Lets Talk Bookish

Let’s Talk Bookish: January Freebie!

Dini @ dinipandareads9 Comments

✨ Welcome back to another week of LTB! ✨

Let’s Talk Bookish is a weekly meme created by Rukky @Eternity Books and co-hosted by Aria @Book Nook Bits and myself! In this discussion meme, participants get to talk about certain topics, share opinions, and spread the love by visiting each other’s posts! Learn more about LTB, past topics and future topics HERE.

This week’s topic is:

Freebie!

Prompts: For the fifth Friday of the month, pick your own topic. You can check out our blogs for inspiration (Aria and Dini) or write about something else you’re interested in! 

For today’s freebie, I’m going back to the first LTB topic of 2026 because even though I was really excited about doing it, when it came down to getting it done on holiday, my brain was all farts! 💨 So there’s better time than a freebie moment to re-attempt this topic—hopefully, I’ll have better luck with writing something this time.

As a refresher: the first topic of 2026 was: Top Reads in Five Words/Sentences. Since I’m terrible at choosing favourites, I decided to randomly choose five books from my Best 10 of 2025 and I’m going to try describing five reasons (in hopefully five words) to read them. Here we go!

The Tainted Cup by Robert Jackson Bennett

  • Fantastically witty banter
  • Holmes x Watson x Benoit Blanc vibes
  • Rich world-building with complex, powerful, and corrupt systems
  • Mysterious all-powerful leviathan
  • A murder mystery that’s twisty and full of fun surprises

The Sword of Kaigen by M.L. Wang

  • A complex, flawed, realistic mother-figure with an incredible arc
  • Mothers who are also just badass warriors and can wield a weapon like nobody’s business
  • A very cool Avatar-esque nature-based magic system, but deadlier.
  • Family dynamics reminiscent of The Green Bone Saga aka it’s about duty, loyalty, family first, and it’s messy AF.
  • I bawled like a little baby and was thankful for it. *sobs*

A Man Called Ove by Fredrik Backman

  • Want a book that will make you cry? (It’s cathartic)
  • Don’t judge a grumpy face by its cover!
  • A curmudgeonly man who steadily worms his way into your heart.
  • Heartwarming and hilarious found family vibes
  • A book about love, friendship, loss, grief, healing. ❤️‍🩹

Assassin’s Apprentice by Robin Hobb

  • Immaculate, impeccable, stunning world-building. Holy granola!
  • Slice-of-life vibes but make it high fantasy (and more complex, lol)!
  • The most villainous characters you will ever read and who you will want to murder and see suffer so badly.
  • Characters who you don’t think will worm their way into your heart, but then suddenly you’d fight for them and they become new favourite characters.
  • The writing is the kind that inspires obsession—it’s not only well-written but it’s “comforting” and compulsively readable!

We Used to Live Here by Marcus Kliewer

  • Get ready to be sent down a Reddit rabbit hole reading theory after theory, and dissecting all the clues!
  • Those theories and clues will make you want to re-read the book immediately just to see if you can decipher anything else.
  • Full of twists that make you question reality
  • It’s readable (and enjoyable) for even scaredy cats like me, but you will definitely get nightmares and certain scenes will live rent free in your head—but it is also totally worth it!
  • The sort of creepy that sneaks up on you when you least expect.

Don’t forget to check out the other bloggers who joined the discussion this week! 👇🏽

Rachael @ The Green Tea Librarian
Elle @ Unwrapping Words
Raji @ Worlds Unlike Our Own
Lin @ Lin’s Perspective
Laurie @ Laurie is Reading

If I’ve missed your post this week, don’t hesitate to let me know in the comments, and I’ll add you to this week’s list of community posts ASAP!

Did any of this make you want to read any of these books? Do you already have any of them on your TBR? How would you describe your favourite read of 2025 in five words or sentences?

9 thoughts on “Let’s Talk Bookish: January Freebie!”

  1. Your post made me want to read all of the books above! Although I have already read A Man Called Ove, I would love to re-read it and go back to this world. Backman is an amazing writer, and everything I read by him so far has not received less than 5 stars from me. I have a few books in here that are already on my TBR! Now I am intrigued by We used to live here but I am also scared haha

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    • Aww, yay! Ove was my first foray into Backman’s books and I totally get the hype with that one. If his other books are anything like that, then I have no doubt I’m going to love them too 😍 Definitely excited that I have so much of his backlist to explore now! Haha, We Used to Live Here was deliciously creepy! 😂 Tbh, after reading it I was proud of how brave I was to read it, haha. Honestly, it’s so good though! As mind-twisty and weird and scary as I expected it to be. I hope you enjoy the books that you have on your TBR!

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