Welcome to the Holiday Book Bingo Challenge portion of the 2025 Ho-Ho-Ho Readathon, hosted by Caffeinated Reviewer! The sign-up page for the #2025HoHoHoRAT can be found here – and you’ll definitely want to find it so you can participate in ALL of the Elves’ Challenges. The challenge here at Reading Reality is a Book Bingo. Complete one BINGO! (row, column, diagonal or four-corners) to be entered into my $15 Amazon Gift Card giveaway (International winners can receive either an equivalent gift card from their local Amazon or a book from Better World Books).

My Review: Time travel is a fun idea to play with - which is why there are so many stories about it. Well, the stories aren’t really about the time travel, per se, because that's usually just a lot of handwavium. Where the stories come in - and often go out - is about what people DO with the time travel.

My Review: There are towns named Climax in Georgia, Kansas, Kentucky, Michigan, Minnesota, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, Texas and Virginia, and those are just the ones that are officially incorporated. There are towns named Intercourse in Alabama and Pennsylvania. Why couldn’t there be a town named Harlot’s Bay in Maryland? Why shouldn’t there be come to that? And why shouldn’t the town lean ALL THE WAY into their name?

This was a TERRIFIC reading week - even though it was very little like the reading week I expected. C'est la reading vie. In upcoming big news, the 2025 Ho-Ho-Ho Readathon begins Wednesday. I'm already putting the final touches on the 'Holiday Book Bingo Board' I'm posting this year. But that's not UNTIL Wednesday, so there's still plenty of time for participants to sign up over at Caffeinated Reviewer…

A couple of these covers transcend merely pretty into absolutely beautiful. I'm thinking of The Astral Library and The Vanishing Cherry Blossom Bookshop and realizing that at least part of the reason I think they're pretty because they feature books so prominently, in one way or another. I guess you can take the woman out of the library but not the librarian out of the woman - or something like that.

My Review: Annie Gore has been a lot of things in her life, a private investigator, an Air Force special operations investigator, a muscle car mechanic, a poverty draftee into the military - and a child of the Appalachian hollers who is still running from a past she can’t forget. Max Andrews needs all of those things, but it’s the last who pushes Annie to return to a place much too much like the one she fled, investigating people who could all too easily have been her own neighbors, just like the ones who looked on and kept to themselves as her dad regularly beat on her mother.

My Review: I picked this up, and started it in audio, because I adored the author’s two books featuring the Morisaki Bookshop (Days at the Morisaki Bookshop and More Days at the Morisaki Bookshop) and was looking forward to more of the same. But the Morisaki Bookshop turned out to have some secret sauce that the Torunka Café, at least so far, doesn’t have.

My Review: Violet Thistlewaite is not a villain anymore, but there’s something inside her that still wants to be one. Or that just finds villainy easier. Or at least finds doing evil things with her prodigious magical power easier. Whichever it is, Violet is all in on being ‘good’. The village of Dragon’s Rest has earned every drop of good that Violet can muster.

Marlene's Review: There's power in stories, though. That's all history is: the best tales. The ones that last. Might as well be mine. - Varric Tethras in Dragon Age: Inquisition I’ve always loved this quote because it manages to combine how I feel about games, how I feel about their characters, what makes some games live in my imagination and even my heart for decades while and even after playing them - along with the reason I’m playing in the first place.

My Review: I fell in love with this series with the very first book, The Kamogawa Food Detectives, and now I’m utterly hooked on both the series AND the reading niche it occupies. By that, I mean the genre that was popularized by Before the Coffee Gets Cold of loosely connected slice-of-life stories centered around a cozy location that use that location and its function as a framing device to tell slightly bittersweet, often sadly fluffy stories with or without a hint of magic or magical realism.

Galen was away this past week, which makes this picture particularly unusual. Hecate and Luna don't like each other all that much, and are seldom in even this close a proximity. Nevertheless even enemies must band together when there are not enough humans around to serve everyone's needs! Now that Galen is home, of course, they are remaining as far from each other as possible.

This stack has a whole lot more pretty than it does "pretty weird", not that there's not a bit of that mixed in as well. (I'm looking at you, Monster in the Moonlight and Sister Svangerd and the Not Quite Dead - which I also picked up for the title.) The pretties in this stack look like The Elsewhere Express…

My Review: Lukan Gardova has a knack for getting himself into trouble - and an even bigger, or perhaps that’s more frequently necessary - knack for getting himself out of the trouble that he’s gotten himself into. While underneath a facade of gallows’ humor, crackling cynicism and behind a tongue that isn’t half as silver as he thinks it is, there’s a man with a cracked heart of gold wrapped in more marshmallow than he’d willingly admit, even to himself.

