Amelia Hruby: 00:01

Hello, and welcome to pleasure reading. I'm your host, Amelia Ruby, and this is a podcast about the pleasure of reading, where I share curated reading lists, author rankings, chats with my bookish friends, and more. If you too take pleasure in reading, I hope that you will subscribe and share the show with a friend. Cheers to your next best book. Hello, and welcome to Pleasure Reading.

Amelia Hruby: 00:30

I'm your host, Amelia Ruby. And on this show, I share curated book lists, themed TBRs, and occasionally chats with my bookish friends. I love making my curated episodes. I love reading on a theme and thinking about how books go together. But I also love mood reading or just sort of going with the flow and the vibe of whatever strikes me on a particular day that I wanna read, picking up a book and enjoying it for the sake of no theme at all, no content, just my own pleasure.

Amelia Hruby: 01:05

So at the beginning of this year, I did an episode recapping all the books I read in the first month of the year, and I heard from a few of you that you really liked it. So I'm bringing it back. And in this episode, I will be giving you reviews of all 28 books that I read in February and March 2025. Now some of these books I did do episodes about, so I will not belabor them if I have already talked about them elsewhere. But I will do a quick recap and kinda love it, hate it, recommend it, don't recommend it, review for each book.

Amelia Hruby: 01:40

And as always, they are all linked in the show notes. If you would like to get your own copy and if you make a purchase through my bookshop link, I will receive a small affiliate payment that I take as a tip for the book recommendation. Okay. I think I've told you enough about what we're gonna do. Let's just talk about these books, shall we?

Amelia Hruby: 02:03

The first six books that I read in February 2025 were all for my episode on dark academia, the You standalone edition. So all six of these books are dark academia related, and they are all You standalones. So let me tell you about each of them very quickly, and then I'll tell you which were my faves. The first book I read was Their Vicious Games by Joelle Wellington. This is a book about a young woman who has just graduated high school, and she had been accepted to, I believe it was Yale, but her acceptance was rescinded because of something that happened in the final weeks or months of school.

Amelia Hruby: 02:45

So she's graduated from a very prestigious school with no plans for the future. There is this competition that happens at the end of every school year hosted by this super rich family, and if you win the competition, you can basically have whatever you want from them. I mean, maybe not whatever you want, but, like, they will essentially make any connection that you could want that will set you up in your university and your career and beyond. So she is entering the competition, and that is essentially what the focus of the book is about. I really enjoyed this, and it definitely has a slasher final girl sort of vibe.

Amelia Hruby: 03:27

So I highly recommend Their Vicious Games by Joelle Wellington. Next, I read Where Sleeping Girls Lie by Farida Abike Iyemide. And this was another dark academia. We have our main character who goes to a boarding school, and she meets her new roommate the day she gets there, and kind of goes on a tour around campus with her and one of her other friends, and then goes to sleep that night and wakes up the next morning, and her roommate has disappeared. And the whole book unfolds from there.

Amelia Hruby: 03:58

Another great read. I also read Ace of Spades by this author, and that was probably slightly my favorite over Where Sleeping Girls Lie. So I'll tell you about that one next. Ace of Spades is about this school called Niveus High. It is a super rich private academy, and there's this, like, anonymous texter, like, gossip girl style who's called Aces, who is spreading rumors and, like, revealing secrets about two of the very few black students at Niveus.

Amelia Hruby: 04:31

We have Shiamaka, who is from a upper class background with Nigerian parents, and we have Devin who comes from what this book makes very clear as a sort of like low income, dangerous area. And they are not friends, but they have to become friends, sort of bridge this class divide, their sort of social status divide to figure out what is going on here. This is definitely dark academia about institutionalized racism, and I really, really liked it. The other two dark academia books that I read were The Mary Shelley Club by Goldie Muldowski, which is a dark academia book set in New York City, and this one is for all of my horror fans out there. It's about this group of teenagers who are obsessed with horror movies and kind of pull pranks on their peers to try to make other people really scared, and a whole lot of messed up stuff happens from there.

