Reading, Writing, and Me

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