Hello everyone!! A new month is here, and that means a new link up for the bookish link party that Lisa from Boondock Ramblings and I co-host every month!

It’s just all about books!

So, some guidelines.

1. For Bloggers, you can link unlimited posts related to books and reading. These can be posts about what you’re reading, book reviews, books you’ve added to your shelf, reading habits, what you’ve been reading, about trips to bookstore, etc. You get the drift.

2. Link to a specific blog post (URL of a specific post, not your website). Feel free to link up any older posts that may need some love and attention, too.

3. Please visit at least two other bloggers on this list and comment on their posts. Have fun! Interact! Get some book recommendations.

4. Readers can click the blue button below to visit blog posts.

5. If you add a link you are giving me permission to share and link back to your post(s).

It’s just another fun way to build our bookish community!

You can link up here!

Hello everyone! Remember the senior superlatives in school? I was never nominated for anything, but Billy was chosen twice, as Most Unique and Most Artistic. I was not surprised, he was and is both of things, unique and artistic. (and many other things as well). Anyway, I thought it would be fun to “award” superlatives to book characters for this spooky season!

Cutest Couple:

Ellis and Cooper from Falling Like Leaves. They are just adorable! And if you want a book that fully immerses you in the fall season, pick this one up.

Best Dressed:

Clio from Play Nice. She is a fashion stylist and an influencer and as she says in the book, if she says something is fashionable, then it is. She sets the trends.

Most Likely to Succeed:

Is there anyone else who wants so bad to achieve perfection as Annie? She wants to make everyone happy, solve all the problems and look good doing it. She is motivated and driven and has magic up her sleeves as well.

Best Entertainer/Class Clown:

The answer, obviously, is former theater kid Tristan, who turns his ghost tour into another way to play a roles and entertain the crowds.

Biggest Chaos Monster:

Eliza from The Late-Night Witches. She is like the younger sister who just bumbles into all the messes, but has a good heart.

Most Artistic:

Maeve from Uncharmed. I don’t want to give too much away, but she is a very talented young artistic witch!

Most School (Town) Spirit:

No one loves their town more than Sophie!

Most Responsible:

Cassie is basically a single mom of three, who also feels a maternal responsibility for her little sister Eliza (see above). She also becomes the chosen one who has to save humanity. No big deal right? Cassie has a very large sense of duty, and one could definitely rely on her to do the right thing.

Most Daring:

Evie from The Clackity. She is so brave!!

Today, let’s talk about haunted houses! I love books with ghosts or pretend ghosts or even sentient houses because of mushrooms, haunted by memories – just creepy houses. Gloomy houses. So today’s list is all about the haunted houses.

Bag of Bones || Home Before Dark || Play Nice

Mexican Gothic || A House with Good Bones || The House Next Door

The Haunting of Hill House || Rebecca || The Turn of the Screw

And finally The Shining. Not technically a haunted house, but a very haunted hotel.

Ooooo today we bring you ghosts of my TBR, books that have been on my list so long I have forgotten about them entirely….

I have gone back on Goodreads to find titles that I added between the years 2015-2020, and chosen one or two from each year. And I have made this sound way spookier than it is. But, it is Halloween week so I am going all out.

Let’s begin at 2020ish and work our way back, shall we? Follow me, and watch your step, you never know what might be lurking here.

The Cold Vanish – From Goodreads: “It’s a tricky thing to write about missing persons because the story is the absence of someone. A void. The person at the heart of the story is thinner than a smoke ring, invisible as someone else’s memory. The bones you dig up are most often metaphorical. While much of the book will embrace memory and faulty memory — history — The Cold Vanish is at its core a story of now and tomorrow. Someone will vanish in the wild tomorrow. These are the people who will go looking.”

Owls Aren’t Wise and Bats Aren’t Blind: From Goodreads: “In this fascinating book, wildlife expert and enthusiast Warner Shedd refutes popular animal myths like squirrels remembering where they bury nuts, wolves howling at the moon, and oppossums “playing dead.”

