Coughing, congestion and Christmas cooties got me in a chokehold. Reading is literally the least I can do next to mandatory napping. When I’m awake and not reading, I’m watching shows with ‘demon’ in the title. I wonder what that says about me.

I read 5 books in January 2023: 1 x Short Story Collection, 1 x Graphic Novel, 2 x Audiobooks, and 1 Fiction Novel. More details in the post! Let’s get into it!

Veronica G. Henry’s The Foreign Exchange is reminiscent of a cozy mystery with Haitian voodoo elements.

We Knew All Along by Mina Hardy, follows the trials, tribulations, and trepidations of stay-at-home mom and wife, Jewelann Jordan. Jewelann dolls herself up, putting on airs, to vie for the attention of a high school fling, Christian Campbell. She thinks her presence is reminding him of what he could have had. Amid the compliments and attention, little does she know that that wasn’t all she’s getting from this one night of playing catch-up.

Get in here! Diane Marie Brown’s, Black Candle Women checks these boxes: black and female characters of varying ages, family secrets, voodoo and hoodoo magic, and R&B music references. If this rings any of your bells, give it a read.

October 2023 is my month of advanced reading copies, carryover reads, readathons, book clubs, and buddy reads. However ambitious, I’m determined to participate.

Have you heard, have you heard? Claude and Daisy Compton are a couple. Oh, you didn’t know? Don’t worry. His mama and daddy didn’t know either. Let’s hope you don’t take this news like they have.

The Jot Down – December 17, 2022 Happy Saturday y’all! Phew! This week was a myriad of things. If I had to give it a title, it would be “Different: The Scripted and Unscripted.” I didn’t get around to posting a WWW Wednesday this week because I had some extraneous tasks outside of my normally scheduled program to tend to. One of them being a stressful journey running errands on Fannin at UTHealth Houston and another being a task that took longer than expected. By the time I finished both, Wednesday was gone. It would’ve been fruitless of me to…

Scrolling through social media has its perks. Now and then I stumble on something that inspires me to share my thoughts and experiences with you all. The post that inspired this blog post is from the Grand Central Publishing Facebook Page and it poses this question: If you could read a book for the first time again, what book would you pick?

Told from multiple points of view, in The Memory Concierge we witness the ups and downs, delusions, and realities of families shaken by the force of extreme forgetfulness embedded in brain disorders and neurological conditions such as Alzheimer’s and Anosognosia.

It’s common knowledge that artists can be sensitive about their work. In The Last Word, Taylor Adams zooms in on this and creates a fast-paced, action-packed, almost campy, good, old, wackadoodle time of a novel.

The Devil Won’t Keep Us Apart by Shane T. Clark is a suspense novel and revenge story crafted around a father-son relationship between an elderly man, Elmer Ray, and his next-door neighbor, Adrian Franklin. I received a gifted copy of the book in exchange for an honest review from the author via Booktasters, and here it is. 🙂