Samhain is a Celtic bonfire festival that marks the end of the harvest season and the beginning of winter and the dark part of the year. It is a liminal time, when the veil between our world and the spirit world is thin, and so it is associated with spirits and ancestor work. Our modern Halloween is influenced by this ancient holiday.

I'm writing this the night before Samhain, as I just spent the evening preparing the home spiritually for the holiday. I am hosting a dinner for a few close friends, called a Dumb Supper (which comes from the Old English for dumb meaning mute - it's a name that has stuck to refer to these kinds of dinners for ancestor work specifically). I've done Samhain rituals like this for the last few years but this is the first time I'm hosting it in my home, as before I was a part of a ritual space that hosted.

This year involves a large ancestor altar, where I will be moving my existing ancestor altar to for the night as well as adding anything that friends bring - which can include photos of deceased loved ones, mementos, offerings, etc. Each ancestor represented will have a small tea light candle anointed with an ancestor oil I have as well as a large ancestor candle to include the entire ancestral lines.

The supper will be only by candlelight and include no talking. A plate will be prepared for the ancestors first and left on the altar as an offering to them. So far, the menu includes apple and maple pork chops, a pomegranate rice salad, traditional Irish champ (which is a mashed potato dish), and pies. I wanted to make soul cakes, as that is a well loved Samhain dish, but my oven is so unpredictable that it makes baking challenging.

Following the dinner, we will be doing ancestor divination with both the fire from the candles and an oracle deck that I have specifically for spirit communication.

Tonight in preparation, I have both physically and energetically cleaned my space and recharged wards I have around the house. It was an exhausting process, as I haven't done a deep clean of either variety in a minute, so there was definitely some energy to clear out. But once I had wards recharged and even some new things added, I am feeling much better. Drained in a good way!

I also sat in front of my ancestor altar and had a chat with them, which included some tears, possibly because I was playing "Remember Me" from the movie Coco which is an instant tear jerker. But as this year I intend to do a lot more ancestor work throughout the next month and through winter, this felt like a nice private chat with my ancestors before the big celebration tomorrow.

I will write a post about how the celebration it goes. I'd love to hear what you are doing for Samhain if you are celebrating as well!

xo Sam

My Libby queue this week feels like a carefully balanced storm - eight books, eight moods, all orbiting different corners of curiosity, dread, and delight.

Crime & Suspense

• The Lincoln Lawyer - legal intrigue and moral ambiguity; the tension of justice that doesn't always feel just.

• Killer on the Road - a psychological descent told from the mind of a killer - relentless, haunting, and disturbingly human.

Horror & Speculative

• You Weren't Meant to Be Human - existential horror and identity unspooling at the edges; a story about transformation and the terror of becoming.

• Of Monsters and Mainframes - tech meets terror; code, consciousness, and the uncanny in our machines.

• The Bewitching - witchcraft, power, and superstition woven through gothic atmosphere; history's hauntings in the hands of women who won't stay silent.

Nonfiction & Thought-Provoking

• The Cure for Woman - nonfiction that reclaims women's place in science; a story of medicine, defiance, and the fight to be believed.

Whimsy & Adventure

• Automatic Noodle - absurdist and sharp-edged; humor that slips into something uncanny and oddly true.

• A Pirate's Life for Tea - cozy escapism with a wink; mischief, magic, and maritime tea parties for when you want your chaos charming.

I've dipped into a few already, and each on carries its own current - some dark and unsettling, some sharp and clever, some quietly strange. The rest are waiting, humming at the edges of my week, promising new moods when I'm ready to sink in.

Mood reading isn't about discipline or genre loyalty. It's about surrender. About knowing when you need courtroom tension over gothic curses, or when absurdism will soothe you better than a love story ever could. It's about giving your reading life permission to be a reflection of your inner weather.

This is mood reading: trusting instinct, following curiosity, and letting your unread shelf become its own aesthetic.

Curated chaos for the discerning reader.

Curated chaos for the discerning reader.

Our next months pick is Little Eve by Catriona Ward! This one is available on Kindle Unlimited!

At 265 pages and separating them into 4 sections brings us around 66 pages a section!

Section 1: Page 63 Dinah 1921

Section 2: Page 125 Evelyn 1920

Section 3: Page 191 Dinah 1931

Section 4: Finish! :)

We will meet every Monday at 8PM CST!

To join the discord, click here!

*If you still need to buy the book, click the image of the book below and it will take you to either amazon or bookshop.org!

okay it’s been one week since i started 75 booked—a reading challenge designed to help you get reading back into your daily routine—and i’ve noticed a few things that i thought i’d share.

if you missed my original post about the challenge, go check it out below.

75 BOOKED. A challenge to reincorporate reading into your daily routine

Oct 23

ok so after 7 days of doing this challenge (of which there will be 75 days so we are still VERY early on in things), i’ve noticed four major things. if you want to see the specifics on how the challenge is going—check out this playlist on my tiktok @thisstoryaintover.