Amelia Hruby: 05:25

And then the last dark academia book that I read this month or for that episode was A Lesson in Vengeance by Victoria Lee, and this is a gothic, dark academia. Our main character is returning to a boarding school where she had previously gone, but the year before her friend slash girlfriend, which not everybody knows about, but we learn pretty early in the book, died. And she left school after her girlfriend died, and then has now returned the next year to finish her studies. When she gets back, she lives in this house that seems to, I think, have only five other girls in it, and her friend's spot has been replaced by this, like, very famous young writer who has, like, won a Pulitzer when she's 17 or, like, something nonsensical like that. And together, they start to dive into the background of the school and its history of witchcraft, and things unravel from there.

Amelia Hruby: 06:21

So definitely the most gothic of the settings, and definitely perhaps the most, like, straight up witchcraft of any of these books, if you're looking for that in your dark academia. And I'm realizing now, there's actually one more dark academia that I read this start February, which was How We Fall Apart by Katie Zhao. This was also set, I believe, in a New York City private school and also begins with the death of a young woman. So we have this group of friends, and one of them has died at the start of the book. And we're unraveling, like, what has happened and who killed her.

Amelia Hruby: 06:54

And all of these friends have secrets, and they are brought to light kind of one at a time by another sort of, like, mysterious force called the Proctor. And I thought this was pretty dark, but I did enjoy it. Thought it was really well done. Again, if you like You dark academia. Okay.

Amelia Hruby: 07:12

Enough about You dark academia. After that, I was like, I need to not read dark academia for a while. So I listened to a really fun audiobook called Know Your Newlywed by Elena Armas. This is essentially a novella that features Cleo and Javi, and they are like super fans of a beloved dating show that in their universe is called Know Your Newlywed. And they meet on Tinder, I believe, or like a dating app when Cleo is in Chicago where Javi lives.

Amelia Hruby: 07:48

And she's just traveling through. She makes that very clear, but they start to chat about how they love this show, and then they see that the show is, like, doing a reboot. And Cleo goes back to where she lives in Boston, but they keep texting, and they basically decide to, like, pretend to be newlyweds so they can go on the show. It's very cute. It's a little corny, but I really like a super short romance audiobook, and it definitely meets that mark if that's something you're interested in.

Amelia Hruby: 08:16

After that, I read a romance that was similarly cute, flirty, fun, maybe not the most, like, deep book you're ever gonna read, but a good time. And that was Just My Type by Fallon Ballard. This is basically like how to lose a guy in ten days, the book version was my take on it. Our main characters are Lana and Seth. And Lana is like a serial monogamist who's been in a ton of different relationships, and she's just kind of gotten broken up with, and she's single again.

Amelia Hruby: 08:48

And her editor at the magazine she works at is basically like, you need to be single. You're 30. You need to find yourself. I'm gonna assign you like a whole column editorial beat on this. At the same time, her high school boyfriend who has become, like, a really prestige journalist comes to work at the magazine, and he is known for being kind of a playboy.

Amelia Hruby: 09:10

So he has a separate column that's all about how to find someone to be with, like to settle down. So they're kind of on these, like, warring paths, and the idea is that whoever's column gets the most views or clicks or something is gonna get this fancy job at the LA Times. Like, this is all ridiculous. We know this does not happen in real life. But if you like How to Lose a Guy in Ten Days, you'll probably like this book.

Amelia Hruby: 09:30

It felt very similar to me. I enjoyed it. I had a good time. After that, I read a series that I cannot believe I'm gonna admit to having read in public. But that was Priest by Sierra Simone.

Amelia Hruby: 09:44

And I read all three books. Priest, sinner, and saint. This is essentially an erotic romance, where a priest falls in love with someone. And in the second book, we have like a nun who falls in love with someone, and there's like another book with a monk who falls in love with someone, I think is the third one. Different people are related, none of the ones who are falling in love, but regardless.

