2026 Midyear Reading Wrap Up | Best, Worst & Biggest Surprises

And they were so clever, so smart, so kind, so funny, so witty. There was a lot of dark humor, but it was so memorable.

It was fascinating, frustrating, and honestly a bit heartbreaking at times. I mean, I think we all know that social media can be extremely detrimental for mental health, especially for children who are going through the self-development process, but seeing this and how calculated it was, it's so scary.

Sorry if that's incorrect, but it's by Barbara Kingsolver, and she wrote my favorite book of all time, which is Demon Copperhead.

Oh my god, if you don't know, this is like jumping back into the world of Divergent, and that book series was such a pivotal part of my reading career as a child. Like that book alone, that book series alone, the movie alone got me into reading.

That book was so good. I highly recommend the audiobook if you haven't read that yet. It's just so informative.

And it's interesting because the plot itself is pretty quiet and yet from the very first page I was completely consumed by this book. I could not put it down.

And this one was unbelievable. Yes, again, the romance was good, but when Kennedy Ryan writes, she ain't really talking about the romance for real. Yes, she's talking about it, but she's really talking about something else.

I'm really enjoying it so much and I'm surprised by how much I'm loving it, but it feels light and fluffy and heartwarming, but also has a layer of depth to it, too. And I'm just I'm eating it up.

And for me, someone on a self-love journey themselves, I felt so seen by her, especially because again she was a content creator, but like just her life story and her arc, her story arc was just so beautiful for me, and I really felt seen in that book. And I just was so happy for her by the end of it.

If I'm looking back, the thing that really got me is that these people were awful, and not even like a fun awful like you love to hate them. They were just insufferable for insufferable sake, and I kept trying to get into the story, kept trying to understand their dynamic, but the more I read it, the more frustrated I got.