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INNA'S BOOKSHELF

@inna.epub

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❤️‍🔥 I love books that shatter my heart
🍷 Adding bright shades to the darkest reads
▪️ Classics | Literary | Contemporary
▪️ Vienna, Austria

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I savored every page and cried for a week the first time I finished it. I thought knowing the plot would make me less emotional this time, but I was wrong 😭 I couldn’t get enough of this book. I kept wishing it would end differently, that Scarlett would finally understand everything in time… but oh well 💔

My heart is in pieces and I already can’t wait to reread it in a few years.

Please recommend me something that will make me feel like this again! And follow for more powerful book recommendations @inna.epub ❤️‍🔥

Scarlett O'Hara, Rhett Butler, gone with the wind, classic literature by @inna.epub

Hi friends! I skipped my February wrap up, so this time you get a double one 💅🏻 A lot has been happening in my life lately and I shared some personal updates in the slides too!

A shameful confession: I broke my book buying ban and bought one book in 2026 so far 👀 it has two parts and you definitely know it. I only got the first one, so tell me, do I need the second??

And here are the 13 books I read in February and March:

▪️ Betty
▪️ Assassin’s Quest
▪️ Us Against You
▪️ The Winners
▪️ Gone With The Wind (reread)
▪️ Sleep Like Death
▪️ Doggy Style
▪️ Murdle 1
▪️ stay in place (sing a chorus)
▪️ The Complete Chi’s Sweet Home (4 parts)

You’ll find very short reviews in the slides, let me know if you’ve read any of these and what I should pick up next from my physical TBR! 🥳

P.S. the grid is turning red again for a while, back to where it all started ❤️🍒🍷💋🌹 by @inna.epub

I did not love this book. Not even close.

But I could not stop reading it.

It took me 38 days to finish, and during that time I remembered what it feels like to be completely consumed by a story. Reading until sunrise. Going to work after three hours of sleep. Thinking about the book all day.

I read slowly because I wanted to devour every word.

But here is the problem.

Some scenes felt completely unnecessary. They did not move the plot forward. They existed only to make the character suffer. That was the hardest part for me. Not because it was heavy, but because it felt pointless.

If those moments were fewer, this would have been a 5 star book for me.

But it was not.

There is almost no character growth, and that frustrated me more than anything.

And something else happened that I did not expect.

This book affected my mental state without me even noticing. I was already not in the best place mentally, and while reading it I started having su!(!d∆l thoughts. The strange part is that once I finished the book, those thoughts disappeared almost immediately.

So read at your own risk.

But the book does raise powerful questions.
Should a person who wants to die be saved?
Is it everyone's responsibility or only their own?

🖇️ If you want to see all my annotations, check my highlight “A Little Life”.

🫂 You can also join my free supportive read along where we read this book together. There are no deadlines. Read at your own pace and take breaks whenever you need.

And follow for more heartbreaking book recommendations @inna.epub ❤️‍🩹 by @inna.epub

This book found its way to me exactly when I needed it ❤️‍🩹 It feels like a warm hug you’ve been longing for. It’s a story about found family, learning to love and forgive yourself, and finding the courage to face your deepest fears.

𝐓𝐇𝐄 𝐒𝐄𝐂𝐑𝐄𝐓 𝐋𝐈𝐅𝐄 𝐎𝐅 𝐁𝐄𝐄𝐒
▪️ by Sue Monk Kidd
▪️ 388 pages
🐝 5 / 5

The story is set in South Carolina in the 1960s and follows Lily Owens, a young girl searching for answers about her late mother. She escapes her abusive father and ends up in the most unexpected place: a house run by three beekeeping sisters. In their honey scented home, surrounded by beehives, Lily slowly learns about love, grief, forgiveness, and belonging, and finds the family she has always needed 🫂

The characters!! I loved them so much. The sisters May, June, and August are all so different and special in their own ways. It is Lily who finds a family with them, but as a reader I really felt like I was part of it too.

I also loved that every chapter starts with a fact about bees. Some of these facts were totally mindblowing, and they mirror Lily’s feelings and struggles in such a beautiful way!

