Reading, Writing, and Me

The Benefactors  by Wendy Erskine Overview: Going by the summary on the back of the book, this is a story about three Belfast mothers who are brought together by each of their sons being accused of sexual assault by the same girl after an incident at a houseparty. While this is certainly one component of the book, I question if it is truly the heart of the book. Clearly, though, this is a hard book to boil down to its plot because the happenings of the book are somewhat irrelevant. I guess I would call this a book about four Belfast families with voices incorporated from every inch this story reaches. It is a book that addresses the realities of sexual assault and reporting a case, but it is also a book about grief, about family and the many unconventional forms it can take, about how perspective is warped and ideals are lost. It is, maybe, mostly, a book about parental love and how complicated that can be. Overall: 4.5 This is a difficult book to pin down. It’s brilliant, but it...

Welcome to the final 2025 book ranking list! We've almost made it to 2026! There will be more in this series of end/beginning of the year posts. I'll be rolling out my reading stats and a post about the 2026 books I'm incredibly excited about as a way to launch into the new year. I'm also going to reflect on my 2025 reading goals and set some for 2026, so plenty of New Year's content coming your way.  2025 was a weird reading year for me. I found that in 2023 and 2024, I was much more excited about more of the new releases, and I had a lot of new release reads that really stuck with me. I was wondering if this was more an issue with me and my headspace this year, though when I sat down to make this list, I realized that all of my favorite reads of the year that really did set off those sparks for me were 2024 releases with a handful arriving earlier. I think, like I said on my 2025 new release only list that maybe this was just a kind of dip year. I'll happily t...

Nonfiction makes up a huge part of my reading each year (currently sitting at 48% of my annual total), but I don't really talk about it with you guys. Sometimes, if I manage to make a monthly wrap-up, I'll share mini reviews, but I just don't generally feel like they have a spot on here unless there's something particularly special going on (for those, see the links on the titles). A lot of this comes from the fact that I consume almost all the nonfiction I read on audio, almost more like a podcast, so I don't feel like I've truly engaged with the books deeply enough to review them in a helpful way. (This is not to say audiobooks are a lesser form of reading, just that I know I'm easily distracted and liable to miss things). It's kind of my way of having "just for fun" reading that's for me instead of being for me, for my writing, and for this blog like fiction ends up being labored by. So don't expect frequent nonfiction reviews from m...

Simple Passion  by Annie Ernaux  The shock I had when I saw Goodreads classifies this as fiction. I'd read a bit of Exteriors  for a class in an excerpt, and I considered Ernaux a nonfiction writer, a literary nonfiction writer. Not even really auto fiction because it feels like she liberally inserts herself factually into the narratives that are pulled unaltered from her life. This affair really happened... I'd gotten into this book hearing it talked about by one of my classmates so much that I got curious, and that was a great way to sink in. A slight idea that the prose would be good from my previous skim and then an effusive reverence for the writer as the only precursors. Usually, I'll give you a summary of the book before we get started, but I'm not sure how to do that here except to say this is a slim volume about her affair with the married man. Nothing in the summary speaks to what makes it compelling, though. So, instead, I'm going to give you two quotes I...

Personally—and I've seen this expressed a bit around the bookish internet and various podcasts I listen to so I don't think I'm entirely alone—2025 has felt like a bit of a let down of a new release year. There are years where I nearly every new release I pick up sparkles, and this year, I really struggled to find a 2025 release that really captured my attention the way that, say, the 2024 slate of releases did. Last year, I was struggling to narrow down the list of books from the year to make my final list. This year, it's truly only the top two that I fully recommend without reservations. There were plenty of interesting books this year (I'm about to tell you about nine of them), there were just very few that wholeheartedly captured my heart or got me extremely excited. Hopefully, 2026 is another uptick year (more on the books I'm already anticipating in a minute).  I feel like my best reads of 2025 really came from backlist titles, which you'll see in a ...

What I'd Rather Not Think About  by Jenna Posthuma (translated by Sarah Timmer Harvey) Overview: Posthuma has written a book with a quite simple mandate at face value. The novel chronicles grappling with an incredibly deep grief as a sister works through the loss of her twin brother to suicide. There's not much to say in a summary as the magic of this book is purely in the execution, the use of language, the framing. There's so much beauty and insight into grief to be found here but an equal amount is invested into illuminating life. I had a friend criticize a book as "death affirming" recently, and this is one of those books that's the antidote to that.  The novel follows the sister from childhood through around age thirty-six or seven and the observations that come from that period of growth, of becoming an adult. There's no proper way to encapsulate this for you. You just have to read it. Overall: 5 When you're truly caught off guard by a certain ki...