This is my "everyone should read this" book. Even if you can't use everything in it, it'll get you fired up to get deep into your own practice.

My gold standard of all witch books I have read, and it's in a 60-ish page zine.

Here's a fun one: This book is bad, and I recommend you read it. It was published in 2001, and holy shit does it show its age. It's so obvious in its faults that its almost cartoonish. Now, it's a bad book because it's a product of its time, not because the author is a shithead (I mean, I don't think. I didn't look him up too closely). If you ever want to find a bad witch book that will teach you how to pick apart bad witch books, this is an excellent one to teach you how to do that. I mean there's alien abductions and Lemuria. It announces its problems with fanfare. Also it's fun to read this man telling you what the internet is.

Absolutely an excellent one to have on your shelf as a reference. It's a little too repetitive to read straight through, but you're gonna want this on hand when you need to look up some down-and-dirty folk magic.

I love this book. I hate this guy. I want to recommend his book to everyone. I want to throw a drink in his face. Great for building a foundation of spirit work, just keep in mind that this guy can't talk about anyone but Hekate and St Cyprian. Remember that his examples for them are meant to be tailored to your own entities, and you'll be fine. Also slap him for me if you ever meet him, everything about his tone and personality is insufferable.

Another book I would recommend to everyone. Up there with Backwoods Witchcraft (though I'd still put that one just a scooch ahead of this). Lost touch with your craft lately? This book'll get you right back in it.

I am obligated to be grouchy about this one, because I have it on good authority that the author (Don Martin, who seems to have dropped the pen name Fire Lyte) stole a bunch of stuff uncredited from Tumblr. I can't give it a good rating because of that. However, I also can't give it a *bad* rating, because it was (unfortunately) a great book. It is well written, kept my attention, well-researched (and well-credited as long as it's a source deemed 'worthy' of citation...). I do take issue with the title and the use of the word 'dabbler' throughout the book. The original Dabbler's Week was designed for someone who was not certain if they wanted to practice witchcraft but wanted to try it out. Don's book is written for a beginner who is already committed to practicing. So for a beginner, this book outlines many of the less-often-discussed-in-books stuff about witchcraft spaces, and in a wonderful way that explains why not just what. Cultural appropriation is bad -- and here are real world examples of how it harms people. Yes, you can make up your own spells -- but here's why you shouldn't ingest herbs just because a dubiously researched book told you to. Yes you can buy fancy tools, but spending money is not a substitute for skill. This book is an excellent primer on how to navigate witchy spaces, not just witchcraft, and it's an excellent one to have on your bookshelf. But I won't tell anyone if you download a PDF, because Don sure doesn't have a problem with stealing.

My notes on this one include the phrase "looking for ghosts in the gaslamps". She's constantly trying to come up with Super Duper Spooky reasons for everything in her life. If this woman has been cursed as many times as she says she has, she sure is doing something wrong. But the methods in the book are good to know. While you may not think you'll ever need to use what you learn, there's a reason the airline covers what to do in case of plane crash while you're still on the ground. Read it, learn from it, put it on the shelf and hope you never need it.

This was not the right book to read immediately after finishing Queering Your Craft, and I am not its target audience. The House Witch is for a spiritual-but-not-religious cis-woman who is the spiritual-head-of-the-household, spends her days housekeeping and cleaning, and teaches her 2.5 children to say their prayers to the abstract Divine every night before turning on their essential oil humidifier for bedtime. That's... not me.

I would have been far more interested to read this book if it was more of a personal memoir. There are plenty of moments where the author is seemingly bursting at the seams to tell the reader about her own personal practice, but is confined either by herself or her publisher to keep all the information general and vague. There is a ridiculous amount of page filler in this book, nonsense fluff that serves no purpose other than bulking up the page count. I could not get a grasp on how this book was organized, with projects and spells seemingly coming out of nowhere in unrelated chapters, rather than in the chapters that are actually about those topics.

In the end, there were at least some nuggets of information that I was able to latch onto and learn from or that prompted ideas about improving my own craft, but they were so few and far between.

I'm mostly neutral on this one, vaguely positive. It's more like a guidebook pointing you toward other magical texts, divided into sections such as "Chaos Magic", "Spell Books and Grimoires", and "Ceremonial Magic" among others. It does a good job of giving a general overview and recommending sources should you wish to dive in further. It's fine. That being said, I do have to shout out this quote from the acknowledgements: "I want to thank the trees on which this book is printed, and the workers who typeset, printed, bound, and transported it. Nothing would exist without you." We love to see it.

This book is a one trick pony, and bless it for that. While it is dated and there's some attitudes that need adjusting and appropriation that's not cute, I do appreciate that it is here to do one thing, and that's what it does. It isn't here to teach you the basics, but to give you a single serving of a single subject. While it is certainly not a perfect book, I do wish that more books would follow this pattern. It also does a decent job of taking older spells and updating them to be accessible to modern usage, while still maintaining the vibe of the original spell. I give this one a "Sure why not" out of 10.

"At least for the time being, you'll have to live with being constantly offended by the ignorance of people who would never think of insulting blacks, Jews, or other folks so outrageously as they do witches." With that quote, I returned this book to the library and gave my entire device a spiritual cleansing to remove all tarnish of that bullshit. This is not a place of honor.

The one that started it all for me. This book was so bad, it forced me to deconstruct all the parts of it and figure out why it was so terrible. It was the most helpful thing for my craft, and helped me identify some things of questionable origin that had leaked into my practice so that I could weed them out. It remains one of the worst witchcraft books I've read, but was an invaluable experience.

