Reading, Writing, and Me

Tilt  by Emma Pattee Overview: Annie is standing in the crib section of the Ikea warehouse when the big earthquake hits. It destroys the city around her. She has no purse, no phone, no car, and she's about to have a baby any day. The novel follows Annie as she attempts to reconnect with her husband who is on the other side of Portland. She learns about herself, disaster, the bonds you can quickly form with others, and her altered perspective on motherhood. Overall: 4.5 Characters: 5  Annie is an interesting character, somewhat filtered by the idea that she's telling the book not as a running inner monologue but in speaking to her unborn child. An unborn child she, admittedly, has mixed feelings about. Annie is an artist who never got to fully realize her dreams despite throwing herself headfirst into them. She feels backed into a corner by life, and suddenly, the earthquake cracks her world open and makes her reevaluate. Annie is not in a very happy spot at the beginning of th...

On The Calculation of Volume I  by Solvej Balle translated by Barbara J. Haveland Overview: Tara is stuck in a time loop. More precisely, she's stuck in November 18. It's not a true Groundhog Day because, while those around her reset, Tara does not. The burn on her hand from the first November 18 stays with her and heals through the successive November 18ths. Some items stay with her, are consumed across the same days repeated. Others disappear. As the book chronicles her year stuck in the time loop, Tara experiments with different approaches to living the same day over and over and tries to figure out the rules of the rip in space/time she's fallen through. Overall: 4  Characters: 4 There's not much to say for the characters here. Despite living intimately with Tara, we don't know her all that much beyond the confines of her predicament, which becomes her sole focus. We know she has a solid marriage to Thomas and that she moved to France from Denmark as a student. ...

This has been a slow reading summer for me. Perhaps, somewhat, a backlash to the fact that I spent all of winter reading and writing without doing much else. Summer has been about the else—work, parties, random fun, swimming. I've read a little. In June, I finished re-reading  Conversations with Friends , started re-reading Normal People , and listened to Kate McKean's book, Write Through It . I'd subscribed to her newsletter for a long time, so it was exciting to see the finished project of the book. Since I've spent nearly a decade in the online literary world, I didn't find anything mind-blowing there, but it's a great primer for new writers to condense a lot of good information into one place. In July, just like I made a concerted effort to start running again, I put thought into reading and writing. In June and early July, I'd been plagued by horrible writer's block. The book that I'd done five drafts of still wasn't working for some inexpli...

Sorry I've abandoned you all for the summer! I'll talk more about it in my July wrap-up, but I wanted to just put that out there. I've posted a few reviews that I've had ready to go for months when I can remember to. I've definitely dropped the ball, but thank you all for continuing to read my posts and share them with your friends through this time. I've been book blogging since 2017, so I'm trying to give myself the grace that taking breaks when I'm not feeling it is how this blog has stayed alive so long.  Today, we're playing a new game. I'm bringing a habit I have after library trips to the blog. I find it hard to really figure out if I'm going to like the book at the library. If I have a ton of time, I'll bring a stack to the couch and read the first few pages of a book to decide if I want to take it home, but usually, I'm rushing through, tossing familiar or interesting looking books in my tote to sift through later. I'll s...

Common Decency  by Susannah Dickey Overview: Lily and  Siobhán live in the same Belfast apartment complex. Lily works in the hospital gift shop and volunteers for the cancer charity nearby to pass the time. She's struggling to navigate the world without  her mom, who was also her best friend.  Siobhán has bounced through a few apartments and from working in a hotel to finally landing a coveted teaching position. While she's learning how to manage a classroom of kids, she's also navigating an affair with a married man. Lily escalates their relationship beyond neighbors when stalkerish tendencies arise and she becomes desperate to get closer to  Siobhán. Overall: 3 Characters: 3  Here's the fundamental problem with the book. It's a dual narrative where both voices sound the same. Not just the same generic voice—no. The same extremely hyper-specific voice that utilizes the world's strangest vocabulary words shoehorned in left and right. While this would've sti...

Perfection  by Vincenzo Latronico translated by Sophie Hughes  Overview: Anna and Tom moved to Berlin to work their remote design jobs acquired through their childhoods spent navigating the burgeoning internet. They have a relatively perfect life, a nice apartment, a serviceable group of friends. But there's something still dull about their lives, and all the fellow expats in their lives eventually move on. So they start to move around too, chasing different, more than they have. The pursuit of perfection will ultimately rip up their lives. Overall: 4 I don't feel like I can write a typical review for this bite-sized novel. It's only 125 pages with a scaled back type-set and font on the bigger side. I easily read it in a day without trying all that hard. It was the perfect book to get back into reading after a long gap, but the opening did almost make me put it down. The first prelude spends pages describing the apartment in a great degree of detail, and I had to flip a few...