Welcome, welcome, welcome to the Fantasy Fan Reads podcast. We are thrilled to announce the newest bookish podcast under the Fantasy Fan Girls media network. What you're about to hear is the first little bit of this brand new podcast, Fantasy Fan Reads, which is hosted by the delightful Jess of Lost Books of Jess. Each episode is all about celebrating the joys of reading through cozy coffee conversations, author interviews, and so much more. These first few episodes of Fantasy Fan Reads will be having little snippets posted on the Fantasy Fan Girls feed, where you're listening to our beautiful voices right now. If you want to listen to the full episode, you can do so over on the Fantasy Fan Reads podcast feed. Link is in the show notes. Be sure to follow the Fantasy Fan Read podcast feed and hey, it's on YouTube too. New episodes drop every single Tuesday. Give the podcast a follow on Instagram at fantasyfanreads. So without further ado, and with all of your follow buttons hit, we hope you enjoy this snippet of Fantasy Fan Reads. Hey there, how are you? Welcome to the Fantasy Fan Reads podcast, where we gather as friends to chat about our shared love of all things reading. I'm Jess, an avid lifelong reader and lover of cozy conversations. So go ahead and grab yourself a cup of something wonderful and come on in. Today is a special Cup of Conversations solo episode, where I'm going to dive into a variety of reading topics submitted by all of you. I've taken those topics, printed them on little slips of paper, and scrambled them up in my magical Fantasy Fan Reads mug. Whatever comes out of the mug is what I will discuss. Now a quick heads up as we get started. This episode will be spoiler free for any of the books that come up in my conversation topics. Also, Fantasy Fan Reads is the newest podcast in the Fantasy Fan Girls Media Network, and as a new show, your support means the world. Please give us a follow at fantasyfanreads on social media, rate and review the podcast, and spread the word to your friends. Plus, if you want to help support every show under the Fantasy Fan Girls Media Network, you can join the Fantasy Fan Club for exclusive content, early access, and ad-free episodes, live Q&As, book club, private discord, community events, and so much more. Go on over to fantasyfangirls.com slash fan club for more information about the Fantasy Fanatics and Deep Divers tiers and benefits where you get all show access. Now, normally on episodes that I record with other people, I ask them some get to know your questions first. Let's go ahead and do a little myself getting to know myself. Okay, self, what are you reading right now? Thank you so much for asking self. I'm in fact still reading the Cinderblock-sized book, The Way of Kings by Brandon Sanderson. This book is kicking my rear, but I am determined to power through because I trust the Cosmere fans out there who say that there will be payoff. I'm also at the same time reading Direbound by Sable Sorenson, and I am hooked. I am about 25% of the way in. I read it on some recent plane rides, and I gotta know. I gotta know if these wolves are gonna warm up to any— I just— I gotta know things. Okay, so that's what I'm reading right now. Self, what do you like to drink? What's your favorite warm beverage? Ugh, I could go for a warm beverage right now. Self, if you want to go ahead and grab— Okay, I'm done with this bit where I pretend to talk to myself, but my favorite warm beverage is just definitely a cup of coffee. I love just plain coffee with maybe some vanilla flavored creamer. I do like my coffee on the sweeter side, but coffee all the way. If I could have that cup of coffee with any two book characters, oh my gosh, I would probably choose Lysandra from Throne of Glass. She is my girl. She is my ride or die. She saved that story in so many ways that I'm not gonna tell you in case you haven't read it. And I would also want to be joined by Misha from the Crowns of Nyaxia series, because I just relate to her so hard, and she is a ray of sunshine. The question I always end with in this Get to Know You section is, how does reading bring you joy? And I don't even know that I can encapsulate my answer in any way that will then get us to the questions in the coffee mug, but I think ultimately reading brings me joy because it makes me feel less alone in this world. Even though reading can be a highly solo activity and a very individualized experience, it makes me feel connected to the author who wrote the story, the characters within the story. My friends are strangers who have also read the book, and that feeling like even though I am, you know, a mere speck of dust on this giant planet we live on, but I'm not alone is pretty cool. All right, all right, all right, let's dive into these topics from the mug. Let's see what the people want to know. I didn't even, like, I didn't really think through if I could fit my paw down in this mug. Let's see. Here we go. Question one, how when I am deep diving a book, do I pick up on so much foreshadowing? This question must be coming from