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For this week’s freebie topic, I’ve decided to highlight the books that the reviewers here at Long and Short Reviews have recently given five stars.

We don’t rate books that highly very often, so kudos to all of the authors who have earned this honor!

I included their genre or genres in parentheses as well.

This post was written a few weeks in advance, but I gathered up as many recent examples as I could find in our queue.

1. The Excitements by CJ Wray (Fiction)

2. Slaughterhouse by K.A. Lugo (Suspense/Mystery)

3. The Fog Ladies: Date with Death by Susan McCormick (Mystery)

4. Sally Mitts Finds a Home: The Story of a Shy Shelter Kitten by Shain Stodt (Children’s)

5. Dreams of Drowning by Patricia Averbach (Mystery, Paranormal)

6. All Rhodes Lead to Here by Mariana Zapata (Romance)

7. The Devil and Mrs. Davenport by Paulette Kennedy (Mystery, Paranormal)

8. Dogboy vs. Catfish by Luke Gracias (Mystery)

9. The Perfectly Fine Neighborhood edited by Kayleigh Dobbs, Stephen Kozeniewski, and Wile E. Young (Sci-Fi/Fantasy, Horror)

10. Embracing Amelia by Elaine Violette (Historical Romance)

For the fellow reviewers reading this post, how often do you give out five star ratings in your reviews?

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Since I recommended this topic to Jana, I thought I should be the one to write Long and Short Reviews’s response to it as well.

Here are ten funny or interesting things I’ve googled thanks to a book. Horror and mysteries are among the genres I read which is why some of these queries are about death and corpses.

1. How long does it take bones to decompose in a grave? Can you still tell something was once a grave if there are no bones left in it?

2. What do zombies think about when they’re not chasing people?

3. Why is the Chosen One so often a teenager instead of someone older and more experienced?

4. How did people figure out which mushrooms were safe to eat when a lot of wild mushrooms will kill you?

5. Why do so many romance novelists dislike big cities?

6. Why doesn’t character X have common sense?

(No, I didn’t actually expect an answer for this one. I was simply annoyed by a character who kept making terrible decisions for no reason).

7.  How long can you live on a spaceship before getting radiation poisoning?

8. Why do so many aliens want to destroy humanity?

9. Books written from a cow’s perspective.

(Because I’d never heard of such a thing and wondered if it existed).

10. Can you write a book without any tropes at all?

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As much as I love to sit down with a chonker and really immerse myself in a book, there isn’t always the time for that.  Not to mention the fact that I don’t always have the attention span for it either.  So, when I’m low on time or mental focus, I grab a short book to indulge my reading need.

Manga is a favorite of mine when I need a quick read.  I can usually get through one in an hour or so.  Some of my favorites lately:

Spy x Family by Tatsuya Endo

Heartstopper by Alice Osman

Wotakoi: Love is Hard for Otaku by Fujita.

Yes, I’ll admit it, I tend to go for the goofy manga.

There are a ton of great novellas out there as well.

Seanan McGuire’s Wayward Children series, that starts with Every Heart a Doorway, is a great series with fast, engaging stories.

The first four installments of Martha Wells’ Murderbot Diaries, starting with All Systems Red, are short, fast reads as well.  This is a series I need to catch up on soon as I love it.

Another source of quick reads are cozy mysteries.  While they’re usually a full length novel, they tend to go faster for me since the plot is light and fun.  Some of my favorite cozy series:

Witchless in Seattle, which starts with Witch Slapped, is a fun paranormal cozy series by Dakota Cassidy.

Caroline Fardig’s Java Jive series is also a fun, quick read, set in a coffee shop in Nashville, TN.  The series starts with Death Before Decaf.

Mindy Quigley has an intense, but engaging series called Deep Dish Mysteries, set in a gourmet pizzeria in Geneva Bay, WI.  The first is Six Feet Deep Dish and is a great start to an excellent series.  My only complaint is I wind up craving pizza while reading these!

And to round it out, a couple of books I recently devoured in a short time.

Out of the Fog by Clarissa Ross is an engaging gothic romance with a bit of suspense thrown in.  It was published in 1970 and the writing is to the point, making the pages fly by.

The Murder of Roger Ackroyd by Agatha Christie.  This comes in at just under 300 pages or about seven hours in audio.  However, I will say that I was so taken in by this mystery – and Richard Armitage’s narration of the audiobook – that I found myself unable to stop listening.