Tastemaker Salon: An interview with Hailey Conroy (@hconroybooks)
Why the first 15 pages of a novel are crucial, ARC FOMO, and books as the great equalizer
Hailey is an awesome book blogger from North Carolina, whose Instagram aesthetic I would best describe as “vibrantly cool” plus her dog Roxy Rey is severely cute. She’s got great taste in books (as you can see from the stack above), spanning thrillers to romance to fantasy. Check her out!
What's your bookstagram handle?
When did you start your bookstagram?
May 2021
How did you get started/what made you get started?
I had been reading 80-100 books a year [Editor’s note: OMG teach me!] and going to book festivals for a while, so when I started Instagram in 2021, this seemed like a logical next step.
How many books a year do you read?
100 [Editor’s note: !!]
What are your favorite genres?
All of them! I really dabble in every genre. Thrillers, mysteries, fantasy, and contemporary fiction are probably my most read, but I love a good romance, memoir, lit fic, historical fic, self-help, YA, or sci-fi novel.
Who are some of your favorite authors?
Ruth Ware, Riley Sager, Emily Henry, V.E. Schwab, Blake Crouch, Becky Albertalli, R.F. Kuang, Alex Michaelides, Grady Hendrix, Sarah J. Maas, Brené Brown, Ashley Poston, Steven Rowley. (I tried to narrow it down haha.)
What makes a book stand out to you?
Deep character POV, stellar dialogue.
How do you decide which books to read, and then which books to feature?
I feature a lot of ARCs on my page. I typically veer towards requesting ARCs for authors whose books I’ve already read, but if I see a flood of bookstagrammers posting about a new book they love in my feed, I will order it. (Because I can’t handle the FOMO haha.)
What kind of book are you dying to read? (I don't mean a book that exists—but if you could design the perfect book you're dying to read, what would it be/what kind of elements would it have?)
I love a great witchy book or contemporary fantasy. I feel like a lot of these come out in the fall, but I am here for reading them year-round. We need more. (Think VenCo, The Change, Weyward.) I also generally love books that can rip my heart out and make me ugly cry.
What's the book you recommend the most often and why?
The Guncle by Steven Rowley. That book has everything and I feel like readers from all genres fall in love with it. I laughed, I cried, I cheered. Plus, Rowley is simply the best human.
What’s a book you love that you don't see getting enough love on social media?
Do you ever DNF books? And if so, at what point/what causes you to DNF?
All the time. If the book doesn’t grab me within the first 15 pages, I’m done. Sometimes if it’s an author I already love, I will wait a little longer.
What’s your favorite thing about bookstagram?
The people! Bookstagrammers are some of the most passionate, caring, kind, supportive, bookish, and brilliant people out there. They have big hearts and even bigger TBRs. I have become close friends with people across the U.S. and beyond! While many of us are still planning that group chat meetup, I have met several bookstagrammers in-person. They are as fabulous IRL as they are online.
I know a lot of people talk about social media being a toxic space, but I have never felt that way about Bookstagram. When I open my feed, I am flooded with book recs and fangirl level excitement.
And at the end of the day, books are the great equalizer. We can’t all book that fancy vacation or have that gorgeous expensive kitchen. But whether it’s through a bookstore, library, thrift store, LFL, or Kindle, a new book, used book, ebook, or audiobook, we can all access and enjoy books. [Editor’s note: Well said!]
Backlist beauties
Recommending: The Sundial by Shirley Jackson
Year published: 1958
I just read (and loved) How Can I Help You, Laura Sims’s excellent slow-burn psychological suspense novel set in a library. That book is a lot of fun, in no small part due to its literary references, most specifically We Have Always Lived in the Castle, arguably Shirley Jackson’s masterpiece. (Even if you haven’t read Shirley Jackson—and you should—you know her work: The Haunting of Hill House spawned multiple film and tv adaptations, not to mention permanently altered the template for haunted house stories; and her short story The Lottery is essentially the backbone of The Hunger Games).
I love all of Jackson’s work—Castle, in particular, is an all-time favorite—but I wanted to recommend her gothic, apocalyptic novel The Sundial, mostly because I want more people to read it so we can talk about it together. It’s hard to delve into all the amazing, hilarious parts of this novel—which is, indeed, both very dark and very, very funny—but the overarching story is that at a family gathering after the death (possible murder) of one of the family scions, one of the Halloran family members becomes convinced she knows the exact date of the apocalypse. Not only that, but only the people gathered at the Halloran mansion will be spared. It’s an eerie, atmospheric, funny read that plays into gothic and apocalyptic tropes as much as it skewers them (not to mention the privileged narcissism of the Uber-wealthy)—let me know if you pick it up!