1. reading for 1.5 hours each day is easier than i thought and it’s started to replace a lot of my scrolling time. i do this content creation thing full time, so take this with a grain of salt, but most of my reading is still happening in the 5-9pm hours rather than the 9-5 hours. audiobooks have helped with this of course but i also feel that i’m being more intentional in allowing myself to relax with a book for at least 1.5 hours a day. as a chronic overworker, this is huge for me

2. some crafty hobbies are made better for audiobook listening. i find that the hobbies that involve repetitive movements tend to work better for me or ones that involve cleaning lol. i cleaned up an old typewriter i bought off facebook marketplace a year ago and had such a good time listening to my audiobooks while doing it. it’s not necessarily a crafty hobby but it’s something that has been on my to-do list for so long and i’m so glad that i finally got around to it

3. i’m finally getting to my physical tbr — i think this one is definitely motivated by the video i made at the beginning of this year where i said i would unhaul the list of books in the video if i didn’t read them by the end of the year. if you’re curious about the list, you can watch the video below.

4. writing reviews of the books i finish in a physical journal is my new FAVOURITE thing — i truly wish i had started doing this earlier. beyond being obsessed with using my louise carmen-inspired traveler’s notebook, i feel like writing my reviews on paper is making me sit with my thoughts on each book so much more. because i’m also only writing in my journal for myself and for my eyes only, i feel like i can be super honest about my thoughts and really interrogate how i felt about the book.

OK those were the four things i’ve observed so far but it’s still early days. i wonder if my opinion on any of these observation will change as the challenge goes on but i would love to hear from all of you if you’re taking part in the challenge and what spin on the rules you’ve made for yourself!

with love,

jananie ♡

ANNNNDDD we have a winner!! our november book club book is ….

the isle in the silver sea by tasha suri !!!

tasha suri is one of my favourite authors and i just know im gonna love this one. sapphic lady knights let’s gooo⚔️

I’ve been working on some book reviews, but TBH I’m a really slow processor so it’s taking a bit of time. 

Just wanted to post this with some of my book mail from last week. Still waiting on quite a few — the post strike has been brutal. 

Feel free to tell me in the comments what you’ve been reading. I’d love to chat books with y’all!

November is almost here so let's talk about the selections for the History & Fantasy Sickos Book Clubs for next month!

After a rare double tie vote in September, the Fantasy Sickos will be reading She Who Became the Sun by Shelley Parker-Chan! This is book 1 in the Radiant Emperor Duology set in 14th-century China while under the rule of the Mongol-led Yuan dynasty, so it's a blend of history and historical fiction (or a historical fantasy reimagining, however you wanna classify it. Here's a blurb on it:

... In a famine-stricken village on a dusty yellow plain, two children are given two fates. A boy, greatness. A girl, nothingness…

When the Zhu family’s eighth-born son, Zhu Chongba, is given a fate of greatness, everyone is mystified as to how it will come to pass. The fate of nothingness received by the family’s clever and capable second daughter, on the other hand, is only as expected.

When a bandit attack orphans the two children, though, it is Zhu Chongba who succumbs to despair and dies. Desperate to escape her own fated death, the girl uses her brother's identity to enter a monastery as a young male novice. There, propelled by her burning desire to survive, Zhu learns she is capable of doing whatever it takes, no matter how callous, to stay hidden from her fate.

After her sanctuary is destroyed for supporting the rebellion against Mongol rule, Zhu takes the chance to claim another future altogether: her brother's abandoned greatness.

The History Sickos experienced a bit of a coup by a women-led coalition in the Discord and so we went with four options that were by women, about women. The winner of that vote was The Five: The Untold Lives of the Women Killed by Jack the Ripper by Hallie Rubenhold!

The title is self-explanatory but here's a blurb anyway:

"For more than a century, newspapers have been keen to tell us that "the Ripper" preyed on prostitutes. Not only is this untrue, as historian Hallie Rubenhold has discovered, but it has prevented the real stories of these fascinating women from being told. Now, in this devastating narrative of five lives, Rubenhold finally sets the record straight, revealing a world not just of Dickens and Queen Victoria, but of poverty, homelessness, and rampant misogyny. They died because they were in the wrong place at the wrong time - but their greatest misfortune was to be born a woman."

I'll be setting up the discussion forums in the Discord server on Saturday. If you want to participate, subscribe at the Sicko or Mega Sicko tier and when you link your Discord (in "Account Settings") all the additional channels will open up. The discussions in these have been amazing lately and I hope to see you there. Sicko, out!

Meet the sapphic couple of Black Salt Queen: Duja & Imeria!

I'm a little behind on announcements! (and everything else, because I've essentially had the bubonic plague since returning from NYC)

Bindery recently announced that all

$5 members will receive an E*Arc of all books put out by Boozhoo Books

$12+$25 members will receive a physical are of all books put out by Boozhoo Books! (If you haven't updated your profile with your address, do that ASAP!).

Our first book, What Feeds Below (by Tatiana Schlote Bonne) a YA horror fantasy for fans of The Descent and Annihilation about two poor girls who guide rich tourists into a cave of treasures but run into trouble (in the form of monstrous creatures and plants) is coming out OCTOBER 6.

That's less than a year now and that's super exciting!

Our cover is near completion (paid members have now seen Draft 1 and Draft 2!) and I know that you guys are going to lose it. I can guarantee you that this book is going to be on Best Cover Lists (and Best Horror Lists) of 2026!

Hi Friends,

Tonight at 5pm PST/8pm EST is our author chat with Daphne Fama, author of October's Women in Horror Book Club Pick: House of Monstrous Women.

I cannot wait to chat about this gothic.

Naomi Darling is inviting you to a scheduled Zoom meeting.

Topic: Daphne Fama + Women in Horror
Time: Oct 29, 2025 05:00 PM Pacific Time (US and Canada)
Join Zoom Meeting
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Meeting ID: 853 0458 1428
Passcode: 946614

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