the people who watch the videos on my The Lost Books of Jess Instagram account where I have made some quality guesses about the books that I have read. I got to toot my own horn on that. How do I do it? Okay, I don't honestly know. I don't honestly know. I feel like I have a puzzle solving brain. I always have. I love crossword puzzles, word puzzles, Sudoku's, number, everything where you're trying to puzzle something out. Like even back when, do any of you remember elementary school getting those puzzles that were like a grid and then you got clues like Sally doesn't have a blue dress but her best friend does and you had to like X off the things in the grid that were and were not true. Anyone else with this experience? Well, I still do those for fun. Okay, that's what I'm doing on the weekend. So logic is like the name of my game. And then when I'm reading, I try to put myself in an author's shoes, even though I'm not an author and would never claim to be, but I am obsessed with like, they wouldn't put these little details in books if they didn't matter. Like if a word is spelled weird or a word is repeated a lot or a character's just suddenly acts a little bit different. I'm like, I got to write that down because there's no way in the world that is there for no reason. A lot of times I just end up lucky though. I take those little breadcrumbs of things that I am convinced have to be there for a reason and turn them into something. And sometimes I end up on the right track. Sometimes I say things totally accidentally. I don't want to give away a spoiler for this book, but now I know why it was so funny when I was reading the Mistborn era one trilogy. And I specifically said a word related to a character and the internet went wild because I accidentally used a word that was going to be very important later. That was an accident. I had no idea. I don't know. So sometimes I just get lucky. Other times it's that puzzle solving brain. But I've always been an analytical reader. I don't often just read for vibes because even when I try to just be chill, I'm like, okay, all right, the characters are bopping along, they're doing things. And then I'm like, but that name just came up again. And I take notes when I read also so that I can go back through my notes, you know, and it's not even annotating. I don't write in my books, by the way. You will find zero annotations in the books themselves. I even forget to highlight and make Kindle, which is silly because that is not per I don't know. But I have a notebook that I write things down and then I furiously try to flip back through to see if I can figure things out. So I don't know. It's the way my brain works and a little bit of luck at the same time. Are any of you out there analytical readers? I mean, sometimes I just want to be a passenger princess and just show up at the plot twist and be like, gosh, darn it, I said none of that, Cameron. But most of the time I'm like, oh, see what you did here. There are a few that have walloped me. Hello, metal slinger. Anyone else get completely slapped sideways by that one? I had no clue. Upon a reread, I was like, I see what you did there. But on the first read, no way, ma'am. Absolutely not. So I don't know. I'm a lucky analytical reader. All right, let's see what comes out of the mug next. How do I choose books is question number two. That might be as messy of an answer as the first one. All right, I choose books in a variety of ways. Prior to social media existing in my life, really, I guess, I was very much a like window shopper at the bookstore. Like I would fall for like whatever they put on end displays or if a book was on a special table, like I am the queen of falling for that advertising. Like if Barnes and Noble put it front and center, I was like, well, take my money. I'll find out later. I would just go to the bookstore and buy random things. Or I had heard a friend talk about a book and I was like, well, I'm going to need that as well. I used to do the same thing all the time at my public library. My public library has this really cool set of displays when you walk into the adult section. One of them is for books that have been getting checked out very frequently. And I forget what it's titled, something like readers love these. And I would always search there because I'm like, if other people are checking it out, there must be something to it. And they have this other shelf called the lucky day display and it's books that are really popular and hard to get at the library, but they had an extra copy and it was your lucky day that you were getting it. So I would always like browse those two shelves figuring like the library wasn't going to lead me astray. You know, and that's how I used to make my decisions before. Now that I have social media at my fingertips, I spend a lot of time seeing what other people are talking about, especially other readers that I vibe with social media friends that I know have had similar opinions to myself, authors that I've befriended along the way. And I end up kind of curating my list that way. I