Amelia Hruby: 10:06

If you have a lot of like weird, repressed relationship things to your Catholic upbringing, like myself, you might enjoy this. If you thought that the hot priest arc on Fleabag was the best thing that's ever been on television, you might enjoy this. And I will say it had a much more of a dose of Catholic theology than I expected. Like, it definitely took itself more seriously than just a sort of like Kindle Unlimited smut sort of book, and I appreciated that. Made me feel like I was doing something smart while I was reading my smut, which I liked.

Amelia Hruby: 10:37

But if that's not your thing, this might not be for you. I don't know. I don't have much else to say except I did read this series by Sierra Simone. And after I read it, I realized that she was also one of the co writers on the Jingle Bell Mingle book and that series that I had read last year and really liked. So, you know, I guess I just like her work, whatever it's about.

Amelia Hruby: 10:56

Up next, I read a horror novella called We All Rot Eventually by Mia Ballard. This was my foray back into extreme horror a bit. It really wasn't that extreme though, so I felt like it was the right balance for me. You may remember from my January episode that I read a couple extreme horror novellas, and I did not like them. And I was like, this is not for me.

Amelia Hruby: 11:15

But I wanted to try it again largely because the cover of this book literally has sparkly star stickers on it, and I was like, I could probably handle this. And, I mean, it also has a blood spatter on it, but that's neither here nor there. So We All Wrought Eventually is set in 02/2005, and Alexa Valentine has moved to Los Angeles to be an actress. But the things that she has traded to be a successful actress come back to haunt her, And we have this story about kind of like what people give up for fame, and what how much blood is required for glory. So this was really fun if you're into horror, and it's super short and moves fast, which I appreciated.

Amelia Hruby: 12:01

So that is We All Wrap Eventually by Mia Ballard. After that, I listened to Elegy for the Undead by Matthew Veselie. This was a really beautiful queer romance set in a sort of zombie apocalypse pandemic setting. So it is sort of a horror book. They talk about, like, this sort of outbreak that turns people into zombies, and I think it happens in Philadelphia, and then it's contained.

Amelia Hruby: 12:31

And the story is told through this, like, queer couple or gay couple, and one of them is bitten during the outbreak, and the other is not. And so the one who's bitten has to go to this, like, rehab center, and the one who was not and is still healthy or fully human, like, goes to visit, and they kind of tell the story of their relationship, like, looking back into how they met and fell in love mixed into the present day timeline where one of them is, you know, essentially dying in this really horrible way. So Elegy for the Undead is a really beautiful book, a very unique take on this zombie genre, and I definitely highly recommend it if those are things you like. And apparently, I needed another horror audiobook after that, so I listened to Goddess of Filth by V Castro. This accompanied me while I was cleaning my entire house one weekend, and I was a huge fan of it.

Amelia Hruby: 13:24

So it is described as a sort of like Chicana the craft, which I found to be very accurate and really enjoyed. So on the sort of summer night, I think after most of these girls' senior year of high school, we meet Lourdes, Fernanda, Anna, Perla, and Pauline, and they have this seance. And it's meant to kinda be a joke, but they accidentally awaken this Aztec ancestor of theirs. And she possesses one of the girls. She possesses Fernanda, who becomes, like, totally unrecognizable to most of her friends and family.

Amelia Hruby: 14:06

And then her family tries to have her exercised, and her friends have to go, like, seek out other experts and get help for her. And a lot of things happen along the way. And I just thought it was so well told, and it really moved at a great pace, and you really got a sense of these girls and their friendship, and how this possession happens, and and what it's about. And it's really a feminist horror for sure, which I also, of course, appreciated being who I am. So that is Goddess of Filth by V Castro, and I highly recommend it if you're into feminist horror.

