My First Book Haul of 2025 & Some Personal Oversharing Yada Yada…

As I always say, reading books and buying books are two different hobbies.

Typically, I read as much as I buy. That doesn’t necessarily mean I’m reading owned books; in fact, I’m definitely not, but it’s the spirit of reading that counts, not where the books come from. But for the last year or so, I’ve been reading less and buying more. Like, way more. I was using book purchases for jolts of serotonin, my only source of happiness during the most stressful year of my life.

If life has taught me anything, it’s that shit can always get worse, so I need to maintain a high level of anxiety at all times, waiting for the other shoe to drop. Yes, I am in therapy.

But certainly my response to 2024 could have been way worse. I could have gotten into heavy drugs. Maybe considered alcoholism, but I try to avoid swallowing as a general rule. That’s a weird thing to say, so more on that in a minute.

I guess there’s always a chance I totally lose it in 2025 with the way things are currently shaping up globally.

Speaking of, my goal for 2025 is to make book buying not about trying to escape something negative, but to once again be an experience done for the joy of it, the simple pleasure of it. You know, without overdoing it like a book goblin maniac.

That’s why this past Sunday I took my holiday gift cards and hit up the bookstore for an afternoon out with my husband. After undergoing an esophageal myotomy, it was the first time in 3 weeks that I felt healthy enough to leave the house and do something normal, just for me. A kind of celebration for making it over that last hurdle in a year-long race.

So yeah, that thing I said about avoiding swallowing? Maybe your mind dipped into the gutter for a minute, but the truth is that I live with a degenerative disease of my esophagus called achalasia. Among the many issues it brings (the esophageal spasms are a treat), it makes getting food and drink into my stomach nearly impossible. Typically, my esophagus just fills up like a water balloon until enough pressure exists to force open my LES. (You want to see something horrifying? Google achalasia barium swallow x-rays.) For the last 15+ years, if I could avoid eating and drinking, I would.

Achalasia is not something I talk about on my socials at all. It’s super rare. I’ve never met anyone who knows what it is, except Matthew Gray Gubler (we’ve never met, but he has it too, so it’s definitely for the best that we didn’t fall in love and have little achalasia babies.) In my experience, most people don’t even know how the esophagus works. Normal people don’t need to consider the function. Dying nerve endings, misfiring muscle signals, a permanently closed LES… I always end up giving an anatomy lesson when I dare to talk about it, so I kept it private. If I had to eat or drink around people who were unfamiliar with my disease, I would give the same disclaimer, “I’m not choking. You don’t need to be concerned. Please just ignore me.”

The truth is that until you can’t participate, you don’t realize just how much food and drink play a part in social interactions. And once those interactions are compromised, it can do a number on your mental health. Girls’ nights, date nights, work dinners, family parties and holidays, vacations… those things were a nightmare for me. (And let me just point out the irony that when my job was still in-office, pre-COVID, I was the party planner — always planning potlucks and pizza lunches for everyone else.) Once my stress and anxiety kicked in about doing a public food thing, my swallowing got even worse. I’m not going to talk about how many times I’ve regurgitated food in a restaurant bathroom or out the car door on the side of the road because I just couldn’t get the food down, but the number is high.

You might ask yourself why I lived untreated for so long, and I don’t have a great answer. I will say that in terms of swallowing, I made it work eventually, like 8 times out of 10. (Carbonated water was basically a disability aid for me.) When I was first diagnosed, my GI doctor at the time basically told me the disease was too rare and I’d need to find a specialist. I never got that far. I was given possible treatment options to pursue, including a more invasive surgery than what I ended up having. (Medical progress wins again!) But back then, I was in an abusive relationship, so I made a choice not to put myself in a vulnerable position where I was being “taken care of” after surgery by a guy who had put his fist through every wall in our apartment.

That’s the fucked up thing about abusive relationships – I chose to deny treatment for myself rather than leave that guy behind. I think about that a lot.

But I digress…

I was young and dumb and ill-equipped, and I chose to live without treatment because that seemed like the safest option for me. I was in that bad relationship for 4 years, and by the time I got out of it, living with achalasia had become second nature.

As I got older and life got more complicated, there never seemed to be a good time to re-explore treatment, to put myself first. By October 2023, when my husband and I went on a 3-week road trip through New England and I had to bring like 99 bottles of carbonated water with me, I officially became sick and tired of being sick and tired. I just wanted to enjoy a lobster roll in Bar Harbor without the overwhelming anxiety of eating in public, the discomfort of it, and the struggle of swallowing.

So, I finally sought treatment.