have a really sad and scary TBR spreadsheet. Y'all, it is a feral wasteland. It started organized. I had intentions. There's like a title column, an author column, if it's part of a series. And then I had a column where I could put like red coming up soon, not reading right now, like I had these choices. Well, then it just got too much of a mess. It was a mess. It was a mess. So then I had to add a column called priority, high priority, medium priority, low priority. So I'm just trying to figure out what to read next. It is, I don't know why I try to organize things on a list though, because then at the end of all of these things that I just told you, I am also a very afflicted mood reader. I will say I'm going to read things like I'm laughing at that spreadsheet right now because I know things that are marked that I want to read next. Normally I'm going to do that. I'm not doing that because I don't feel like it. So it's really, it's like a, it's a menu, not a schedule. You know, if I don't want an appetizer, I'm not going to get an appetizer. I do though, definitely fall prey to hype. I want to be part of the hype. I want to know why people are excited about things, but I'm always like a few months behind the hype because I can't keep up and I can't read fast enough. There's also hyped things that I have never read because I just didn't want to. Like I still have not read Onyx Storm. I know, right? I have the copy on my shelf and I just cannot get myself in the mood to read it. So I don't know, I window shop, I follow the hype, I make a list, and then I hope to be in the mood to read something. So bad. I don't know how to be a more organized mood reader. Like how do you organize your mood? You don't. That's the whole point of a mood. I can't predict who I'm going to be a week from now. I think that's why it's killing me so much to be reading The Way of Kings is over a thousand pages long. And I'm like, I'm never getting out. And my mood is shifted, but I have to know what happens. So that's how I ended up reading Direbound on the side of it because I was like, I need something else going on. But that's another struggle I have as a reader also. I mean, I applaud all of you out there who are reading like six books at a time. You have an audiobook going, an ebook going, a physical book going, a buddy read, a book club. Go friend, how do you keep them all straight? I have no idea. Two is my maximum. So I've hit my maximum. I have Way of Kings as a physical book and I've Direbound on my Kindle. Past that, I've tried to audiobook. I'm in the middle of Quicksilver, the audiobook right now. My audiobook attention span is low. It's really low. I'll try to do even like mind numbing activities while I'm listening, like I'm folding laundry or washing dishes and all of a sudden I'm like, there's a pretty bird out that window. They're like burning metal in the book and I have no idea. So I try to choose books strategically so that I can get to things I want, but follow my chaos. The answer to that question could have just been chaos. Maybe the next question won't make me sound like such a weirdo. Let's see. Oh, what books in my youth affected me the most? What was childhood read or just like? I love this question. Before I start this question, I need you to know that I am a hardcore millennial and I feel like my reading was very much influenced by all of the things that millennial readers experienced. So my earliest reading memories definitely come from the Berenstein-Bear's picture books. My mom and I would go to the bookstore all the time and get one new one and they were only like $1.99 a piece at the time for like, they were like these floppy picture books. I actually still have the entire collection of them in my son's room and my mom and I would read them together every night. She wrote my name in the front of all of them and like they're one of my most prized possessions, but that was super formed it for me because that is the first time I remember going to a bookstore and picking out a new book and like that thrill that we were going to go home and read it that night. After I started to morph into someone who could read on my own, my mom and I really still had that attachment to reading together for a while and we turned to the American Girl Doll books. My grandma gifted me my first American Girl Doll for Christmas when year was Felicity, who is the best, followed by Kirsten. I will not be taking any comments, concerns, questions or arguments on that ranking. Thank you very much. But I had the little box sets of the books that went with each of the dolls and once I could read, my mom and I would sit in bed together and she would read a page and I would read a page and that experience was super formative for me as well because I felt so successful as a reader. Like I could keep up with my mom and we could read together and then slowly you start to pull away and I was laying in bed and reading them on my own and I distinctly remember because I didn't have a TV in my bedroom until I was in middle school. So for all of those