Reading, Writing, and Me

The Rachel Incident  by Caroline O'Donoghue  Thank you so much to Knopf for giving me an e-ARC for review purposes. This had no impact on the content of my review. Overview: Rachel is coming of age in Cork, Ireland, in 2010 as the recession is making the job market impossible, and the world feels collectively bleak. She's crawling through an English degree that feels pointless, especially in light of the recession. She picked it with no career goals in mind and feels relatively aimless in her swan dive into adulthood. Thankfully, she has her best friend James by her side, and as they share a run down house on Shandon Street, their lives bend, change, and shift so that every few months they're nearly unidentifiable. Framed around Rachel's life in 2021 as a fully grown adult, we sink into her adult-coming of age from around 19-22 as her life takes unexpected turns. Overall: 4.5 Characters: 4.5  Rachel is a character I immediately connected with as a fellow 20-year-old gir...

I'm a Fan  by Sheena Patel Overview: Our narrator has contorted her life into quite a predicament. She's bored in her relationship with her dependable but completely stale boyfriend that she lives with. She's found herself embroiled in an affair with a powerful, well regarded man who is married and has another lover as well. She is consumed by him and by his lover and his wife, and she'll let it destroy the shell of a life she's built on her own. Through a very narrow scope, we live in her intense obsession for 200 pages. Overall: 4 Characters: 4 I feel weird saying that the characters in this book were good because they hardly existed, but it was also kinda fascinating? I don't really know how to talk about this book, and I'm just going to preface this entire review with that statement.  Every character in this book only exists within an extremely narrow lens. They are not multifaceted. They are not particularly developed. But that's the point. We have ...

Anna  by Amy Odell Overall: 4.5  I've always been intrigued by the world of magazines and editorial – the glamour that's marred by long hours and strong personalities and grueling steps to prove yourself. I've read articles here and there and fictional interpretations of that world but never anything as comprehensive as this book. This is a biography of Anna Wintour for sure, but more than that, it's a great overview of a specific lens on the evolution of media from its heyday to the trials of recessions and the bumpy road of transitioning from print to the web. Honestly, it's a bleak picture, and there isn't exactly an uplifting note at the end about the fate of the industry. This downward spiral of sorts runs a parallel narrative to Anna Wintour's iconic rise.       I don't tend to like biographies. They're often dense and struggle to find a compelling thread to offer the reader that emphasizes why this person is important beyond the titles they ac...