Start to finish, it took a little over a year to get where I am today—almost 4 weeks post-op. The endless tests and doctor’s visits, the waiting, the liquid diet, the surgery, and the healing process have all been worth it.

You know those Booksta things that go around like, “What’s your favourite drink or snack when you read? Coffee or tea while you read?” I’ve never had an answer for those because snacks and drinks while reading were not a fun thing for me. It would literally ruin my reading time. It’s such a little, stupid thing, but getting to participate now is everything.

Leading up to my surgery, I kept thinking of one scenario: getting to have an iced coffee while browsing the bookstore like an (almost) regular person.

So, for my first outing post-surgery, that’s exactly what I did. I drank an iced coffee with ease — no pressure, no buildup, no forcing and twisting and pushing just to swallow. No foamy build-up that would sit in my esophagus until I spit it out. Gross, I know.

I bought books, and I enjoyed my day without the anxiety, discomfort, and feeling of “otherness” that would have previously hung over me like a dark cloud.

This book haul was not to search out serotonin; it was purely to celebrate a new chapter in my life, as it were. Bookish play on words coming in hot!

With all of that said, let’s take a closer look at the books I got!

---

🔪GRAVEYARD SHIFT | M.L. Rio

Genre: Horror, Mystery, Novella

What the FUCK It’s About: Every night, in the college’s ancient cemetery, five people cross paths as they work the late shift: a bartender, a rideshare driver, a hotel receptionist, the steward of the derelict church that looms over them, and the editor-in-chief of the college paper, always in search of a story.

One dark October evening in the defunct churchyard, they find a hole that wasn’t there before. A fresh, open grave where no grave should be. But who dug it, and for whom?

Before they go their separate ways, the gravedigger returns. As they trail him through the night, they realize he may be the key to a string of strange happenings around town that have made headlines for the last few weeks—and that they may be closer to the mystery than they thought.

🔪THE WITCHING TIDE | Margaret Meyer

Genre: Historical Fiction, Literary, Feminism

What the FUCK It’s About: East Anglia, 1645. Martha Hallybread, a midwife, healer, and servant, has lived peacefully for more than four decades in her beloved coastal village of Cleftwater. Rendered voiceless as a child, Martha has not spoken a word in years.

One autumn morning, a sinister newcomer appears. The witchfinder, Silas Makepeace, has been blazing a trail of destruction along the coast, and now has Cleftwater in his sights. His arrival strikes fear into the heart of the community. Within a day, local women are being captured and detained, and Martha finds herself a silent witness to the hunt.

Powerless to protest, Martha is enlisted to search the accused women for “devil’s marks.” Now she is caught between suspicion and betrayal, having to choose between protecting herself or condemning the women of the village. In desperation, she revives a wax witching doll that belonged to her mother, in the hope that it will bring protection. But the doll’s true powers are unknowable, Martha harbors a terrible secret that could cost her own freedom, and the gallows are looming…

🔪SIGNED SEALED DEAD | Cynthia Murphy

Genre: Young Adult, Mystery, Thriller

What the FUCK It’s About: When true-Crime obsessed Paige, along with her family, move across the Atlantic to her father’s eerie hometown, it’s not long before she uncovers the town’s dark history—a string of unsolved murders and disappearances in the 90s.

Soon after, notes start appearing at their home, about the secrets the old house is keeping.

The clues lead Paige to a diary concealed in the walls that belonged to one of the missing girls.

Could this be the key to solving a quarter-of-a-century mystery…or will the diary make Paige the next target?

🔪WITCHCRAFT FOR WAYWARD GIRLS | Grady Hendrix

Genre: Horror, Fantasy, Historical Fiction

What the FUCK It’s About: They call them wayward girls. Loose girls. Girls who grew up too fast. And they’re sent to the Wellwood Home in St. Augustine, Florida, where unwed mothers are hidden by their families to have their babies in secret, give them up for adoption, and most important of all, to forget any of it ever happened.

Fifteen-year-old Fern arrives at the home in the sweltering summer of 1970, pregnant, terrified and alone. Under the watchful eye of the stern Miss Wellwood, she meets a dozen other girls in the same predicament. There’s Rose, a hippie who insists she’s going to find a way to keep her baby and escape to a commune. And Zinnia, a budding musician who knows she’s going to go home and marry her baby’s father. And Holly, a wisp of a girl, barely fourteen, mute and pregnant by no-one-knows-who.