Amelia Hruby: 14:41

After that, I read a thriller called The Inheritance by Tricia Sakhleka or Sakhleisha. I'm not quite sure how to pronounce it. This was a really fun read, I think, for fans of, like, The Guest List by Lucy Foley. In this story, we meet, like, this family from India, and they have traveled to this island off the coast of Scotland to visit essentially their daughter who's like building this giant retreat there. But the reason all the different siblings and family members are gathering there is because their father is supposed to sell off his company, which has like made the family all of its money, and they need to meet there to talk about how much money everybody's gonna get, essentially.

Amelia Hruby: 15:26

Like, how is this gonna be divided up among the trust, and what will be inherited between them? And I guess the father has always kind of said, like, we're not doing this evenly. You have to earn your peace. And so it's created this pretty, like, divisive relationship between the siblings, and sort of pitted the kids against the parents. And believe it or not, that doesn't go well.

Amelia Hruby: 15:48

And everything unravels over the course of their stay this one weekend on the island. So I thought this was really well done. Really enjoyed it. Didn't guess the ending. If you're like a Lucy Foley fan, I think you will really like the inheritance.

Amelia Hruby: 16:02

Following that, I read books for my indie sleaze episode. So I read Lo Fi by Liz Riggs and Deep Cuts by Holly Brickley. Lo Fi is the story of Al, who is this young woman who's just moved to Nashville after college. She gets a job working at a music venue, and we kind of see this series of relationships that she has with different men in the music scene as she tries to become a musician herself. This book was super nostalgic for me because it happened kind of in the South in a music scene very similar to the one that I knew and loved in college, and I adored it.

Amelia Hruby: 16:37

I don't think it's for everyone, but it was so for me. And then Deep Cuts tells a similar but different story set between like the West Coast, Berkeley, San Francisco, and the East Coast, like New York, and even Miami. It's about the relationship between Percy, who is a music critic and writer, and a guy whose name I don't remember, but is something like Joe, who's a musician. And they meet and write songs together in college, and then he goes off and becomes much more famous and doesn't give her credit for the songwriting. And she gets a job as, like, a trend spotter and a music writer, and, like, they sort of stay friends, and then their friendship falls apart, and they come back together.

Amelia Hruby: 17:18

And I think deep cuts is mostly a romance, and I really liked it. So if you are into either of those books, can listen to my Endislays episode to hear a lot more about them. Okay. The rest of the books on this list, I did not make content about. So we're gonna talk about them here.

Amelia Hruby: 17:33

Next up was Perfume and Pain by Anna Dorn. I think that reading We All Wrought Eventually kind of gave me this desire for some more, like, millennial LA cool girl fiction, which is how I would describe this book. So Perfume in Pain is about Astrid Dahl, who's a writer who lives in LA. She is the cofounder of this writer's group called Sapphic Scribes, and she's kind of just been canceled for saying some, like, not so correct or kind things at a panel that she was doing, and she's trying to write her next book. As she does that, she has a few relationships that distract her from that path, and she has some substance issues that distract her from that path, and she's like really trying to get her career together, really getting in her own way in the process.

Amelia Hruby: 18:28

And along the way of watching her journey, we like get to learn a lot about like nineteen fifties lesbian pulp fiction and the queer scene in LA, and I just thought this was a really good time. So if you like the sound of any of that, I highly recommend Perfume and Pain by Anna Dorn. And if you like this book, Anna Dorne's actually kind of written a whole universe of many different books that go together. So she's also written Vega Blonde and Exiled, and then there's a book that Astrid writes inside of Perfume and Pain that actually, like, was written and published under this pen name Astrid Doll. Like, Anna Doran wrote it, which I thought was super cool.

Amelia Hruby: 19:07

So there's a lot of world building around this if you dip your toe in and you like it. Up next, I read Back After This by Linda Holmes. This was a super cute podcaster romance, which is like becoming a subgenre of romances, which I find very cute and kind of silly. At the start of the book, we meet Cecily, who seems to be pretty bad at relationships. She works for this up and coming or kind of about to sell actually podcast studio.

