Hearth & Horizon

So, let's begin the inaugural Monthly Reading Wrap Up for July 2026! Better late than never! I'm a data nerd so let's go over the stats real quick. So, I read 4 books and a total of 1,491 pages. The average length was 373 pages and it took me an average of 11 days to finish a book. There were 3 e-books and 1 paperback. All of the e-books were library loans.  July was a slow month in my reading with my Kindle being MIA. I know it's in a box, somewhere, in our house. It'll get unpacked eventually. So, I've been roughing it with the Kindle iOS app and Libby iOS app. I didn't realize how much of a difference it was until I found myself getting distracted every other chapter with notifications. My July reads were: The Witches of El Paso by Luis Jaramillo Ward D by Frieda McFadden Pachinko by Min Jin Lee None of This is True by Lisa Jewell I kicked off July with The Witches of El Paso as a random TBR selection and it was such a good choice. It has magical realism,...

What does that even mean?   I, for one, do not know. It's such a subjective designation. However, if I polled 100 people, I'd bet that there would be some common threads. Perhaps it is someone that reads a lot of books. Okay, but what if they're all middling quality or all in the same genre?  Perhaps it is someone who has read all of the classics. What classics? Contemporary classics, historical classics? Fine, now we have to decide what makes a piece of literature worthy of being deemed a classic. Do we weigh the worth based on how well written it is, on how influential it was on literature or on the world, or something else entirely? While I was pondering what makes a "good" tarot reader and whether I counted as a reader or not, my mind wandered to other things that I'm considered "good" at to compare. Reading easily came to mind. I've been a voracious reader since I was a child; I recall several instances as a child where I had read everything...