The bookmark in Hold Me Like A Breath is my all-time favorite bookmark. I’ve had it since 2008, when a professor I worked for at UT went to Tasmania. She knew how much I have a love for that place — because of a book, The Ghost With Trembling Wings by Scott Weidensaul, about lost species of animals and travel and nature and tasmanian devils — and she picked up the bookmark for me because it’s made of Tasmanian wood. It’s a Huon Pine, and to this day, many years later, it still smells good. 

2. I’ve been buying books by the bucket loads. I went to three bookstores in three weekends. For someone who is quite a ways from any bookstore, this is a lot of driving to visit bookstores. It hasn’t just been purchases in store, though. I’ve done some online ordering, too. Mostly things that have been sitting on my “to read” list for a while that I don’t have access to via the library and can’t find in store.

I haven’t read any of these books. I haven’t started any of them yet, either. Most were from recommendations of others. It’s a mix of non-fiction and fiction. I’m really looking forward to digging into each of them, and I plan on getting to The Diary of a Teenager Girl soonest, probably. It’s an older backlist title, a mix of prose and graphic elements. It’s being rereleased this summer, as a movie’s being made from it. The preview in EW is where I heard about it and then I became determined to track down reviews before putting money down for it. 

Headstrong, a book of short biographies of women in science, looks like it’ll be great research for my anthology. 

I bought all of these books, too. Again, some were from a to-read list. Others were things people told me about or I had connections to somehow — I bought two romance novels, my first ever, because Kimberly has raved about Sarah MacLean. I really think she’s a neat person (and I’ll tell you more about why in the near future, I think), and I’m excited to dig into them. 

The Last Life came to my awareness from this wonderful Reading Lives podcast with Nova Ren Suma. I picked up Astonish Me after talking in the Book Riot backchannel about my love for dance themed novels, and The Bluest Eye will be my first Morrison read, on deck for next month. 

I adored Amy Spalding’s funny, feminist Kissing Ted Callahan when I read it earlier this year, and so I had to pick up a finished copy. The librarian in the story has a familiar name, too. 

Selfish is a small literary magazine. Jenn Northington, who is the Director of Events and Programming, has a piece in it. This is the first issue, and it sounds fantastic.  

3. It’s not just books I’ve been buying. I went on a bit of a comics binge buy, too. 

After I heard there was going to be an Archie vs. Sharknado issue this summer, I decided it was high time to catch up on Archie I never read. I consulted a friend who is an Archie expert and decided on three mega collections. I then bought Afterlife with Archie because zombies.

Everywhere Antennas is one of the most beautifully drawn graphic novels I’ve ever read. It’s a story about a girl who never feels well and attributes it to living in a city, where there’s a lot of electricity. The wires and buzzing are hurting her and she chooses to move to rural Canada, where she can connect with the Earth, go off grid, and create. It’s a comic in translation — a thing I’ve really come to enjoy lately — and I can’t wait to revisit it. This is definitely the kind of comic you could consider “new adult,” if that were a thing comics could be. The main character is post-college, but she’s not entirely sure yet where her life will take her.

Both Ms. Marvel and Sex Criminals just released their second trade issues. I loved their respective first trades, so I had to pick them up.

Not pictured: Black Widow, Volume 1. You cannot find it anywhere. It’s backordered. I hope I get it some day. I’m waiting, still. 

4. Of course, there have been review copies coming to my house, too. Fortunately, it’s been in lesser quantities than the purchased books. I think. I can’t always tell since books get put places around the house and I have become bad about knowing what is where. It’s somewhere. But not always easily accessible.

The covers of these are so great. There’s the new Blythe Woolston. The new Sarah Darer Littman. A horror novel — We’ll Never Be Apart — which has almost the same exact cover as After the Snow. 

Todd Strasser’s The Beast of Cretacea was compared to Moby Dick, which is a dangerous catnip for me. I love Moby Dick. I’m tentative and a little hesitant about picking up Sugar because it’s about a fat girl. This could either go very well or very poorly. I want it to be great. I worry I might be let down. Reviews haven’t told me much either way. I’ll be getting to it sooner, probably, rather than later. 

5. I’ve not been in the mood to write reviews lately. I’ve been in the mood to read and really think about my reading in a private, personal way. A lot of those thoughts end up coming out in bigger, more developed pieces, outside of reviews. I’ve found a short review on Goodreads works, along with talking up a great book on Twitter, is about my energy level for reviews. 

