Reading, Writing, and Me

Supper Club  by Lara Williams Overview: The supper club is a chance to reclaim power. It's permission to take up space in every way, to be loud and obnoxious, to gorge on all of life's pleasures without guilt. It's a framework 30-year-old Roberta desperately needs to cope with her past. In a narrative that bounces between the present day and Roberta's university life, we see how deeply the people and events of her college years impact her sense of self and the ways she interfaces with the world. Overall: 4 Characters: 5 It's the characters that make this book, which makes sense considering that it is more than anything an epic character study. Roberta is unfolded in many layers from flashbacks to bad past encounters and relationships that shaped her complex feelings around love and sex to the insecurities that cling to her friendships. She's also very much framed within the contexts of different worlds. Compared to Stevie, a painter and devout artist , Roberta c

It's been way too long since I've been to a proper book event. If I'm being super honest, I was lured into this because I was interested in going but also because I'd get extra credit in my English class this semester for going to a literary event. I love books, but I'm also a homebody, so sometimes I need the extra push. After being introduced to Zadie Smith's work through an essay we read in class and then picking up her novel Swing Time , it felt like fait that Skylight Books was hosting an event with her a short walk away in Little Tokyo.  I got to the theater almost an hour early because, much to my surprise, Smith was doing a signing after the event, and your place in line was determined by how early you checked in. So many authors that have big, ticketed events at theaters just pre-sign books for attendees, which is totally understandable, but it was cool to see Smith take a different approach. There were pre-signed books at check-in, and it being Los Ang

I've been trying to think about some posts that will fit in my schedule but be different than the book reviews I'm always posting an be a little more fun and personal. I came across @ readwithlindsey_' s post on Instagram responding to the My Reading Habits tag, and I loved the questions, so I decided to do the tag on here to have a little more space to elaborate on some of my current reading habits as a 20 year old college senior almost 7 years into book blogging.  my current read:  This is a particularly funny question at the moment because I'm taking an English class at university for the first time. Sure, I've taken a writing class but not an English class where it's centered around reading books. So that's greatly inflated the number of books I'm reading at the moment.  Normally, I read two books at a time – a "print" fiction book, whether it's on my Kindle or actually in print, and a nonfiction audiobook. Two totally different worlds.

Old Enough  by Haley Jakobson Overview: Sav is forming a new identity at her arts school. She's found a queer community after coming out as bi, and she's constructed a life and a sense of self that she's actually proud of. The only issue is that her childhood best friend, Izzie, is always ready to remind her of her drunk, party girl high school past and a trauma they all want to forget. When Izzie announces she's getting married, Sav is pulled back into her old world more intensely than ever and forces her to confront realities of her past in a way she's spent years avoiding. Overall: 3.5 Characters: 3.5  I like Sav. She's clearly trying her best even during the moments she fumbles and hurts herself and those around her. It's obvious from the start that she's coping with a lot, and what exactly happened to her is slowly revealed throughout the book. She's grappling with how to reconcile the person she wants to be and the person she's been in the

The Woman Destroyed  by Simone de Beauvoir  Overview: The book was first published in 1967, so it's by far the oldest book I've read by choice since I read Jane Austen in middle school. Classics assigned in grade school largely left a bad taste in my mouth, and I've never figured out how to decipher which ones actually deserve to stand the test of time. (If you'd like to give me more recommendations, I liked Rebecca , Pride and Prejudice , and Frankenstein  most). I have a weird relationship with things made before the '90s unless they're from the 1800s because I have no real context for what I think they'll sound like or feel like. A serious failure of the education system is that every history class I've ever taken stopped around 1900 and never covered any recent history besides random, isolated events. Since The Woman Destroyed  has suddenly become trendy amongst the lit fic online communities, I figured I'd hop on the bandwagon and give it a try.

This Time Tomorrow  by Emma Straub  Overview: On Alice's 40th birthday, she falls into a time loop. She goes from being a single woman with her own apartment and a job at her old high school to waking up in her childhood bedroom 16 again. Most importantly, when she wakes up, her dad is younger again too. Instead of in the hospital, attached to a million wires and unconscious, he's vibrant and wacky and the dad she remembers again. As she falls somewhere between Freaky Friday  and Groundhog Day , Alice becomes determined to wrinkle time enough to avoid her father still being in the hospital when she makes it back to the present day. Overall: 4 Characters: 4 Alice is the protagonist of the novel, but Alice is almost multiple characters within the novel. She's her 40 year old consciousness through all the ups and downs, but as she encounters new situations both as her kid self and the different possibilities she bounces into as an adult, her sensibilities shift. She's able