Week of January 5, 2026

Well, 2026 started off with quite a whimper over here. More of a sneeze, actually 🤧. Maybe it’s good to get a cold out of the way early in the year? Let’s go with that theory! I spent most of the early part of the week on the couch, so that reading “limit” that I talked about last week? Yeah, that didn’t happen lol. Movement? Not much of that happened, either. It was a box of tissues a day, a book a day, and lots of hot tea. And a full re-watch of Heated Rivalry, of course. But what else is there to do when you’re sick?

Despite the week starting off on a slow note, it certainly ended on a bang with our younger daughter Tori getting engaged on Saturday! So both of our girls got engaged within two months of each other. We are so happy that they’ve each found their person and that they’re ready to forge ahead in life with someone special by their side. No matter what road they each decide to take, and I’m absolutely positive their paths will be wildly different from both each other’s and from mine, I want it to be unapologetically their own. I can’t wait to see what 2026 holds for us all as we look forward to two weddings in the family. 🙂 

1. Love Always, Wild, by A.M. Johnson ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️

2. Not So Sincerely, Yours by A.M. Johnson ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️

3. Dear Mr. Brody by A.M. Johnson ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️

4. For the Love of Summer by Susan Mallery ⭐️⭐️⭐️.5

5. Secrets We Fight by Kimberly Knight ⭐️⭐️

The first 3 books in the list above, all by A.M. Johnson, were from a series called ‘For Him.’ They’re all MM romance and I picked the first one up on a whim through Kindle Unlimited and I really enjoyed it. In the first book, MMC Wilder Welles had his heart broken in college by closeted boyfriend Jax who left school and ghosted him for nine long years. But Wilder took that heartbreak and turned it into a best selling book. When Jax sees the book in the store window and recognizes the name of the author, he can’t stop himself from reaching out to the author, but uses an alias. You can guess where this goes, of course, but it’s never an easy course. The yearning was great in this book and the characters were really well developed. I loved Jax and his devotion to his brother Jason in the book, and Wilder was irreverent and unapologetic in his sense of self. And the way this book introduced other characters that flowed so well into book #s 2 and 3 in the series just made me keep on reading. There’s a 4th in the series that I haven’t read yet, plus a novella. I’m not sure I will because the MMC in the 4th book didn’t draw me in the same way these other characters did, but maybe I should go give it a chance. We’ll see.

The Susan Mallery book, For the Love of Summer, was a book about women finding strength in and support from each other which is something we can all get behind. Despite having both been married to the same (albeit, despicable) man, Erica and Allison overcome the natural differences they might have and realize they have more in common than not. It was a good read, even if it was a little simplistic. It’s always fun to have an awful man that everyone can collectively loathe, and Peter was an easy target for that in this book.

That’s it for this week! As always, you can keep up with all of my reading on my Goodreads if you want to. https://www.goodreads.com/user/show/12921106-karen

Love, Karen