Reading, Writing, and Me

One of my major goals for the blog this year was to chat with more authors again , so it's been beyond my wildest dreams to have the chance to interview Alison Espach , author of one of my favorite books of this year, The Wedding People . You might be familiar with the novel from it being a Read with Jenna  pick or its popularity on bookstagram, or you might have just stumbled upon it in the bookstore and been drawn to its stunning cover. I've had so many wonderful conversations with other readers who loved the book, so it was awesome to then get to talk about it with Alison herself and get some insight into how the book was written, her tip for querying writers, how writing looks both the same and different 3 books into her career, and what books she's been loving lately!  If you're not familiar with The Wedding People  yet, you're in for a treat. Check out my review to hear about why I loved it, but I'll also add the back cover copy to give you some context

All Fours  by Miranda July Overview: This novel is about a sorta-famous woman who is also a mother, a woman facing the realities of aging, and someone intensely battling a feeling of stasis. The novel begins with the premise that this woman will drive from LA to New York, in some kind of a bid to either find or change herself. Instead, she only makes it 30 minutes from home before settling into a roadside motel where she strikes up an affair with a fan who works at a rental car office down the road. In the second half of the book, the protagonist reckons with the findings of her botched roadtrip while reemerged in the confines of her normal life.  All Fours  questions the realities of modern life that are taken as given.  Overall: 3 Characters: 3  There are so many interesting ideas here, but July plays a strange game of withholding with the reader that never allows a proximity that makes the novel feel worth reading or the main character one you can fully invest in. There's a weir

In August, I got back on the reading train. If you noticed that I didn't have a post for July's Wrap-Up, you can probably guess that my reading (and blogging) month didn't go exactly to plan. Luckily, August has felt much more fulfilling on a creative front, and part of that means doing more reading. Beyond books, I ended up joining a critique group, registered for a writer's conference in my hometown, and made steps towards both submitting more short stories and progressing on my novel draft. Part of my career choices post-grad were heavily made to prioritize writing, and I'm trying to honor that in both my reading and writing. I read a new favorite book this month as well as some others I'm greatly enjoying. I read a recommendation from a friend and a book that sparked Twitter drama months ago. It was a varied reading month and hopefully one that will be repeated.  stats. August felt like a strong reading month coming out of July where I worked a ton, got sick

Daddy  by Emma Cline Thoughts:  I want to start this off with the preface that I'm not a huge Emma Cline fan in general. I really didn't like The Girls , and I liked The Guest  enough. But there's a certain charm to her writing that intrigues me, nonetheless. So, since I wanted to read more short stories this year, I picked up Cline's anthology with collected stories from esteemed literary magazines like the Paris Review, Granata, and the New Yorker.  And there are many great stories here. I'm impressed with the quality of the writing and the craft evident across the collection. Writing a short story is hard. It's an incredibly difficult form to get right. And Cline does it in story after story in this anthology covering a range of topics and places–mostly different looks at various people's unique and privileged lives, a peak behind the curtain. Some of these stories are directly   embedded in these worlds, while other stories brush with it from an outsider

No Judgement: Essays  by Lauren Oyler Thoughts:  I enjoy cultural criticism. I think it's a shame it's dying. I enjoy reading album reviews and book reviews. I'll even read criticism about movies I never intend to watch. I find people's various perspectives interesting. By the same token, I also read amateur reviews. I just like taking lots of different opinions and squaring them with my own. I wanted to be a music journalist. In many ways, I started the book inclined to agree with Oyler's thoughts on internet and literary topics. But she makes herself incredibly difficult to fully align with or take seriously in these essays. Most of her stances are mushy to start, indiscernible by the end of the overly long essays. Her sentence level writing makes the book a slog to read at times and casts her more pretentious comments in even worse light. There's a certain standard one has to reach to have solid ground to complain from, and No Judgement  is built on sand. Tha

I Could Live Here Forever  by Hanna Halperin Overview: Leah starts over in Wisconsin on uneven footing. While she's gotten into one of the most prestigious MFA programs in the country, she struggles with feeling like she's good enough compared to her cohort of writers. As she's finding herself as a writer, she also embarks on a tumultuous relationship that defines her time in Madison more than the program itself. Leah falls head over heels for Charlie, but as she learns about his heroin addiction, she realizes the relationship is far more complicated than it seemed on the surface. Overall: 4 Characters: 4 I liked Leah. I enjoyed spending the book with her. But from a storytelling perspective, she seemed underutilized. Halperin hints at Leah's own major character flaws, the way that she's happy to use people in relationships for her own selfish gain, consciously or not. But this doesn't get explored or addressed over the course of the book. She's so consumed