Reading, Writing, and Me

Evenings and Weekends by Oisin Mckenna Overview: Evenings and Weekends follows the full web of a friend group across the expanse of a sticky London summer in 2019. It feels nearly impossible to summarize, though, because of the immense number of plot threads. Every named character is given a perspective, their own story, at one turn or another. Most centrally, there’s brothers Phil and Callum. Phil is losing his precious warehouse rental while Callum is getting married. Their childhood neighbor, Ed, just found out that his girlfriend, Maggie, is pregnant. They’re not in much shape to have a child, though. Maggie is also Phil’s best friend. Then we delve into the lives of Phil and Ed’s parents, their more extended friend circles, Maggie’s extended circle, and Callum’s as well. Then there’s the random subplot about the whale in the Thames. Overall: 4 Characters: 4 Books don’t tend to have a million characters for a reason. Those that do become about breadth over depth at a certain p...

I wasn't going to buy books on my trip to Dublin, Edinburgh, and London. I had a 35 liter backpack to hold two weeks of clothes, journals, and toiletries and, as such, had to carry everything I acquired on my back. But I should've known myself better than that. Just having a Kindle was never going to cut it, and with so many fantastic bookstores on the trip, I was going to lose willpower at least a few times. I will say, I went to far more bookstores than the number of books I purchased, and most of these were bought at the very end of the trip when I returned to an indie I absolutely adored and wanted to support. It turns out, I could fit far more books in my bag than I thought, and it helped that I bought a tote bag from Books Upstairs early in the trip (that mostly proved integral for my writing trips in London so I had something to carry my laptop in). One of the biggest things I learned from my book shopping is that I'm a huge believer in the paperback first or early a...