elementary school years, I would read before I went to sleep and I had this little pink lamp by my bedside on a table and I would turn it on and I would read, read, read, read, read until I was ready to fall asleep and I think I reread those American Girl Doll books until they were falling apart. They were so good to me at the time. I loved those stories. I felt seen. I loved the tidbits of history in them. I loved that I had like this is where my trinket love began, right? Those American Girl Dolls were book trinkets from the OG days. But I was a reader for all of elementary school and middle school and high school. I mean, as my social life blossomed, my reading maybe fell off a little bit. Other formative books I can think of are Where the Red Fern Grows was the first book I remember like heaving, sobbing at and being really broken by a book but also put back together at the same time and having to like reflect on that. I loved the book Holes and Ringer. Oh, Goosebumps. I used to collect the Goosebumps books and I was like horrified by them. I was very scared of the dark as a kid and I have no idea why latched on to the Goosebumps books but I was obsessed. Anything that was at the Scholastic Book Fair, remember? Your mom would give you 20 bucks and be like, you better come home with a book and not just pencils and erasers and posters of a cat. But I did usually go buy books because I loved to read and collect. My grandma also gave me a bunch of the boxcar children and little house on the prairie books and just books abounded. My family didn't always have a ton of money when I was growing up so I wasn't somebody who always like got, got, got, got, got things. I mean, we were fine. Don't, don't get me wrong. But books were something that were always a yes when I was growing up, getting new books and having new stories. And I so much appreciate that my mom and dad and grandparents and aunts and uncles did that for me because I truly cherished those stories. Oh my gosh, I just thought of another one. Sideway stories from Wayside School. Iconic. That book, oh my gosh, at my elementary school library, you had to get on a wait list to get that book. It was so popular. I feel like I should have like copies of it now that I'm like, look at my trophy. Do you remember when I had to fight for you at the library? So good. As a teenager, I definitely moved into again being a millennial. I grew up in the Harry Potter generation. So waiting for each one of those new books to release was super, super formative for me. My friends and I all read them together and we would stay up all night after every release and call each other in the morning and ask like, what chapter are you on? How far did you make it? And college that turned into Twilight. I discovered the Twilight series and was waiting for each of those new releases. So I just feel like I kind of went through each of those like iconic phases of growing up like in the 90s and early 2000s that so many of us went through that definitely shaped my love of reading today. I definitely as a kid though did not think being a reader was like cool. You know, I think that was a problem a lot of us had as well. I've talked to a lot of people who can relate to that. I wave my reader flag with pride at this point. I love that it is my number one hobby and the thing that I collect and the thing that I do. But as a kid, I don't think it was something I ran around being like, I'm a reader. Look at my t-shirt with book characters on it. And I wish I had. If I could go back and tell childhood reader Jess something, it would be like, this is the best hobby you can feed into because you're expanding your mind. You are going to make so many friends. You are learning so many things and keep doing it. She did. She didn't give up on reading, but I would have told her to be a little bit more proud of being a reader. Man, I want to go back to those scholastic book fair days. Denny, if you remember the little like, it felt like newspaper, the flyers that our teachers would give us, you could order things from scholastic, you would turn in the little slip on the back of the flyer with like a check from your parents and then the books would get delivered to your teacher. And it was like a holiday every single time. That was like core elementary school memories for me. Oh, my insides feel ooey and gooey and oh, so warm. We love Jess. If you want to listen to the rest of this episode, head on over to the Fantasy Fan Reads podcast feed where you'll find all of the full episodes of Fantasy Fan Reads. Link is in the show notes. And hey, since you already listened to this episode or a little snippet of this episode, why don't you head on over to the podcast feed and rate the show five stars? It is one of the best things you can do for every podcast, but especially baby new little baby podcasts. Also, be sure to follow Fantasy Fan Reads podcast feed so that you stay in the know every single Tuesday when episodes drop. And give the show a follow on Instagram at fantasyfanreads. Thank you so much for listening. Bye bye. Bye.