My Review: This story was a fascinating choice for the next story in the long-running Penric and Desdemona series because it takes place, not after the previous book, The Adventure of the Demonic Ox, but before it. Way before it, in fact. So far before it that most of the characters in Ox aren’t even on Penric’s horizon in…

My Review: Brigands & Breadknives brings the story that began in Legends & Lattes into a delightfully full circle that ties the events of Bookshops & Bonedust up into the story with a great big beautiful bow. Legends & Lattes kicked off the whole cozy fantasy trend with its story of Viv, the orc who opened a coffee shop in off-the-beaten-path Thune, fell in love with Tandri the succubus, and they, with the magically delicious help of Thimble the rattkin baker and the whole, entire town of Thune, settled into their happy ever after with a whole lot of help from the friends they made along the way.

Not all who serve are at the point of the spear, contrary to what the current Defense Secretary is trying to do. In fact, modern warfare simply is not possible without the nurse and the truck drivers and medics and other support soldiers. So far this year, some stories from the shaft of the spear this year. From an interview…

Welcome To The $100 Amazon eGift Card or PayPal Cash Giveaway! Giveaway: 1 lucky winner a $100 Amazon eGift Card or PayPal Cash. The event is running from November 8th to December 31st. Giveaway open Worldwide everywhere PayPal is negotiable & age 18+. GIVEAWAY DETAILS Prize: $100 Amazon eGift Card or PayPal Cash One Lucky Winner Will Receive choice of: …

Clearly, this was a week where I was spoiled for choice when it came to selecting the Book of the Week! All of this week's books turned out to be fan-damn-tastic. I just LOVE it when a plan comes together! Speaking of plans, the Thanksgiving, Black Friday & Holiday Giveaway Event! officially started YESTERDAY at Versatileer. I'll be posting Reading Reality's participation TOMORROW.

There are certainly some pretty covers in this stack, but that's not the important bit this time around. Instead, this is a stack of books that I'm just plain looking forward to reading, to the point where a whole bunch of these are going straight into my "Most Anticipated" post for 2026. There are lots of books that are next in series in series that I just can't wait to read.

My Review: As much as I've loved this author’s fantasy series, the sprawling and awesome Deverry Cycle, I couldn’t have stopped myself from diving into Haze if I tried. Her fantasies are so good that I couldn’t resist the impulse to see if her science fiction would be just as addictive. Which is an appropriate turn of phrase with which to open a review of…

My Review: “The humans fear what they do not understand,” a truism from a book I read a very long time ago. Which does not make the statement any less true, or any less applicable to the Isle of Wyrd or this story. The title of this first entry in the Isle of Wyrd series is the point where the above comment connects with this particular story, because the Isle is all about fate and change and human attempts to fight or flee one or the other.

My Review: This book begins in the exact same place where the previous book, The Grey Wolf, ends. With the same characters, even with the same sentence, at the moment in time where the situation changes irrevocably. The moment, as artist Clara Morrow's current series of paintings is currently stuck on, the moment just before something happened. It begins in the village of Three Pines, in the Gamache living room, where the Sûreté du Québec’s Homicide Chief, Armand Gamache, is recovering from his barely averted execution at what should have been the successful conclusion of his latest investigation.

The U.S. arguably has too many elections for the electorate as a whole to handle — see this The Atlantic article by Jerusalem Demsas — but any proposal to change that would of course take time to implement. Actions like having House members serve for four years rather than two would require a constitutional amendment, while others like getting rid of judicial retention elections or not making the county coroner be an elected position would take time and could have unexpected consequences.

My Review: I didn’t know what I was getting into with this book. I’ll confess that I picked it up because it was short and fantastical and that was exactly what I was in the mood for. It turned out to be fantastic and beautiful in ways that I was not expecting it all. But was so very happy to read.

Did you remember to set your clocks back last night? Or this morning? AND, did you curse the ancestry of everyone involved with the manufacture of any clocks that you still have to remember to change? We don't have a lot left, just the microwave, one last actual windup clock, and the cars. I hate changing the clock in the car, because I never think of it before I get on the road, then I check the time but can't fix it until I reach my destination.