But here’s a peek at recent reads, with a quick pitch/comparison.

Hold Me Like A Breath by Tiffany Schmidt comes out on the 19th. It’s a retelling of “The Princess and the Pea” with organ trafficking. It is as thrilling as it sounds. And there’s romance. And also, there’s a sequel forthcoming that I can’t wait to get my hands on. Satisfying, well-paced, and unique. 

Scarlett Undercover by Jennifer Latham comes out later this month, too. It’s about a Muslim American girl who is, without question, as snarky, quick-witted, and smart as Veronica Mars. Very little romance in this one, though it is hovering in the background. Teens who want teen sleuths and who want a story where a Muslim girl’s identity plays a role in the story and in her character development will eat this up. I know I did.

Invincible by Amy Reed came out last week. Like all of Reed’s books, we have a broken main character and she’s broken because she has to be. This isn’t at all like TFIOS, which is the unfortunate comp it’s gotten from the publisher. It’s about a girl who learns she’s not on the death sentence with cancer she thought, and coming back into real life after that means she’s grieving everything: her entire life is now different. And so, she seeks out comfort with a boy who is not good for her, not even a little. If anything, maybe this is the kind of book you hand to readers who are over TFIOS. It’s not sentimental, and it’s not at all emotionally manipulative. 

Kissing in America by Margo Rabb hits shelves later this month and if ever you wanted a Trish Doller read alike or a read alike to the also forthcoming, also outstanding A Sense of the Infinite by Hilary T. Smith, here you go. The title is, I think, unfortunate. There’s very little kissing in this book at all. It’s about friendship, about Eva seeking out some sort of life after the unexpected death of her father in a plane crash. It’s one of the most well-done grief books I’ve read, and it features a road trip and a series of realistic bad decisions at the hands of a 16-year-old girl. The writing is outstanding. I blew through this, as well as the Smith title, in no time. 

I didn’t get a picture of A Sense of the Infinite, but it is without question one of my favorite reads this year. When it comes out later this month, pick it up. It’s about friendship, about family, about grief, about girls growing up. It’s a true coming-of-age story. I talked more in depth about why this book is so phenomenal over at Book Riot in our Best of the Month round-up. 

Also not pictured — well, it is, at the very top of this post — is my reading of Jesmyn Ward’s outstanding, poignant, painful memoir Men We Reaped. It’s Ward’s reflection on losing five young black men in her life and where and how their stories and their deaths are connected. Read this. Especially if you care about black lives and stories. It’s not easy. It’s not pretty. But it’s important and powerful and so damn humanizing. 

6. This isn’t a writing blog, nor will it turn into one. But I wanted to round this post out by talking briefly about my anthology. 

It’s weird. I feel two things about it at once: I feel like I know exactly what I’m doing, in part because I feel like the work in putting together blog series, especially the “About the Girls” one, has taught me that giving other people freedom to explore the things they’re passionate about within a theme allows them to be at their best. On the other hand, I feel like I have no idea what I’m doing. I’ve not told anyone who else is involved, so it’s a big secret. Contributors know what they’re writing or creating (I have people creating things for my book — that feeling is unreal) but I don’t know how it’ll look in the end. 

In thinking about the things I want to put in myself, I get a little overwhelmed. Then I get excited. But I float back and forth on the knowing/not knowing line. 

The very last class I took in college for my English major was meant to be a capstone experience. The final project was about anthologies. We explored how they were put together. Why they were crafted as they were. What the editors’ choices meant in terms of their work and in terms of having an impact on those who read those anthologies. Our project for the course was to create a mock anthology and talk about why we made the choices we made. What those choices said about our biases and our knowledge.

My group made an anthology about censored children’s literature. It’s still online in bits and pieces, but since some of the copyright choices are questionable (we were young and so was the internet, honestly), I don’t link to it. 

I’ve been thinking a lot about that project, about the choices and conversations that went on, and I have definitely been influenced by that class in working on this project. I spend a lot of time thinking about each contributor I reach out to. About what I ask of them. About where their work will land in the greater conversation. 

And I’ve been asked really good questions back. Some of them have led me to reconsider visions I had, but not in bad ways. While it’s my work in the editing, I cannot wait to see where my invisible work — those conversations, those decisions — ends up taking the creators. 

I’m looking forward to when I can begin sharing who is a part of this project. 

It’s a treat to work with some of my feminist heroes and heroines.