Welcome to Short Stories with the Hot Girls Read Podcast! In addition to our regular seasons that include longer episodes, we are coming to you hot with some shorter segments that will cover bookish news and recent updates.

In our first episode of Short Stories, we talk about the US Tiktok ban, how booktok dealt with it, and the highly anticipated fantasy read, “Onyx Storm.”

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Part II of our 2024 Wrapped starts off exactly where we left off in Part I and we get straight into our top Non-fiction reads of the year. We continue on to our most memorable books across the categories of Poetry, Overhyped Booktok Books, Unexpected Top Read, Cozy Read, Spicy Read, and last but not least, or top read of 2024!

After all the fun of delving into the books that have accompanied us throughout 2024, we end the episode talking about our reading plans for the end of the year and what 2025 has in store for the Hot Girls Read podcast.

As always, we loved creating this episode for you guys and we look forward to many more in the New Year!

After our short and sweet season 5, we’ve decided to end the year with one last episode: our 2024 wrapped! We had ambitious goals for this episode, namely sharing our top books of the year across 12 different categories and ending with our top read of the year. So in typical fashion, we went on for so long that we had to break the episode into two parts.

In Part I of our 2024 Wrapped, we start out by dissecting our reading habits and trends over the past year, which seemed to differ quite a bit! This became even more clear as we got into our top books for each category, starting with Adult Fantasy and covering YA/MG Fantasy, Fiction, Romance, and Mystery.

Catch the rest of our top 2024 reads and some updates about the Hot Girls Read podcast in Part II!

S5E6: For our final episode of the season, we chose a topic recommended by one of our listeners: interracial romance reads.

The Romance genre is a refuge for many readers – it offers lighthearted storylines with plenty of passion and intrigue that are easy to escape into, as we have done countless times. However, the genre can be found lacking in its offer of interracial relationships.

We decided to delve further into the world of interracial romance, and tasked ourselves with finding and reading a variety of interracial romance demographics.

In this episode we are excited to share our list of interracial reads, and of course, our honest thoughts about them. We truly went on a journey of discovery here, and in some cases, even found new favorites to add to the TBR!

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Books Mentioned:

Party of Two by Jasmine Guillroy

That Time I Got Drunk and Yeeted a Love Potion at a Werewolf by Kimberly Lemmings

Twisted Love by Ana Huang

King of Wrath by Ana Huang

The Kiss Quotient by Helen Hoang

Dust Child by Nguyễn Phan Quế Mai

The Dating Plan by Sara Desai

First Love, Take Two by Sajni Patel

Forbidden Jewel of India by Louise Allen

The Very Secret Society of Irregular Witches by Sangu Mandanna

His Road Home by Anna Richland

S5E5: Greek Mythology retellings have always been popular, most memorably during our middle school days, but never have they seemed more widespread than they are right now. Greek retellings fill up the ‘New In’ shelves and people just can’t get enough of them – us included!

In this episode we not only talk about the Greek myths and retellings we’ve read and loved (or didn’t love), but we also get into what drew us to Greek myths in the first place, as well as the differences we see among retellings, particularly between books geared towards adults versus young adults.

Content warning: Rape, Sexual Assault.

Books Mentioned:

Percy Jackson series by Rick Riordan

Ariadne by Jennifer Saint

Elektra by Jennifer Saint

Circe by Madeline Miller

Galatea by Madeline Miller

Song of Achilles by Madeline Miller

Ithaca by Claire North

House of Odysseus by Claire North

Neon Gods by Katee Robert

Electric Idol by Katee Robert

Wicked Beauty by Katee Robert

Iliad by Homer

Stone Blind by Natalie Haynes

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S5E4: Continuing our book club tradition, in this episode we discuss our latest buddy read: Rebecca Kuang’s “Yellow Face,” one of the most popular fiction books from 2023. As usual, we share our ratings and conduct a deep dive into the characters, the writing, and our overall thoughts.

“Yellow Face” was an eye-opening, and perhaps controversial, read for two people who are interested in and linked to the world of books, writing, and publishing. Needless to say, we had a lot to say about this one!

Content warning: Rape
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S5E3: This isn’t the first time we’ve talked about online bookish communities (see Season 2 Episode 4, The One Where We Talk About Booktok Parts 1 & 2), but this time we’re turning our eyes to Bookstagram.

From blowing up during the COVID lockdown to now influencing the publishing industry and international book charts, Bookstagram is an ever-growing and powerful community, for better, and sometimes, for worse. Ayesha shares her own experience of building a bookstagram account and then we discuss themes we’ve noticed in the community – the good, the bad, and the ugly.

If you’ve ever been convinced to get a book based off of someone's Instagram post, listen to this episode to get a behind the scenes look into the world of book influencing!

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S5E2: Why is reading about relatable characters so fun? Why is it so frustrating when a character feels completely unrelatable? Is character relatability actually important to us as readers? Can fantasy characters still be realistic?

These are some of the questions we delve into during this episode about unrelatable book characters. To begin, we go down a rabbit hole of discovering the differences between realistic vs. relatable/unrealistic vs. unrelatable when it comes to analyzing book characters. Our working definitions thus defined, we then share what the internet seems to think about the whole realistic/relatable character debate before getting into which characters we find the most relatable and unrelatable across both fantasy and fiction.

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