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Remember how I said June was the start of the summer season when many publishers tend to push their bigger titles? Truer words have never been spoken, because July’s book‑sub lineup is stacked. The suffering and middling picks of January through April are gone! The shelves are filling, the wallet is emptying, the TBR list is growing, but the book blog and love for reading are thriving. Confirmed Book Picks: Surprise Book Picks: Off Months / No Renewals: Recap: Needless to say, July is a great month for books and a horrible one for my wallet and overgrowing TBR. But I’m not mad at all as some of the books selected were my top to-read picks for the year. It’s still early and can change in the common weeks, but the silver lining is August’s picks are not quite my thing with far more renewals skips which will balance out this month’s craziness slightly. I’m still so thrilled to finally be able to add Inkstone to this monthly list and am eagerly awaiting for their first book from quarter 2 to arrive soon!

Hey all, this is my book box sub renewal breakdown for June 2026! This month marks the start of the summer season, which is traditionally the publishing industry’s peak period where they push many of their biggest titles. While last month had a lot of decent but forgettable picks outside of the ongoing series, this month has some great standalone picks that I’m really looking forward to! Confirmed Book Picks: Surprise Book Picks: Off Month / No Renewal: Recap As expected for the summer season, June’s lineup is stacked and required me to be selective. I ended up renewing and keeping five books, selling one, and skipping four. In addition to limited bookshelf space, skipping OwlCrate and Fae Crate—which could’ve gone either way—was also preparation for July, which is looking even better (aka worse for my wallet). Spoiler: I’m renewing the trio of TBB subs plus the FairyLoot combo, which already matches the number of June books kept—and there’s even more I’m keeping. What a time to be alive.

Intro: “Hey all, it’s been a while since I’ve done any book blogging since I’ve been marathon reading and trying to get my physical TBR and ARC reviews under control (spoiler: he’s still fighting a losing battle). While a bit late for May, I thought I’d start a new book‑blogging series where I discuss my many book box subscription services and which subs I’m planning to renew vs. skip. Since early last year, I fell down the book box subscription rabbit hole, innocently starting with Aardvark Book Club and somehow expanding to 10+ subscriptions; I fully blame my book box and fellow reading friend Rachelle for this. With that many subscriptions and limited bookshelf space, I have to be quite selective about what I keep, so each month I’ll be walking through my internal thought process and ramblings. Note: Many of these book box subs are considered “surprise book boxes,” where the book title and customized designs (if applicable) are not revealed ahead of time. These blog entries will contain spoilers as a warning. Other subs do not, and some even reveal the full designs of their books ahead of time. I’ll be linking and including the digital mockups for…

Created by the popular but often controversial company Amazon, the humble Kindle eReader and its associated ebooks have revolutionized and permanently shifted the trajectory of the book and publishing industry. Following the success of the rapidly growing ebook market, in 2014 Amazon introduced their digital subscription service Kindle Unlimited. Now if you somehow stumbled on to my book blog, you’re likely quite familiar with ebooks and Kindle Unlimited so I can likely cut this intro blurb and get right into the nitty-gritty details. But for those unfamiliar with Kindle Unlimited (I’ll be shortening it to KU for the rest of this review), KU is a subscription service that promises a huge selection of ebooks, free to access and read with no limitations on how long you can keep them for compared to the similar Libby/Overdrive system offered by Libraries. While you can technically download and read an unlimited number of ebooks from Amazon’s rotating selection, you can only access and read them for as long as you have an active KU membership. Instead of paying a licensing fee per purchase (aka Amazon’s version of “buying an ebook”), the monthly payment gets you blanket access to Amazon’s huge library akin to…

Last month I posted my book list that recapped my top 5 Most Pleasantly Surprising Reads of 2024 in a similar format as my listing for 2023. I also posted my top 5 Most Disappointing Reads of 2023 which leads into the topic of today’s blog and book list which is my 2024 Most Disappointing Reads! Compared to 2023, I read nearly the double the number of books in 2024 and therefore had many more options to choose from. Also unlike 2023’s list that all had very low overall ratings of around 1-star, my list for 2024 is a bit different and has a greater variety of ratings and overall impressions. To recap the intro from last year’s Disappointing Reads list, books listed here are not necessarily the worst or least favorite books I read in 2024 (that would be The Excitements by C.J. Wray), but are those that either failed to meet whatever expectation I had for them going in or had a notable flaw that unexpectedly severely impacted my enjoyment. This year’s pick also omit reads that I knew ahead of time that I probably wasn’t going to enjoy (a notable example by Ocean Vuong’s On Earth We’re…