Reading, Writing, and Me

Pizza Girl  by Jean Kyoung Frazier Overview: Jane is just out of high school, pregnant, and deeply, deeply lost. She has a supportive mom who loves her and an invested boyfriend she met at grief counseling for young people who've lost parents. While staunchly ignoring her pregnancy and still working through her confusing grief over her alcoholic father's death, Jane works at Eddie's pizza shop as a delivery driver, getting invested in the clients she crosses paths with as a means to escape from her old life. None of them matter as much, though, as Jenny, a middle aged mom who's fraying at the seams of her expected life. Despite the odds, Jenny and Jane bond with one another, though their relationship is a murky and strange one. Jane just needs a compass, a tether to the future, and that can be hard to find. Overall: 5 Characters: 5 This book is one of the magical moments where you're reminded of how lovely and comforting reading is. I have little in my life that'

Cultish: The Language of Fanaticism  by Amanda Montell Overall: 4 After loving Amanda Montell's first book, Wordslut , I knew I had to pick up her latest title, Cultish , as an audiobook. With an intriguing cover to add to the intrigue, this book blends together Montell's strengths using expertise from her podcast Sounds Like a Cult in subject matter while approaching it from a linguistic angle, which falls in line with Montell's first book and her degree from NYU. It's a fresh angle to examine the well trodden cult topic from, and it allows Montell to broaden the definition of what a cult is or might be beyond the murderous, classically dangerous, on a farm somewhere cults that are the common fodder of the media trend around cults.  Instead, she spends the first section of the book giving an overview of a few classic cults (think Jonestown), keen to point out commonalities, many linguistic, that tied these leaders together. That way, as she discusses things like MLMs