The Secret Life of Bees is an incredible story about sisterhood, womanhood, and love in all its forms. Easy five stars for me and definitely a book I will read again 😌

🐝 Please please please recommend more books about found family! And please add this one to your shortlist, I promise you won't regret reading this incredibly beautiful story! by @inna.epub

Happy International Women's Rights Month! Here’s to all the incredible women out there, may you continue to shine with strength and courage! Keep chasing your dreams and never lose sight of your goals, even when faced with challenges. Your voice is powerful, and your story matters. Always ❤️

Hi! I’m Inna, and I run a book blog where I share reviews, recommendations, and bookish content. To celebrate International Women’s Month, I’ve put together a list of 120 powerful books about women to read this March! ✨

📖 Books with strong female characters
📚 Feminist fiction
👭 Stories about female friendships
🔬 Women in science and academia
🎨 Creative and artistic women’s stories
🖤 Books with dark and complex female characters
🐉 Fearless women in fantasy
✊🏿 Black women’s voices
📖 Classic heroines
🏅 Women in sports
📝 Women’s voices and memoirs
🤱 Motherhood and womanhood
⚧️ Books about trans women
📚 Feminist non-fiction
📖 Short stories about women

I hope you find the perfect book about women to read this March! Have you read any of these already? What books would you add to the list?

📢 Share this post with your friends to celebrate women’s strength and resilience! And if you need more book recommendations, you know where to find them: @inna.epub 💖 by @inna.epub

The main antagonist is also named Cathy, and she is eerie as hell 🫣 The similarities are unsettling, but I’m afraid Steinbeck’s Cathy is waaaay worse 🥲 she's not able to love and she ruins everyone who loves her with the greatest rage..

And by the way, East of Eden is a thousand times more powerful than Wuthering Heights. Just saying 👀 also, the new adaptation with Florence Pugh as Cathy is scheduled for release this year!

Join my FREE, low effort, no deadline read-along and experience East of Eden while discussing it with dozens of dedicated readers! You’ll notice details and Easter eggs you would definitely miss on your own 🫢 The link is in my highlight "East of Eden"

💖 And follow me for more heartbreaking classics and literary fiction recommendations @inna.epub

Goodreads blurb of East of Eden:

In his journal, Nobel Prize winner John Steinbeck called East of Eden “the first book,” and indeed it has the primordial power and simplicity of myth. Set in the rich farmland of California’s Salinas Valley, this sprawling and often brutal novel follows the intertwined destinies of two families—the Trasks and the Hamiltons—whose generations helplessly reenact the fall of Adam and Eve and the poisonous rivalry of Cain and Abel.

Adam Trask came to California from the East to farm and raise his family on the new rich land. But the birth of his twins, Cal and Aaron, brings his wife to the brink of madness, and Adam is left alone to raise his boys to manhood. One boy thrives nurtured by the love of all those around him; the other grows up in loneliness enveloped by a mysterious darkness.

First published in 1952, East of Eden is the work in which Steinbeck created his most mesmerizing characters and explored his most enduring themes: the mystery of identity, the inexplicability of love, and the murderous consequences of love's absence. A masterpiece of Steinbeck's later years, East of Eden is a powerful and vastly ambitious novel that is at once a family saga and a modern retelling of the Book of Genesis. by @inna.epub

Share this with the one(s) you love 💛

Not all of these love stories are healthy (Kathy and Heathcliff, I’m looking at you 👀), but every single one of them is undeniably unforgettable.

Which one do you relate to the most? And which one is your favorite love story?

Books featured:

▪️ The Count of Monte Cristo by Alexandre Dumas
▪️ Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë
▪️ Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy
▪️ Les Misérables by Victor Hugo
▪️ Gone With the Wind by Margaret Mitchell
▪️ A Thousand Splendid Suns by Khaled Hosseini
▪️ Betty by Tiffany McDaniel
▪️ East of Eden by John Steinbeck
▪️ The Seven Year Slip by Ashley Poston
▪️ The Color Purple by Alice Walker
▪️ In Memoriam by Alice Winn
▪️ The Hunchback of Notre Dame by Victor Hugo
▪️ Beloved by Toni Morrison
▪️ Sunrise on the Reaping by Suzanne Collins
▪️ Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoevsky

Follow for more classics and literary fiction recommendations 📚✨

Join my FREE March read-along for Gone with the Wind (details coming soon in my stories)! I’m also hosting FREE no-deadline read-alongs for A Little Life and East of Eden right now. Find all the links in my highlights 💖 by @inna.epub

I warned you. I thought nothing could be more damaging than A Little Life, but it actually can 🥲 My name is Inna, and I love books that shatter me, but this one was way too much, even by my standards 🥲 Follow me for similar book recommendations and supportive low-effort read-alongs with no deadline! @inna.epub

☝🏻 Check my highlights to see how I went through A Little Life and to discover what all these tabs are for!

