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my october tbr! a bit daunting, but im lowkey excited to try this refresh. if i get around to it, im adding the five hunger games books, but for now,
1. the tempest by william shakespeare
2. othello by william shakespeare
3. strangers by dean koontz
4. the talisman by stephen king
5. bounty trilogy by james norman hall
6. i am malala by malala yousfazai
7. collected stories by willa cather
8. the kite runner by khaled hosseini (never read in sept)
9. becoming ofyssa by jennifer pharr davis
10. it by stephen king
11. native son by richard wright
12-17 (maybe): hunger games books (5) and fallow by sarah anderson

what does everyone else's late year reads look like? definitely doing a crunch here

#shasreads #septembertbr #septemberhopeful #tbrstack #bookish taken in BOOKSTA by @shastareads

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10 days ago

five or so bookish hot takes of mine. i'm always down to discuss my beliefs. some of these might be more controversial than others, i just don't keep up with social media enough to gauge that. i can infer at least two points are gonna ruffle some feathers, and im okay with that.

1. recent fantasy novels have declined in quality
2. having a tbr nearing 500+ isn't the flex you think it is
3. a review should be substantial
4. diversified reading shouldn't be limited to spotlight months
5. thoughts on separating the art from the artist. is there a severity range to this, or is this just a pass/fail situation

as always, if you want to check me out on storygraph, i track all my reading there.

#shasreads #bookishhottakes #bookish #bookstagram #booksta taken in BOOKSTA by @shastareads

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2 months ago

books you couldn't pay me to... put down, reread, pickup, and stop talking about

i went through my storygraph book history and picked some of these out. i didn't want them to just be from this year, so we have a few years worth of recorded reading and my opinions

#shasreads #bookish #booksyoucouldntpaymeto #bookishtrend #booksta taken in BOOKSTA by @shastareads

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2 months ago

okay! the bookish lineup from oct 11-18 is as follows
1. the talisman by stephen king & peter straub
2. the tempest by william shakespeare
3. becoming odyssa by jennifer pharr davis
4. collected stories by willa cather

i'd like to read these books this week & hopefully i accomplish this

#shastareads #thetempest #thetalisman #becomingodyssa #thetrollgarden taken in BOOKSTA by @shastareads

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18 hours ago

i'm reading the talisman by stephen king and peter straub and the stephen king burnout FEARS me. it's trick or treating at my door and i'm making the fear dance 🪩.

the talisman is tying in the other realms from the dark tower, the sort of interdimentionality. jack, a 12 year old boy (bc ofc the main character is a child), is on a quest to save his mother by finding the talisman... but the talisman isn't in our world, on earth, it's in another realm called the territories. the territories is sort of set in a medieval world and they have doppelgängers known as twinners. so far, the story is really good! i don't typically like children saving the world storylines anymore, but this one is different. jack is oddly not 12 years old on the pages-- he's being hunted, threatened, working off a debt. it's like he's a medieval 12 year old not a 2026 12 year old

"go then, there are other worlds than these" is a well known dark tower quote & i the talisman is delivering another world for SURE. i'm hopefully finishing this soon to stay on track with my timeline to finish all the books i'd like this month

#shastareads #stephenking #peterstraub #thetalisman #bookish taken in BOOKSTA by @shastareads

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2 days ago

ya know, i expected a lot more from this. the idea behind it i think is stronger than the execution. i like the idea of a group of friends as kids battling an entity & then making a pact to come back and battle again if the entity comes back. but honestly? the entity, pennywise, it, was so meh towards the end.

like the beginning, "it" was so mysterious and dangerous that stan didn't want to face it. but as the book goes along, you learn about patrick hockstetter & henry bowers... and these kids are more chillingly evil than it.

i just-- there's something with the execution that's left me disappointed. and i can't tell if it's the weird timeline, end a chapter in present times & pick up the sentence in the past narrative, or the anecdotal retelling of the past as stephen king exposition, but something threw off the majority of the story for me. i'd say maybe 200-1000 pages were just so painstaking to read. the ending with the child sex scene also wasn't as bad as ive seen online people make it out. arguably, tom, patrick, and beverly's father scenes were worse than that.

i see the tower coming through with the turtle though. would i say this is beneficial for the journey to the dark tower? i'll get back with you. but i do understand a reference in 11/22/63, so huzzah! i'd give this maybe a 2 star rating from me. 🤷‍♀️ it read like a watery version of the stand in terms of found family and high stakes

#shastareads #it #stephenking #pennywise #beverlymarsh taken in BOOKSTA by @shastareads

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3 days ago

i thought this was one of king's like ultimate rite of passage books, but it's falling so short for the expectations. it is nice to finally understand where the losers club merch i see all the time comes from. maybe i'll have to watch the movie after this? i've never seen either film, and for once, i hope they're better. this is just so dull and boring in between scenes of like spooky clown sightings and pictures and domestic abuse. which was written first bc this is giving the stand but knock off (and the cell was a knock off too).