Amelia Hruby: 19:37

And she's like their main producer, and her boss calls her into his office and is like, we're doing this dating show, it's gonna be hosted by this influencer. And I want you to be kind of the subject of the show. Because the influencer is trying to become a relationship coach, and she's gonna fix you up and then set you up on all of these dates. And you're gonna go on the dates and meet somebody and maybe fall in love and have a relationship, etcetera, etcetera. So this is kind of Cecily's worst nightmare, but she does it anyway, kind of for some, like, office politics reasons.

Amelia Hruby: 20:08

And along the way, she meets a guy, kinda not through that, whatever. You'll find that pretty early on as well. And it was a fun romance. I don't know. Not groundbreaking to me, but I had a good time, especially as a podcaster myself.

Amelia Hruby: 20:21

While I was reading back after this, I was also listening to this book called Must Love Silence by Lucy Bexley. And I laugh because Back After This is a romance about a podcaster, and Must Love Silence is a romance about an audiobook narrator. So even when I'm mood reading, I'm kind of reading on theme. I just, like, cannot help myself, but, like, draw the connections between things. So in must love silence, Reese Walker is an audiobook narrator who records these books from her home in Chicago.

Amelia Hruby: 20:53

Like, she never leaves her apartment. She has this really annoying neighbor. She has an agent who, like, kinda sends her work and whatever. That's her whole life. And then one day, she gets this bill from her sister's rehab place, and she's like, I need money.

Amelia Hruby: 21:08

Like like and she needs to make some quick cash to pay it. So she's convinced by her agent who's also a friend to fly to New York to audition for a new narration job with the author of the book, and the author's name is Arden Abbott. So Rhys and Arden kind of hit it off as you might expect, and the romance unfolds with some, like, mishaps and things along the way. I thought this was super charming, and it did pair very well with my other reading. So I do highly recommend must love silence by Lucy Bexley.

Amelia Hruby: 21:44

Also, I don't think I said it's a queer romance, but it is a queer romance, just to be clear. After that, I read The Center by Ayesha Manazir Siddiqui. This was recommended to me by my friend, Lillian, a while ago. I think it came out in, like, 2023, and it has a really cool premise. The main character of this book is a translator, and she typically translates Bollywood movies into English.

Amelia Hruby: 22:13

But she dreams of translating, like, quote, unquote, great works from other languages and being like a polyglot and multilingual and winning awards for her translations. And she meets this guy named Adam, and she meets him because she's very impressed with his language skills. And they date for a while, and he is going to go meet her family. So he seemingly leaves for like a week and learns Urdu overnight to go meet her family. And Anisa, I don't know if I said her name yet, but Anisa is our main character.

Amelia Hruby: 22:45

She is very skeptical about how this happened. She is like, you must have been lying to me. Like, there is no way you just learned this language in like a week. That's not possible. So as their relationship continues, this becomes like a sticking point, and eventually he tells her that he goes to this place called the center to learn languages, and they promise complete fluency in ten days.

Amelia Hruby: 23:07

So that's like the premise of the book. I don't wanna tell you how the fluency happens or much more about it, because unraveling that is a really, like, interesting part of the plot. But I found this book fascinating. I thought the characters were well fleshed out. I would have loved to see a little more of their, like, emotional journey in addition to, like, the events of the book, but that's kind of neither here nor there because what happens is pretty intense and interesting.

Amelia Hruby: 23:32

I would say that if you like Agostina Bastrika's work, you will like this book, and that's probably enough said. That was The Center by Ayesha Manazir Siddiqui. After that, I read Goddess Complex by Sanjana Satyan, and this is brand new. I think it just came out in February or March of twenty twenty five. And in the book, we meet Sanjana who is living in New York.

