Reading, Writing, and Me

Dinner Party  by Sarah Gilmartin Overview: Kate's life has been marked by grief. First, her father passed away when she was a young teenager. Then her twin sister died at seventeen. The novel takes on the impact of the grief and her family's sensibilities on Kate from her childhood through middle age. The novel opens and closes with two anniversary dinner parties a year apart. In between, chapters take place in 1999, 2016, and 2018 to build out the full scope of Kate's life and her family. Overall: 4 Characters: 5  All of the characters feel incredibly real, deep, and believable. There's an impressive mastery in creating each character's complexity as a person as well as designating their role in the family. Everyone is much more than how they first appear on paper. I don't often mention trigger warnings in reviews anymore, but I will note that a large part of Kate's arc has to do with developing an eating disorder and an unhealthy relationship with alcohol ...

The first week of March, I took a whirlwind trip with my grandmother to New York City. We both were visiting Brooklyn for the first time, specifically to see A Streetcar Named Desire  at BAM. But, for the two and a half days we were in the city, I wanted to see as many of the amazing bookstores I've seen on Instagram as possible. This, of course, shattered my book buying ban, but for a good cause. I visited stores across three different Brooklyn bookstores and bought a new book at nearly every store. So here's my diary of a bookstore trip.  Fort Greene(ish) The Center For Fiction The Center For Fiction looks as impressive in real life as it does on Instagram with the towering book cases that rise to their extremely high ceilings. It's a sight to behold for any fiction lover. More accessibly, they have a column of staff picks and tables for new fiction (divided by paperback and hardcover) as well as nonfiction. They also, strangely, in my view, have a table of UK editions at...

Jane and Dan at the End of the World  by Colleen Oakley (on sale March 11) Overview: Jane and Dan's marriage is on the rocks by their nineteenth wedding anniversary. When Dan wins a reservation to the most exclusive restaurant in Southern California, they break their tradition of going to Macaroni Grill to have a date night surrounded by celebrities and billionaires. Jane's plan to ask for a divorce makes the dinner tense, but this is escalated when the restaurant is taken hostage by terrorists. As the night goes on, Jane starts to realize this terror plot feels exceedingly familiar as she starts to put the pieces together back to her only published novel from six years ago. Overall: 4 Characters: 4 Jane's voice is the strongest in the book. The chapters alternate between her perspective and Dan's, and a part of me wishes that she'd just stuck to Jane's because it feels so much more embodied than Dan's. Still, that balance doesn't really detract from the...

I'm going to be on planes a bit more than I'm used to this year, so I thought that I'd start a fun series around the books that I've downloaded to make sure I can't possibly run out of entertainment on the plane. For context, I'm flying to New York to see A Streetcar Named Desire at BAM and see my grandmother for 2 days in the city, four days gone with flying, so the time in the air will be a lot of the trip! From where I live, it's about 4.5 hours there and 5 hours back (I guess the winds are bad?), so it's not an insignificant amount of time I'll have to entertain myself. I am glad that I managed to get direct flights, though, to lower the stress of having multiple connections go right. With airport time, I'll have over 10 hours to dedicate to reading if I can focus for that long, so I wanted to make sure my Kindle was stuffed with options.  I know this number of books is total overkill, and I won't be able to read anything close to all of ...

I wasn't going to write a February wrap-up this month because January's was so long , I'm not sure we need one every month, and I've spent most of February in a real slump. While that has somewhat regulated in the last two weeks, I just haven't been as excited about reading and the bookish internet in general (see also, content creation on the current platforms we have at our disposal) in February as I was last month. Well, it's the morning of February 28th and the sun is shining for the third day in a row, so I suddenly feel like talking about my reading life again. We're going to do this month a bit differently, though. Think of it more like a reading journal entry rather than the typical wrap-up style that's a bit more intensive.  I was surprised to discover that in February I read 13 books. That came out way higher than I expected, and I've realized that even when I feel like I'm moving through a book like molasses, it's usually like four...

Kairos  by Jenny Erpenbeck Overview: Katharina is 19 in East Berlin in the late 1980s when she catches the eye of a man on the bus and proceeds to fall into a complicated affair. It turns out this man is Hans, a married man ten years older than Katharina's own father. They begin to see each other in secret, when Hans's wife and son were away, and the affair expands to cover years of Katharina's life. At the onset of the book, Katharina, now a full-grown adult, is looking back on this affair by digging through the artifacts she has of her and Hans. This acclaimed novel, translated from German, won the International Booker Prize in 2024.  Overall: 4 Thoughts: You might notice I'm writing this review a little differently because I truly don't know how to review Kairos , and the conventional number rating system isn't working in my brain in regards to this book. I am glad I read the book. I can't really say I enjoyed it, but I'm glad I read it. I feel like I...