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Alex & Kristen

@weirdlywellread

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We’re Alex & Kristen, Indy-based readers. We have a soft spot for the quirky, morbid, & wonderfully weird—with a bit of everything in between! 🐾📖

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Big thank you to @barbbookedup for the tag in her post yesterday! I absolutely wrote 10 books down in a note immediately. I’ve said this before, but I love hearing if someone didn’t like a book AND WHY they didn’t like it. Not to hate on an author or genre, but to help people with overflowing TBRs (like me!).

So here are mine:

The Midnight Library - an awesome premise that just didn’t deliver for me. I actually disdain this one.

Happy Place - felt phoned in, adults who cannot communicate is my absolute least favorite trope ever

The Southern Book Club’s Guide to Slaying Vampires - I thought this would be a fun jaunt out of my normal reading but I was annoyed and confused the whole time. Was this satire? Was this a man not writing women well? I know this works well for a lot of people but sadly, I was not one of them.

The Guest - sometimes I love an all vibes book, sometimes I love a grifting unreliable narrator, but this book was insufferable for me.

House of Leaves - I cared about the house and the family in the house and nothing else.

The books I wish I could read for the first time again are all six star books / no notes, perfection. Visceral reactions, still staying with me years later - they’re the bar I judge everything else again. Sorry not sorry!

I’ve tagged some friends but no pressure and invite is open to all - I want to see everyone’s 5 books they should have DNF’ed and 5 books they wish they could read again for the first time!

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Lil life update: spring break is here, I packed a suitcase full of books, and despite the time off, I still have absolutely zero chill. I am who I am 😏

I just posted my review of The Wilderness, so go read it if you want my complicated feelings about a book that I was so happy to finally get to! If you have already have done that, then may I present: my full March debrief, because a lot happened (or at least given what I’m always juggling 🤦‍♀️)

What I finished:
🌊Wild Dark Shore wrecked me in the best way. Three days. Done. A lot of people told me it would pull me out of my slump and they were embarrassingly right (full review coming when I’m back)

🏔️Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead was genuinely beautiful in its prose and dragged just enough in the plot that I felt every page given my current bandwidth. I think I needed more brain than I had. I’m excited to revisit it someday.

🏨 The Shining (not pictured) because I have no self control. I decided to dig in on NYC’s second snow day thinking it would be so long it would put me to sleep. WRONG! I loved every terrifying second of it and I have no regrets except that I was reading a haunted hotel book during a blizzard. But my first King? A huge success!!!

🧬The Double Helix is done and I never have to read it again for grad school, which is a sentence that deserves its own confetti. One more full book left, “The Republican War on Science,” and then I am coasting until my summer courses.

What’s happening in April:
The Martian has been my plane book and it feels spiritually correct. James is up for book club. Demon Copperhead is waiting and I am scared of how much I’m going to love it. And... 🥁 roll, I FOUND THE SAFEKEEP and Margo’s Got Money Troubles, and snagged both for $7?!?!?!?!? Yeah, huge win during my weekend in Brooklyn last week. These alone are making me very happy just to own.

Can I read all of these in April while finishing grad school? Time will tell. Follow along if you want to find out. I plan to update more frequently 😄

What was the first book you couldn’t wait to pick up this spring? Drop it below so I can add it to next year’s list👇

#bookstagram #wrapped #bookrecs

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🪱📚INDY INDIE BOOK CRAWL📚🪱

IIBC 2026 was a phenomenal one! I hit the north side with my girls on Friday, and crawled downtown with @weirdlywellread, @sirenbee_readsnthings, and @annieinthepages on Saturday. I was having way too much fun to remember to take photos at every stop like I did last year; as you can tell by the size of my haul, I may have gotten a little carried away… 😂🤷🏻‍♀️

Many, many thanks to the fabulous folks at @indyindiebookcrawl for putting on such a fantastic event. The first IIBC in 2024 is what inspired me to find a bookish community on Booksta, and both years since I’ve crawled with friends I connected with in this space. This event has a very special place in my heart. 💜

See anything in my stack I need to pick up ASAP??

#independentbookstore #shopsmall #shoplocal #bookaddict #bookstagram

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📚 The Indy Indie Bookstore Crawl pt 2 🛍️

New books are an awesome part of the IIBC, but what was even better was the people!

💛 I met up again with @reading.for.three & @weirdlywellread but this time we were joined by @annieinthepages ! The last pic is of all of our hauls combined 🙃

💜 Then, I got to meet @mew.reviews in person at a little after hours event thrown by Tomorrow Bookstore, which I dragged my sister to (say hi to Nicole)

🩵 And last but not least, I met @ijustreadthisbook and was able to buy and get one of her books signed!

Q: Have you gotten to meet anyone off bookstagram yet? Or, have you been to any bookish events lately?

