Post-its and Paperbacks

There are two things you'll always find in my books: love stories and post-its. 

This space was born out of the quiet habit of marking pages. Moments that made me pause, lines that hit a little too close to home, banter I had to reread twice, and scenes I knew I'd want to return to later. Somewhere along the way, those sticky notes became conversations. With the book. With myself. With other readers who felt the same way. 

I read romance of all varieties. Soft and tender. Messy and complicated. Spicy, slow-burn, trope-heavy, genre-bending...if there's a love story at the center, I'm probably interested. Romance, to me, has never been one thing. It's comfort and chaos, longing and laughter, and sometimes the kind of story that sneaks up on you and stays. 

While romance is my home base, I do step outside of it from time to time. You'll find a shake up here and there. I love stories that are simply fun to read, break boundaries, or or break me apart. I hope you too are a little adventurous, because if its a book I didn't expect to love, if it kept me turning pages and thinking about it afterward, it belongs on my shelf. 

My bookshelf is where I want to put those thoughts down intentionally. This won't be place for perfect reviews or polished takes. It's for honest reactions, annotated feelings, and the lingering ache a good book leaves behind. Expect reviews, reading reflections, trope talk, and the occasional ramble about characters who refuse to let go. 

My love for reading didn't come from nowhere. It was handed down to me. Growing up books were always within reach, because my grandparents and parents made sure they were. They understood, in quiet and practical ways, that stories mattered. They made room for books on shelves and in our hands, and in doing so they gave me and my cousins something that never faded: a shared love of reading that followed us into adulthood. Long before I knew what genres I loved or how deeply stories would shape me, I knew that books were welcome, encourages, and meant to be held onto. 

The very first set of books I remember begging for were the Just Ask series that you could buy at the grocery store- aging myself here, this was the mid 80's. I was no older than four or five and I couldn't leave without those books. My parents spoiled me rotten that day with the entire collection and I held on to those books until they pretty much disintegrated to dust. They were the school books with which I taught my imaginary class and the instruction booklet when I pretended I was an astronaut. The little mouse explaining how rainbows are made and how hot air balloons work stick with me even today.

Whether it was my grandfather challenging me to read The Lord of The Rings or my parents keeping my classics collection alive and thriving, it was my grandmother who sparked my love of love by introducing me to the Love Comes Softly series when I was just eleven. I didn't know it then, but that would remain the root of my reading obsession.

You'll mostly find me sharing day-to-day bookish content on Instagram, where I'm the most active and where post-its, reactions, and current reads tend to live in real time. I also cross-post reviews on Goodreads & Fable- because some thoughts need a permanent home, and every now and then I'll pop up over on Youtube when a book (or a stack of them) demands a little more rambling than text allows.

Wherever you find me, the heart of it stays the same. 

If you're someone who:

*dog-ears pages without guilt

*believes annotations are a love language

*reads romance with your whole heart

*likes to step outside their comfort zone

then you're exactly who this space is for.

So welcome. To the post-its. To the paperbacks. To the stories we mark because they mattered. 

xx, Crystal