The Happy Place Five

What would my bookshelves be without the recommendations of my friends? Well, much more empty for sure and my bank account would be quite happy as well! Not complaining, though! Because if it weren’t for books, I wouldn’t have any friends at all. There are so many books and friends I could mention here, it was hard to pick, so I decided to go waaaay back. And somehow this turned out more like a walk down memory lane than a proper rec list. But hey, you get nice anecdotes out of it …

A new year also means there are a gazillion books we didn’t manage to read in that timespan society puts so much meaning to and that’s now over and can never ever come back (though, let’s be honest, we’re all glad we made it through that one alive). For this month’s topic, we decided to pick five books that we meant to read last year, as in 2021, but didn’t get to for some reason or another …

Oh look, I can hardly believe my own eyes! A new The Happy Place 5 post! It’s been a while. This week’s topic is “Books we would want with us while stranded on a deserted island” – and it actually didn’t take that long for me to make up this list, because I immediately had two criteria in mind …

Don’t we all want to crawl inside our reads from time to time? My answer is both yes and no. Yes, because I would love to explore some of those places myself; no, because I don’t really want to stay there for an extended period of time, either because those worlds are lacking our modern comforts or are incredibly dangerous. And I know myself; I wouldn’t survive there for long. Still, here are the five books I’d love to visit – even if the stays come with an asterisk …

New year, new beginnings! And when we talk beginnings, we mean series! Just what series, exactly, we couldn’t agree on, so you’ll get a bunch of interpretations for this topic. I’m really bad at keeping up with new releases, so that one was out of the question for me. In the end, I went with series I want to start in 2021. It’s not like I have a shortage of those …

Take a Discord chat, throw a bunch of bookish people in there together to keep each other sane over the course of a pandemic, and voilà: a new monthly feature is born. 2020 certainly wasn’t an easy year. However, there are a couple of books that really impacted me one way or another, because they gave me a way to escape or something to link memories to. It was really hard to pick just five out of the seven or eight contenders I had for this list. But here we go …