@indyindiebookcrawl #indyindiebookcrawl 💛

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Happy Friday, all! Big thank you to Adison @midtownmoodreader for the tag here! Looking back at what I read these years and picking my top 3 was fun and challenging! I’d done a top 10 list for all of these years. Sometimes I ranked the books, but other years the books were just too hard to rank and I went with my favorite reads. Adison, I had to start with my honorable mentions!

I changed some of these up based on how much a book stuck with me over time, but all of these were in my top 10 for the year and I thiiiink they were all in the top 5 when I did my rankings - it was fun to look back at!

Tagging a few friends who might want to participate, but no pressure! I just want to know if any of these would have made your top 3 for the year you read them!

#favoritebooks

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✨ Top Reads from 2020-2025 ✨

@dyannareads’s post reminded me that I’ve been meaning to put this together! It just took a while because narrowing my favorites down to three was hard (for some years more than others—I wanted to include six books for 2024 😂).

To help with that, I tried to pick books that defined each year for me. For example, I read IN THE DREAM HOUSE by Carmen Maria Machado in December 2020, and it’s an all-time favorite memoir. BUT I read the other three books during the height of the pandemic when I needed an escape, so they feel more “2020” to me.

I tagged a few people who may want to participate in this challenge, too. It’s always fun to look back on favorites!

Let me know if any of these would make your list. 🫶

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Happy Valentine’s Day to my auto-buy authors!
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TJ Klune
Emily St. John Mandel, @emilystjohnmandel
Isabel Cañas, @isabelcanas_
Angeline Boulley, @angelineboulley
Safia Elhillo, @safiamafia
Hanif Abdurraqib, @nifmuhammad
Clint Smith, @clintsmithiii
Fredrik Backman, @backmansk
Elizabeth Acevedo, @acevedowrites
Charlotte McConaghy, @charlottemcconaghy
Liz Moore, @lizmoorebooks
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Thank you @abbysgbooks for tagging me in this challenge 🫶 I tagged a few people who might want to make a post, too, but no pressure (and apologies if you already did this challenge and I either missed it or forgot!).
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Who are your auto-buy authors?

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Happy Valentine’s Day, all! I know it’s a manufactured holiday, built on capitalism and consumerism, but I do like the reminder to lean into the love in our lives, no matter the kind there - romantic, familial, platonic, and definitely self-love. Love is such a force and we need to be leveraging it for good, now more than ever. Thank you for participating, friends! 🥰

That being said, I asked some of my favorite bookstagrammers who I’ve connected with and whose accounts I love to share with me two books they’ve fallen in love with - one a recent publication and one a backlist. It was so fun to see their responses (and my TBR continue to explode)!

What book have you most recently fallen in love with? Tell me, tell me, tell me!

#bookrecs #tbr

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AUTO-BUY AUTHORS

Big thank you to @barbbookedup for the tag on her auto-buy authors post! I had fun going through my shelves and picking out my favorites from my auto-buy authors (first picture) and then thinking about authors who I’ve read their debut and am waiting for their next book to decide if they’ll be come auto-buy authors (second picture).

Who are your auto-buy authors? How do you decide? I think I need two solid reads that I’ll be thinking about for a long time in order to reach auto-buy status. Do we have any in common?

Tagging a few friends but if you see this and are inspired, go for it!

#autobuyauthors #bookstack

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🩸🍒 Horror for the Girlies 🍒🩸

I really leaned into my horror era in the last half of 2025 and I can’t say I’m too mad about that. My female rage had to go somewhere and these horror reads helped me release that productively. 😇

Here are my favorites. Thanks to @libraryof.sam for tagging me. I tagged a few friends too but no pressure to play along. I know a lot of you have done this already! Special thanks to @kieras.reads for creating this book tag! 🖤

🪩 Would love to hear your 2026 horror tbr’s! 🪩

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Thanks to @sirenbee_readsnthings and her vertical spine #bookchallenge, I spent a little time looking at my shelves for vertical spines. I had more than I thought! The first two are a collection of vertical spines on my personal TBR and the last two are vertical spines I’ve read and enjoyed.

My mid-life neck loves a vertical spine and this challenge tipped off the part of my brain that loves to think about book design and how decisions are made and who gets to make them. Cover art, spine alignment, font decisions - all of that is fascinating to me, especially when people go outside of the box. Is there a book art trend you love or really dislike? Vertical spines are a yes from me!

I’ve tagged a few people - sorry if you’ve already done this and I’ve missed/forgotten in my post Thanksgiving pie haze. No pressure, but I do love seeing these spines! If you aren’t tagged but inspired, obviously, go for it!

#readmorebooks #booksbooksbooks #bookish #bibliophile

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👻 You know what bookish thing haunts me most? 👻

All the library books I check out, full well knowing I won’t get around to reading them - the ghosts of library books returned unread, if you will.

What bookish thing haunts you the most? Tagging a few friends but if you see this and you want to post your bookish haunt, please do and tag me - I want to see! Runner up for me is definitely book club permanent “stickers” on cover jackets. Just get out of here with that nonsense!

(Also, what do I absolutely need to read from this stack? 🫣)

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