#shasreads #stephenking #pennywise #beverlymarsh #losersclub taken in BOOKSTA by @shastareads

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4 days ago

for my botm i chose may we feed the king by rebecca perry! it's from their offset collection and sort of gave me yesteryear vibes and some fallow vibes (though i haven't read fallow). i'm curious to see what this actually reads as

between four people, three of us knew each other and one person was new. we played two truths and a lie, and my statement was, "i have read 50 books this year." my two friends looked at each other and said, "that has to be the lie. she's definitely told has us about more than 50" how many books have you read this year? do you have a yearly reading goal you are trying to achieve?

i'm also the reason we have to clarify now in hangman what language we will be playing in. 😜😜🪰 gotta keep them on their toes

#shasreads #botm #bookofthemonth #maywefeedtheking #rebeccaperry by @shastareads

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5 days ago

my september stats are finally in

10 books & the top genre was thriller

can't wait to see what october brings

#shasreads #storygraph #storygraphstats #bookish #booksta taken in BOOKSTA by @shastareads

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6 days ago

spoilers below for beloved by toni morrison

i'm truly still mulling it over and digesting the prose. there's probably a lot of the prose that went over my head. at times, i couldn't read more than 30-50 pages because it made my head hurt. the deciphering, the double meaning, the poetic injustice of it all was painful. and yet, not nearly painful enough.

paul d, sixo, halle, sethe, and so many other characters took me away from cincinnati and threw me into sweet home. the timeline and pov jumps were sporadic and challenging, but the immersive experience it created was unlike anything else i've ever read.

maam being a nameless person, branded like an animal. beloved, also a nameless character slaughtered like an animal. sethe, a named person being branded, thought about, and assaulted as an animal. maam and sethe both having identifiable brands. not knowing the fate of many characters... the way toni morrison writes this story is just a small glimpse of what slavery was like. and it's hard to read, it's hard to stomach, and it needs to be read and known.

would you kill for those you love? absolutely, everybody says so. but would you kill the one you loved if you thought it meant protecting them from something worse?

sethe is a character i think about daily. halle, paul d, and beloved too. love being so thick it chokes you. it breaks you. it gives you strength. toni morrison is a genius when writing these characters

"it is hard to make yourself die forever"

there's a lot more of my review on storygraph, so check it out if you're interested. this isn't a book that you'll enjoy reading, because it's haunting and painful, but it's a book that you'll never forget

#shasreads #beloved #tonimorrison #belovedbytonimorrison taken in BOOKSTA by @shastareads

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7 days ago

i'm so excited to read the tempest finally! i've seen the play a few years back, i know the gist of the story, and can't wait to finally get the full immersive experience. once i finish it by stephen king, im coming for the tempest!

i enjoyed the signing the play had. i recorded just a snippet of it and it's been the sole driving factor of wanting to read the tempest. whoever the actors were, yall did great.

anyways, crazy island of shakespeare here i come

#shasreads #thetempest #thetempestwilliamshakespeare #williamshakespeare #williamshakespeareplays taken in BOOKSTA by @shastareads

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8 days ago

currently reading stephen king's book it and listening to draw you out by noah kahan.

roughly 300 pages into it, feeling a bit dizzy from the pov changes and timeline changes, but fuck it we ball. if i had to pick a favorite character so far, beverly is a badass. i'm glad she finally was able to take a stand. ben, he's this fat kid who later moved to omaha, nebraska. it's like staring into a mirror, let me tell you. surprisingly, i quite like stanley's character. it's weird i already know his outcome?

ive still got 859 pages left of this story and genuinely want to be scared and uncomfortable

i hate clowns

#shasreads #itbystephenking #stephenking #benhanscom #beverlymarsh taken in Derry, Maine by @shastareads

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10 days ago