Have you ever seen a flying squirrel flapping through the air, watched a beaver carrying a load of mud on its tail, or ducked when a porcupine started throwing its quills? Probably not, says Shedd, former regional executive for the National Wildlife Federation. Offering scientific evidence that refutes many of the most tenacious and persevering folklore about wild animals,  Owls Aren’t Wise & Bats Aren’t Blind  will captivate you with fascinating facts and humorous anecdotes about more than thirty North American species– some as familiar as the common toad, and others as elusive as the lynx.” 

Anya’s Ghost: From Goodreads: Of all the things Anya expected to find at the bottom of an old well, a new friend was not one of them. Especially not a new friend who’s been dead for a century.

Falling down a well is bad enough, but Anya’s normal life might actually be worse. She’s embarrassed by her family, self-conscious about her body, and she’s pretty much given up on fitting in at school. A new friend—even a ghost—is just what she needs.”

Toil and Trouble: From Goodreads: “From good witches to bad witches, to witches who are a bit of both, this is an anthology of diverse witchy tales from a collection of diverse, feminist authors. The collective strength of women working together—magically or mundanely–has long frightened society, to the point that women’s rights are challenged, legislated against, and denied all over the world. Toil & Trouble delves deep into the truly diverse mythology of witchcraft from many cultures and feminist points of view, to create modern and unique tales of witchery that have yet to be explored.”

The Man From the Train: From Goodreads: “Riveting and immersive, with writing as sharp as the cold side of an axe, The Man from the Train paints a vivid, psychologically perceptive portrait of America at the dawn of the twentieth century, when crime was regarded as a local problem, and opportunistic private detectives exploited a dysfunctional judicial system. James shows how these cultural factors enabled such an unspeakable series of crimes to occur, and his groundbreaking approach to true crime will convince skeptics, amaze aficionados, and change the way we view criminal history.”

Daughters of the Lake: From Goodreads: “After the end of her marriage, Kate Granger has retreated to her parents’ home on Lake Superior to pull herself together—only to discover the body of a murdered woman washed into the shallows. Tucked in the folds of the woman’s curiously vintage gown is an infant, as cold and at peace as its mother. No one can identify the woman. Except for Kate. She’s seen her before. In her dreams…

One hundred years ago, a love story ended in tragedy, its mysteries left unsolved. It’s time for the lake to give up its secrets. As each mystery unravels, it pulls Kate deeper into the eddy of a haunting folktale that has been handed down in whispers over generations. Now, it’s Kate’s turn to listen.

As the drowned woman reaches out from the grave, Kate reaches back. They must come together, if only in dreams, to right the sinister wrongs of the past.”

The Magic Apple Tree: From Goodreads: “Looking out from Moon Cottage, Susan Hill records the sights and smells, the people, gardens, animals, births, festivals and deaths that mark the changing-seasons in the small Oxfordshire community.”

The House Between Tides: From Goodreads: “An atmospheric debut novel about a woman who discovers the century-old remains of a murder victim on her family’s Scottish estate, plunging her into an investigation of its mysterious former occupants.

Following the death of her last living relative, Hetty Deveraux leaves London and her strained relationship behind for Muirlan, her ancestral home in Scotland’s Outer Hebrides. She intends to renovate the ruinous house into a hotel, but the shocking discovery of human remains brings her ambitious restoration plans to an abrupt halt before they even begin. Few physical clues are left to identify the body, but one thing is certain: this person did not die a natural death.

Hungry for answers, Hetty discovers that Muirlan was once the refuge of her distant relative Theo Blake, the acclaimed painter and naturalist who brought his new bride, Beatrice, there in 1910. Yet ancient gossip and a handful of leads reveal that their marriage was far from perfect; Beatrice eventually vanished from the island, never to return, and Theo withdrew from society, his paintings becoming increasingly dark and disturbing.

What happened between them has remained a mystery, but as Hetty listens to the locals and studies the masterful paintings produced by Theo during his short-lived marriage, she uncovers secrets that still reverberate through the small island community—and will lead her to the identity of the long-hidden body.”