The very barest of basics. There is nothing in this book that you couldn't learn from some beginner Tumblr posts, but to have them together in one cute little whimsical place is nice. This is one that I would gift to a friend who was interested in witchcraft. Short and sweet.

An interesting read that taught me more about anarchism than about paganism, but it did clear up a few things for me on the anarchy subject, so ultimately it was a slight net positive.

Queering Your Craft is better at Queer than it is at Craft, but it's still one that you should read. There are a few red flags in this book, such as a lot more gender-binary stuff than I would have expected from this author, not to mention their insistence that Easter was stolen from the so-called ancient Pagan holiday "Eostre", which is just straight-up not true, and we need to stop passing that story around. I do, however, appreciate the queer lens that the author brings to witchcraft. While I didn't get a lot of good witchy information from the book, I was very glad to have read it. It changed how I saw every book that I read after this one, and I am better for it. Overall, I'm very glad to have read it, I am very glad that it exists, I hope that many more books follow along in Queering Your Craft's footsteps, and I hope that they improve on it.

+1 to its score for a new witch, -1 to its score if you know what you're doing. Rebel Witch starts off excellent, with the author giving the reader permission to break the perceived rules of witchcraft and have the freedom to experiment and find what works for you. It's very good advice to give, but the problem is that that's all there is. There are no spells, no in-depth instructions, nothing to help someone new start practicing, and nothing new for an advanced witch to consider.

That being said, it IS a book that I would give to a brand new witch. For the newbie, my advice would be this: Get a notebook and pen, and be sure to do the homework at the end of the chapters. Fully read Parts 1 and 3, but skim through the repetitive Part 2 and only stop to read what is interesting. Don't let this book be your only source of information; find a practicing witch who can answer questions. Treat Rebel Witch not like an instruction manual, but like a travel pamphlet, and you'll be fine.

While it was marginally better than The House Witch, it's still not good. The organizational problems from House Witch were better in this one, yet it was still filled with the same prosperity gospel, ableism, gender binary, borderline tradwife stuff that made me want to throw The House Witch out the window. While this one did give me a few things to think about, the positives did not outweigh the negatives. Also 13 of the 24 spells contained within this book are nearly word-for-word copied either in or from Skye Alexander's book The Modern Witchcraft Spell Book. I'm still not 100% sure who copied who.

This is a collection of essays from different authors. So, here's the thing. I know why I stopped reading when I got to the one that for serious used the words "alpha-male" and talked about the crime of men being submissive in bed, but for the life of me I don't understand how I got past the second essay where the author recommended using a swastika as a protective symbol.

I really wanted to like this one. I had been excited about it for so long. My family originated in Cornwall! This should be the book for me! I truly cannot remember anything I read from it. I spent six months reading it, and I had eight pages of notes. For reference, I have seven pages of notes on Alex Wrekk's 60-page zine Brainscan #33 DIY Witchery. This was a true nothingburger of a book, and I'm very sad about that.

It wasn't until the last five or so pages of this book that I figured out why I wasn't vibing with it: the author is coming from a perspective of Witches As Otherworldly Creatures, and I come from a perspective of Witches Are Just People. Her many examples of witches being naturally good listeners, or better at empathy than others, or that other people will naturally gravitate toward a witch because of the magnetism of that power didn't sit right with me in a way that would take longer than a blurb to explain. But while I often found myself disagreeing with her conclusions, reading Weave the Liminal did give me plenty of things to think about, and a lot of opportunity to come to my own conclusion about things I otherwise wouldn't have come up with on my own. I told the witch guild that it felt like having a very intelligent discussion with someone that you fundamentally disagree with. I am better for having read this book, even if I don't necessarily endorse all that was in it. [More in-depth review on my blog]

Witch in Darkness was a nice step up from the previous Rebel Witch. It was allowed to be more specific in its scope, and I think it's better for it. I also, unfortunately, found myself in the target audience for this one while I read it. There were definitely tears. Again, like Rebel Witch, you'll get the most out of it if you do the homework at the end of the chapters. This time, it comes with tarot spreads in addition to the journaling prompts, which was nice. I didn't get to try all of them, but I found it to be a nice inclusion. This book is also less fluffy than Rebel Witch was, though it still maintains a little bit of that tone, it does not feel patronizing this time around. In between her first book and this one, Kelly-Ann lost her brother, so she is not coming to the reader from a comfortable place on her armchair; she is going through it as well.

This one was actually good at both Witch and Paranormal. Its very specific in its usefulness and deals with a lot of the logistics of being a paranormal investigator, but a lot of the stuff in this book could be useful if you have a particularly pesky theater ghost, for example. If it sounds interesting to you, give it a go, but your life isn't incomplete if you skip it.

Better at Activism than it is at Craft. Honestly it's the same as always when it comes to these witch books written from a specific perspective: it can either do the perspective well or the witchcraft well, but rarely both. This one is not a witchy book about activism, it's an activism book written by a witch. It was nice to read that perspective, but any of the witchcraft in this book is covered better and more thoroughly in other books.

Didn't hate it. Didn't love it. I wouldn't give it to a new witch, but an advanced witch would find nothing revolutionary in here. It sits in a weird valley of law-of-attraction and Wicca-with-the-label-torn-off that just doesn't do it for me. At one point, the author says to use a full fluid ounce of essential oils for a spell?? She does not mention dilution? HELLO? That is so much essential oil??? NO THANK YOU?! Just overall weird vibes from this book. And I don't appreciate being told that I am "making love to the universe" whether I know it or not.