Amelia Hruby: 23:58

She left her husband who is a struggling actor named Killian in India. They had gone there together. She left him there and moved back to New York, and is trying to kinda, like, figure out her life and finish her dissertation and think through what comes next. But to do that, she needs to get divorced, and she can't find her ex husband. I mean, I guess he's not even her ex yet.

Amelia Hruby: 24:21

He's just still her husband. But she starts to notice that, like, she starts getting these weird phone calls, and she starts seeing these pictures on Instagram of him with someone who looks a lot like her, but, like, is not her. And so from that point, like, the book kind of has two parts. We have the first part where we get a really clear sense of, like, Sanjana's sort of stuckness in her life in New York and, like, how she can't quite come face to face with what she wants for herself. And then in the second book, we really kinda start to explore the, like, doubling that can happen between, like, a life we could have had and the life that we do have.

Amelia Hruby: 24:56

And it sort of shifts tone to me from just more like literary fiction to more like psychological thriller. Definitely has a sort of like feminist satirical tone at times as well. It was a really interesting book. I don't know if it all came together for me, but I do still think about it. So for that reason, I would definitely recommend Goddess Complex by Sanjana Satya.

Amelia Hruby: 25:16

And then I ended March with, like, a really eclectic grab bag of reads, including my first three nonfiction books of the year, which was kind of wild. So in late March, I flew to see my friend Nicole in Arizona, and I wanted, like, a mass market easy breezy paperback to read on the plane. And so I reread one of my favorite, like, guilty pleasure series or the first book of that series, which is called the fever series by Karen Marie Moaning. And the first book is called dark fever. Now guilty pleasures are not really a thing.

Amelia Hruby: 25:48

Right? Like, I'm not here to say any pleasure should make us feel guilty. But this is a book that, like, is unrecommendable. And I love it so much. I can't really describe even why I like it so much.

Amelia Hruby: 26:02

Essentially, it's a book about this girl named Mac whose sister has gone to study abroad in Ireland and goes missing. And then Mac goes to Ireland to try to figure out what happened to her. And we learn pretty quickly that, like, she died. And Mac, like, discovers that there is, a whole Ireland that she cannot see with Fae and all of these creatures, and then eventually there's like romance and all these other things that happen. The series has like 13 books in it.

Amelia Hruby: 26:31

I read all of them a couple years ago, and I've really been craving revisiting them. And I reread the first one, which prompted me to then buy copies of the whole rest of the series. So I did like a huge used book search for these. They all got shipped to my house separately, which was really funny. And I guess I'm reading the series again.

Amelia Hruby: 26:46

But in March, I did read the first one, Dark Fever by Karen Marie Moaning. I love it. I don't recommend it. But if you're into mass market fairy romance, if you've read ACOTAR and Iron Flame and all of that, and you want to, like, read that but written twenty years ago, this is your answer. So dark fever is what I read on the plane ride out to Arizona, and then on my way back, I listened to a new thriller called Everybody Is a Liar by Liv Constantine.

Amelia Hruby: 27:16

This was twisty. It was fun. It is very short. I think it's a four hour audiobook, which definitely makes it a novella about this woman, Julie Buckley, who is a mystery writer, and she thinks her husband is cheating on her. So she, like, is talking about this with her best friend, and her best friend is like, you should go to couples therapy.

Amelia Hruby: 27:34

So Julie and her husband Oliver go to couples therapy, and they're talking to their therapist about this. And then eventually, somebody turns up dead, and the therapist is like, I know too many of the people involved in this. I think I can figure out what's going on. And shocker, she does. But we figure it out with her, which is what makes a thriller fun.

Amelia Hruby: 27:55

And then as I said, I finished March with my first three nonfiction reads of the year. I read Fat Girls Hiking by Summer Michelle Skog. I've had this on my Kindle forever, and I finally read it because I was going to see my friend Nicole in Arizona because she was going on a big hike, and I was realizing that, like, I just kinda didn't think hiking was for me because I am a fat woman, and it just feels kind of inaccessible in certain ways. But Nicole is really encouraging me to, like, figure out if I actually wanted to do this. And I remembered I had this book, and I read it, and it was, like, really inspiring, and I loved it so much.

