Reading, Writing, and Me

I will admit, I was not on my book blogging game this summer. Really, this year overall hasn't been my strongest when it comes to my blogging or reading life. I read a fair bit over the winter, got to have fun visiting bookshops in New York in the spring, and got in a few good library hauls over the summer, but I knew that this was my last summer in my hometown, and I wanted to spend every possible second with my friends and family. That meant reading fell by the wayside, and even though I've had reviews collecting dust on here for months, I rarely thought to actually post them! Which is 100% on me because I couldn't take the last step to publish the work I'd already done. Thank you all for keeping the blog active and afloat with how much you've dug into the back catalog. It's so much fun to see what posts you all like most. Now that my life is structured around school (and school that will require plenty of reading at that), I'm hoping I'll be much more...

The Mess We're In  by Annie McManus Overview: Orla moves from Dublin to London, into a house with a school friend and the friend's brother's band. This creates a lively environment for her to get used to a new city and a helpful in as Orla attempts to build a career in music. Back home, her family is crumbling, and Orla struggles to find her footing when the home base she's always known isn't waiting for her anymore. Overall: 3 Characters: 2  All of these characters are ideas of people, but they're never elevated to have any animating force. Orla and the book's biggest problem is that she has almost no agency. Everything happens to Orla without her input and the most she ever reacts is to get a bit mad and wound up. She doesn't express much depth of feeling and seems generally indifferent to her life. She often loses her memory to capacious amounts of drugs, and while some fairly traumatic things happen because of this, she doesn't seem bothered in t...

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...