Everything the girls eat, every moment of their waking day, and everything they’re allowed to talk about is strictly controlled by adults who claim they know what’s best for them. Then Fern meets a librarian who gives her an occult book about witchcraft, and power is in the hands of the girls for the first time in their lives. But power can destroy as easily as it creates, and it’s never given freely. There’s always a price to be paid…and it’s usually paid in blood.

🔪HOW TO KILL MEN AND GET AWAY WITH IT (Kitty Collins #1) | Katy Brent

Genre: Thriller, Mystery, Contemporary

What the FUCK It’s About: Meet Kitty Collins.

FRIEND. LOVER. KILLER.

He was following me. That guy from the nightclub who wouldn’t leave me alone.

I hadn’t intended to kill him of course. But I wasn’t displeased when I did and, despite the mess I made, I appeared to get away with it.

That’s where my addiction started…

I’ve got a taste for revenge and quite frankly, I’m killing it.

🔪BAD MEN | Julie Mae Cohen

Genre: Mystery, Thriller, Contemporary

What the FUCK It’s About: Meet the most irresistible serial killer of the year in this twisty feminist thriller that’s as wickedly fun as it is lethal

Saffy Huntley-Oliver is an intelligent and glamorous socialite; she also happens to be a proficient serial killer. For the past fifteen years, she’s hunted down and dispatched rapists, murderers, domestic abusers—bad men all. But leading a double life has left her lonely—dating’s tough when your boyfriend might turn out to be your next victim. Saffy thinks she’s finally found a truly good man in Jonathan Desrosiers, a true-crime podcaster who’s amassed legions of die-hard fans for cracking cold cases and bringing justice to victims­­.

When a decapitated body shows up on Jon’s doorstep the morning after his wife leaves him, he becomes the chief suspect for a murder he insists he didn’t commit. Saffy’s crush becomes an obsession as she orchestrates a meet-cute and volunteers to help Jon clear his name, using every trick up her sleeve to find the real killer and get her man—no matter the cost.

🔪THE QUEEN | Nick Cutter

Genre: Horror, Thriller, Science Fiction

What the FUCK It’s About: On a sunny morning in June, Margaret Carpenter wakes up to find a new iPhone on her doorstep. She switches it on to find a text from her best friend, Charity Atwater. The problem is, Charity’s been missing for over a month. Most people in town—even the police—think she’s dead.

Margaret and Charity have been lifelong friends. They share everything, know the most intimate details about one another…but Charity carries a secret that even she is unaware of. A secret engraved into her DNA helix. For Charity is also known Subject Six, the crown jewel of Project Athena—a clandestine and unorthodox gene manipulation experiment, the brainchild of tech titan Rudyard Crate. And when Charity’s gene sequencing actualizes during a traumatic event at a high school party, it sets in motion a chain of events that will end in tragedy, bloodshed, and death.

And now Charity wants Margaret to know her story—the real story. In a narrative that takes place over one feverish day, Margaret follows a series of increasingly dreadful breadcrumbs as she forges deeper into the mystery of her best friend—a person she never truly knew at all…

🔪IT WILL ONLY HURT FOR A MOMENT | Delilah S. Dawson

Genre: Horror, Mystery, Gothic

What the FUCK It’s About: Sarah Carpenter is starting over.

She’s on the run—leaving behind her unsupportive, narcissistic ex-boyfriend and alcoholic, abusive mother—and headed for a new beginning at Tranquil Falls, a secluded artists’ colony on the grounds of a closed hotel. There, with no cell signal or internet to distract her, she hopes to rediscover her love for pottery and put the broken pieces of her life back together.

But when Sarah uncovers the body of a young woman while digging a hole for a pit kiln, things start to fall apart. Her fellow artists begin to act in troubling ways. The eccentric fiber artist knits an endless scarf. The musician plays the same carousel song over and over until his fingers bleed. The calligrapher grins with ink-stained teeth. Not to mention the haunting dreams Sarah has night after night.

When she discovers glass shards in her clay, Sarah wonders if someone is out to get her—or if she’s losing her grip on reality out here in the wilds, where the pounding of the waterfall never, ever fades. As she investigates the beautiful valley and the crumbling resort looming over them all, she unearths a chilling past that refuses to remain buried . . .

---

All in all, it was a successful first day out, but I do kind of wish I’d added one more book to my haul — Guillotine by Delilah S. Dawson. She’s one of my favourite authors after reading two other books of hers. I saw Guillotine on the shelf with the other one that I bought, and now I can’t remember why I didn’t grab it.

The title just fits the vibe lately, you know what I mean?

Thanks for reading all of my personal nonsense in this post.

Until next time book nerds…