It's too sad to even think about.

What does any of this have to do with the book? Nothing and everything. The men on the subway cared for a stranger when they saw I was helpless. That is love personified. The woman at McDonald's made me realize the human connection I take for granted because I'm too busy focusing on everything I don't have. The love you're looking for is actually all around you, not just in romance, but in the everyday moments with family, friends, strangers. It's everywhere. Open your heart and your eyes to it and you'll see it.

This is a book you can come back to time and time again because you will learn something new about yourself and how you perceive, give and accept love in your life in all different forms. If you pick up any book I recommend, let it be this one. It might just change your life. by @cathreadsalot

A very hopeful fall hopefuls list from my physical tbr 🍁🍂

I've been reading This is Me: A Reckoning by Hayden Panettiere and The Silent Companions by Laura Purcell for the last couple weeks. I've been too busy to finish any books though 😢 but these are ones on my hopefuls list:

- The It Girl by Ruth Ware
- Summerween by Joss Wood
- Beartown by Fredrik Backman
- Roadshow by Nikki Ervice

Beartown I've had the longest, and Roadshow I got most recently.

Have you read any of these? I think Roadshow will be up next 🙏🏻 by @cathreadsalot

Spend a crafty autumn weekend with me 😊🍂

The weekend is approaching and I'm excited, mainly just to have time away from work 😅 and if I find a craft idea on tiktok that I want to try, you best believe I'll be doing that ASAP 🙂‍↕️ just like how I had so much fun making clay magnets!!

What other things do you like to do besides reading? by @cathreadsalot

I had a ghostly good weekend in the city 🩶👻🍁🏰

I've been on a Little Free Library kick lately and I love this one I saw outside of Casa Loma, which is a Gothic castle-style mansion and historic house museum in Toronto. It's so cute how they replicated the castle across the street and decorated their Little Free Library for Halloween! 🕸️

I also got to visit the Art Gallery of Ontario which was so nice. I love exploring art galleries and museums, learning more about the artists, and taking in the finer details - those places make me stop and slow down which is something I don't naturally do in my every day life.

I started @ghostscbs on Netflix too and it's just the type of show I've been looking for - not scary but still has fall/ spooky vibes, and is funny yet wholesome.

All that to say, my heart and stomach is full from Canadian Thanksgiving and all the blessings in my life and I'm grateful that I got to slow down and enjoy them this weekend 🫶🏻 by @cathreadsalot

It's the weekend (or soon will be) - which bookish weekend would you like to be having? ❣️🫶🏻

It's a long weekend here and I wouldn't mind if at least one of my days consisted of being cozy and watching movies! Thanksgiving is on Monday and I'm very thankful for the bookstagram community 😊🍂

What are your plans?

Choose your bookish weekend - hot girl with a complicated past, weekend 👡💖💄💋

Choose your bookish weekend - under blankets all weekend, weekend 🧸☁️🛏️

Choose your bookish weekend - bought a train ticket instead of processing my feelings, weekend 👋🏻🚂✈️🧳

Choose your bookish weekend - Victorian woman with a secret, weekend 🖤🐈‍⬛🔮🕸️

Which bookish weekend did you choose? 💌 by @cathreadsalot

Girl's Girl by Sonia Feldman 🌼 and some of my favourite quotes

"I was the least chill person on earth and I knew it. Everyone else had a skeleton, and I was just a bunch of organs. I couldn't keep a single thing to myself if it mattered. I needed to leash myself like a dog. I needed to tell myself to sit or I'd show everybody my belly."

I really liked this book, it made me feel like a teenager in both the best and scariest way 🫣

15-year old Mina is best friends with Eleanor and Margaret - Margaret she has known since she was little and Eleanor is a newer friend of theirs.

All three of them share everything and have constant sleepovers during the summer when the book takes place. Mina has a crush on Eleanor but she's still trying to get a grasp on her feelings. The book goes through their life during the summer while they're figuring out growing up.

I found that I could relate to Mina in some ways. She always wanted to do the right thing even when the other two tried to sway her to be a bit more rebellious, and when she followed them it sometimes came back to bite her.

Mina constantly battled between her head and heart even beyond her feelings for Eleanor, coupled with the fact that her mother was the strictest of the girls' and she always wanted to do the right thing for her mom, though not always at the expense of her fun.

The ending felt a bit too abrupt but overall I was very much immersed! I love a coming of age 🥹

QOTD: Have you read this? What did you think?

#bookreview #octoberreads #soniafeldman #coolgirlsread #canadianbookstagram by @cathreadsalot

Books I'd invite to my spooky dinner party 🍽️🥀

Aka mostly new-to-me books on my horror/ thriller tbr 💌

Book list:
- The Silent Companions by Laura Purcell - CR
- The September House by Carissa Orlando
- La Hacienda by Isabel Cañas
- We Have Always Lived in the Castle by Shirley Jackson- 4⭐
- The Gloaming by Kirsty Logan
- The Hike by Drew Magary

Have you read any of these? Are there any new-to-you books you want to read soon? by @cathreadsalot

This is your sign to bring your book to a coffee shop and have a little date with yourself ❣️ (p.s. I love how my @bitchbereading bookmark matches the book 🐍)

I finished The Rachel Incident by Caroline O'Donoghue over a week ago and I still can't stop thinking about it, nor have I been able to pick up anything else that captures me as much.

This is probably going to be my favourite book of the year, it was an easy 5 star read.

It is mostly set in 2010s Cork, Ireland, when Rachel is 20/21; that's when she meets James, her bookshop coworker turned best friend. Early on, Rachel has a crush on her uni professor, and James devises a plan to get him to the bookshop to sign copies of his new publication.

The book starts off in the present day now that Rachel is in her 30s, but most of it is told in a recounting of the past by present Rachel. One big thing is revealed in the present that the reader is trying to get more information on from the past, and it makes you want to read more to get to it.

The deeper you get, the more emotional things get, and the two best friends go through everything together, if "everything" could fit in your early 20s.

I went into this not knowing what it was about despite the fact that I bought it. It's better to go into it this way, with as little info as possible.

I enjoy good characters that feel real more than a juicy plot but this has both!! Highly recommend, just trust me. I would give anything to read this for the first time again 🥲

[Literary fiction, book review, book recommendations, Irish lit fic] by @cathreadsalot

If my tbr had a wardrobe, this would be it 💌 I was inspired by the fact that @coach dropped new bags a few days ago and I'm obsessed with them, so I decided to pair some books on my tbr with a bag and an outfit from @dynamiteclothing 🙂‍↔️☺️

Would you wear any of these? Which one is your fav? by @cathreadsalot

Laura's fiancé, Devon, dies in her arms a month before their wedding. To deal with her grief, she goes on their honeymoon solo.

Traveling through Europe without Devon is painful, but it also gives Laura space to process what happened and slowly reconnect with herself while meeting strangers, spending time with Devon's family and - as someone who's not into social media - even make a few Tiktoks along the way to document her journey that go viral (which I then proceeded to watch as I was going through the book!)

While a part of me wanted the author to dig deeper into their relationship and maybe be less afraid of what her family and friend's thoughts while reading would be (as that's what it felt like to me), I did enjoy the book as a whole.

Healing is not linear, nor is it something that eventually ends one day, which I liked that the author acknowledged. It's all consuming and never ending, just like Laura's love for Devon.

I recommend The Solo Honeymoon by Laura Murphy to those who want a quick, emotional, nonfiction read.

Thank you Penguin Random House Canada for the ARC 💙

#bookreview #bookrecommendation #canadianbookstagrammer #bookstaexplore #canadianbloggers by @cathreadsalot