Have you read Betty or A Little Life? ⬇️ Recommend similar books!

Betty blurb from GR:

A stunning, lyrical novel set in the rolling foothills of the Appalachians in which a young girl discovers stark truths that will haunt her for the rest of her life.

"A girl comes of age against the knife."

So begins the story of Betty Carpenter. Born in a bathtub in 1954 to a Cherokee father and white mother, Betty is the sixth of eight siblings. The world they inhabit is one of poverty and violence--both from outside the family, and also, devastatingly, from within. The lush landscape, rich with birdsong, wild fruit, and blazing stars, becomes a kind of refuge for Betty, but when her family's darkest secrets are brought to light, she has no choice but to reckon with the brutal history hiding in the hills, as well as the heart-wrenching cruelties and incredible characters she encounters in her rural town of Breathed, Ohio.

But despite the hardship she faces, Betty is resilient. Her curiosity about the natural world, her fierce love for her sisters, and her father's brilliant stories are kindling for the fire of her own imagination, and in the face of all she bears witness to, Betty discovers an escape: she begins to write. She recounts the horrors of her family's past and present with pen and paper and buries them deep in the dirt--moments that has stung her so deeply, she could not tell them, until now.

Inspired by the life of her own mother, Tiffany McDaniel sets out to free the past by telling this heartbreaking yet magical story--a remarkable novel that establishes her as one of the freshest and most important voices in American fiction. by @inna.epub

Hi friends! Even though I planned to be more active on Bookstagram this year, I still struggle to find enough time for this hobby of mine 🙈 However, I’ve still been reading a lot, so I decided to start posting at least monthly reading updates instead of disappearing completely 🫣

Here’s a quick summary of what I read in January:

❄️ Beartown by Fredrik Backman
🏒 Heated Rivalry by Rachel Reid
🦊 Foxli lernt jagen by Vera Groschoff
👑 Royal Assassin by Robin Hobb

No 5-star reads so far this year, but I’m really happy that I’ve finally started working through my physical TBR. I’m looking forward to all the great books waiting for me in 2026 🥳

February plans:

🏚️ Betty by Tiffany McDaniel (currently reading, physical copy)
👑 Assassin’s Quest by Robin Hobb (currently listening)
🏒 The Long Game by Rachel Reid
❄️ Us Against You by Fredrik Backman (physical copy)

💛 Tell me about your favorite reads of January and what you’re planning to read in February!

P.S. I changed my booksta nickname :) I'm still the same old penguinna_books tho 😁 by @inna.epub

This is my priority reading list for 2026! Which books from this pile turned out to be 5-star reads for you and which ones didn’t live up to the hype?

I’m Inna, and I love books that stay in my heart long after I’ve finished them ❤️‍🩹 Follow for more powerful book recommendations!

#5starbook #5starreview #booksof2026 #bookrecommendations #bestbooks by @inna.epub

Hi friends! I hope the beginning of 2026 has already gifted you many happy moments and great first reads! 🥂☺️

For the third year in a row, I’m setting myself the same reading goal – quality over quantity. This year is a bit different though, but also.. not really! I still don’t care about how many books I read in 2026, BUT I do want to reduce the number of physical books I own but haven’t read yet.

I scanned all the books in my little home library: there are 132 books on my shelves, 64 of them unread 🫣 I split them into three categories based on their priority on my list:

⭐ Top Priority are the books that match my taste the most. These are mostly character-driven fictional stories, sometimes sad, dark or even heartbreaking. A couple of thrillers and some illustrated nonfiction sneaked in too! They are all very highly rated on Goodreads, and I cannot wait to read them all 🥳

✨ Read Next are also great books, just a bit less "me". I’ll definitely read them, but they aren’t at the very top of my list.

⚡ Read Eventually includes the books I don’t feel like reading right away – encyclopedias, nonfiction, children’s books, and books in German (despite being almost fluent, I still hesitate reading books in this language 🫣). And also Stephen King has to wait – I'm still recovering from IT's misogyny, sorry fans 💅🏻

I absolutely don’t expect to read all of these books, not even all the top priority ones. (And I’m not restricting myself from reading anything outside this list either. Remember: reading is for pleasure!) But I will try my best to focus on these books when choosing my next read 😌

Also I’ll also try not to buy any new physical books (except for Heartstopper 6 coming out in July!). Gifted books are very welcome, tho 😁

❓ Let me know what your 2026 reading goals are, and tell me which books from my list you’ve read and loved! 💛 by @inna.epub