Poet’s Cottage: From Goodreads: “Poets had always lived there, the locals claimed. It was as if the house called to its own…

When Sadie inherits Poet’s Cottage in the Tasmanian fishing town of Pencubitt, she sets out to discover all she can about her notorious grandmother, Pearl Tatlow. Pearl was a children’s writer who scandalised 1930s Tasmania with her behaviour. She was also violently murdered in the cellar of Poet’s Cottage and her murderer never found.

Sadie grew up with a loving version of Pearl through her mother, but her aunt Thomasina tells a different story, one of a self-obsessed, abusive and licentious woman. And Pearl’s biographer, Birdie Pinkerton, has more than enough reason to discredit her.

As Sadie and her daughter Betty work to uncover the truth, strange events begin to occur in the cottage. And as the terrible secret in the cellar threads its way into the present day, it reveals a truth more shocking than the decades-long rumours.

Poet’s Cottage is a beautiful and haunting mystery of families, bohemia, truth, creativity, lies, memory and murder.“

I still don’t know if I will get to these, ever. They will continue to haunt me for years to come.

How is the state of your TBR? Any ghosts lingering from a five, ten years ago…maybe even longer?

My Sunday Post is hosted by Kimba the Caffeinated Book Reviewer

Sunday Salon is hosted by Deb at Readerbuzz

It’s Monday! What Are You Reading? is hosted by Kathryn at Book Date

Hello everyone! I hope that you are all doing well! We are finally experiencing a real Michigan fall here, with the blazing colors and cool temps, and I love it. It’s perfect weather for reading! I did get new glasses last week though, and I had ordered progressives because I was tired of taking my glasses on and off constantly (I need glasses to read) and I am having a hard time adjusting. Is this normal? I did buy a pair of $7 readers from Amazon that I wear at night when reading in bed, and I don’t need to transition or multi-task and that is helping, but I didn’t realize I could do that until near the end of the week. I had a hard time reading books with my “good” glasses and at least now I have these cheaters to help. I do really like my new glasses during the day, when I am cooking, etc because they do make my life easier that way.

Anyway, I didn’t get through the books I wanted to last week because of this adjustment period, so I am behind on my own self-imposed schedule. Lol. So this week I am reading hopefully two of these. We will see how it goes! Why did I have such an enormous spooky reading list??

I am sort of leaning towards The Bewitching and What Moves the Dead but we will see. What Moves the Dead is a retelling of The Fall of the House of Usher, and we are watching the Netflix series of Usher right now, so I sort of want to read that one. But then I am also sort of feeling the Lazy Bones Bookshop and Crazy Spooky Love. Ugh. Problems, problems. Lol.

Posted Last Week:

Top Ten Tuesday: Cozy Reads

Mini Book Reviews: The Late-Night Witches, Falling Like Leaves, Uncharmed

Comfy Cozy Cinema: Coraline

Friday Morning Coffee Catch Up

Watching:

Billy and I have been watching the Netflix series of The Fall of the House of Usher, which is fantastic but I have to cover my eyes a lot. Mark Hamill is in it, and wow, his performance is amazing. I feel like he steals the show. You wouldn’t even know it was him! It is definitely not for the faint of heart though, and is very creepy and scary. It is a modern reworking of the Edgar Allan Poe story and the writers were so clever, and I love all the little hidden Poe easter eggs. (Roderick Usher Enterprises= R.U.E., etc)

When we need something not scary, we go to an old favorite, and watch the BBC series Victorian Farm. (we watch all of them all of the time, but right now, Victorian is the one we are rewatching)

We are also watching Halloween cartoons and movies with Wyatt, like Charlie Brown Halloween, and Coraline. I think tonight we will watch Hotel Transylvania, which is so cute, or Casper. It’s going to be a tough choice!

Lisa and I watched Coraline for our Comfy Cozy (creepy) Cinema last week, and this week we are going big with The Mummy, starring Brendan Fraser and Rachel Weisz. Then we settle back down into cozy.

Other Internet Happenings:

Lisa and I have also paused Crafternoons for the holidays, and will be resuming in January. We will start our Comfy Cozy Christmas in December, so stay tuned for that.

And that is it from me today! I hope that whatever you do today, you do something that makes you smile!