Amelia Hruby: 28:33

So if you're interested, it's called Fat Girls Hiking. The author is the founder of an organization called Fat Girls Hiking that has community groups all over the country. And in the book, there are actually, like, a lot of different people who share their story. So I really appreciate it. Like, this isn't really a memoir.

Amelia Hruby: 28:50

It's more of a guidebook, and it includes stories from members with all sorts of different backgrounds who have all sorts of different outdoors experience. So very, very cool book. After that, I read Careless People by Sarah Wynn Williams. This is the Facebook memoir that cannot be promoted because there's a gag order on the author. Essentially, she was like the head of public policy at Facebook for the first decade or so of the company, and she has some stories to tell.

Amelia Hruby: 29:23

Let me tell you. This book is a really good time if you like to see Mark Zuckerberg have a really bad time. Or if you do not like Sheryl Sandberg and Lean In, you will probably like this book. I am not sure I've ever read something where I felt so much like Schadenfreude ever before. But this is like a reality TV sort of memoir, frankly, about just like how Facebook has destroyed democracy across the world.

Amelia Hruby: 29:52

So unfortunately, the enjoyment of the drama is dampened by how messed up all this stuff that they've done is and how much power these people have. But even for someone like myself who has spent the last three years making a podcast about all the problems with social media, this still opened my eyes even further to more of the problems. And I appreciated that it wasn't like a dense textbook sort of thing I had to read to figure that out, but I got to read that through a sort of first person narrative, which felt a little bit refreshing even if the content was the opposite. And then my last book of March, the most recent thing that I have read is seven brief lessons on physics by Carlo Rovelli. So this book came out ten years ago.

Amelia Hruby: 30:35

And I picked it up at my local library a few days ago as I'm recording this because I was honestly just like wandering the aisles, seeing what spoke to me, and I saw this little book. It's so tiny. It's less than a hundred pages long. And I was like, I don't know. It felt like the time to read it.

Amelia Hruby: 30:53

So I read it. I've been doing a bit of writing on quantum time recently because I'm working on my own book about social media, and I'm thinking about time and the attention economy. And I thought that there might be some lessons on physics in this book for me, and I as I'm thinking about time. And honestly, there were, like, so many sections that I just felt really beautifully described. These, like, very complex theories of physics in really beautiful, poetic terms.

Amelia Hruby: 31:22

And in one of the chapters, the author is describing, like, what you get if you understand this theory in physics. And to me, it just felt like what I got when I read the whole book. And so I wanted to read you this quotation from the book, and it feels like a beautiful place to end this episode. So quoting the author here, the reward is sheer beauty and new eyes with which to see the world. Like, sheer beauty and new eyes with which to see the world.

Amelia Hruby: 31:53

That is what I want from every book that I deeply love. I mean, I like pleasure and enjoyment, all sorts of things. But, like, when something hits me in that place, the place of sheer beauty and giving me new eyes with which to see the world, like, is a book that I'll never forget. And I've read many of them in my life, and I love reading more of them here on this podcast with all of you. So thank you for tuning in to this episode of pleasure reading of all the books that I have read in February and March 2025.

Amelia Hruby: 32:22

If you did enjoy this episode, I would truly appreciate if you could leave the podcast a five star rating and review on Apple Podcasts or Spotify. Particularly, a review on Apple Podcasts would be a dream to help boost the profile of the show so I can submit for a few more features this year. And thank you. Thank you for that and for listening and for tuning in. I will be back soon with an episode actually on nonfiction books about time.

Amelia Hruby: 32:48

And then I'm planning to do a ranking episode of all of Emily Henry's books, including her brand new one that comes out in April, which is this month when this is coming Comes out this month. I'm so excited. Until then, I hope that you love what you're reading. Here's to your next best book.