Reading, Writing, and Me

Personally—and I've seen this expressed a bit around the bookish internet and various podcasts I listen to so I don't think I'm entirely alone—2025 has felt like a bit of a let down of a new release year. There are years where I nearly every new release I pick up sparkles, and this year, I really struggled to find a 2025 release that really captured my attention the way that, say, the 2024 slate of releases did. Last year, I was struggling to narrow down the list of books from the year to make my final list. This year, it's truly only the top two that I fully recommend without reservations. There were plenty of interesting books this year (I'm about to tell you about nine of them), there were just very few that wholeheartedly captured my heart or got me extremely excited. Hopefully, 2026 is another uptick year (more on the books I'm already anticipating in a minute).  I feel like my best reads of 2025 really came from backlist titles, which you'll see in a ...

What I'd Rather Not Think About  by Jenna Posthuma (translated by Sarah Timmer Harvey) Overview: Posthuma has written a book with a quite simple mandate at face value. The novel chronicles grappling with an incredibly deep grief as a sister works through the loss of her twin brother to suicide. There's not much to say in a summary as the magic of this book is purely in the execution, the use of language, the framing. There's so much beauty and insight into grief to be found here but an equal amount is invested into illuminating life. I had a friend criticize a book as "death affirming" recently, and this is one of those books that's the antidote to that.  The novel follows the sister from childhood through around age thirty-six or seven and the observations that come from that period of growth, of becoming an adult. There's no proper way to encapsulate this for you. You just have to read it. Overall: 5 When you're truly caught off guard by a certain ki...

Universality  by Natasha Brown Overview: The novel opens with a lengthy magazine feature revolving around an assault that takes place at a countryside farm outside of London that's been taken over by a group of anarchist. The night of a rave, thrown by the anarchists, in the middle of COVID lockdown, ends with one man hitting another over the head with a gold bar and then disappearing into the night with the stolen riches turned weapon. The piece bounces around between the man who owned the farm, the anarchists that took it over, the culture wars columnist that links the anarchists and the owner of the farm, and additional unique characters. The second half of the book narratively follows some of these characters as well as the journalist who wrote the piece in snatches that further their portraits. Overall: 4 I'm not entirely sure what to make of this very short novel. My main impulse is that it doesn't quite feel like a novel as a reading experience. It doesn't feel l...

You all know that the first thing I was going to do when I got to Dublin was get a library card. Well, I did have phone/cell service, a government appointment, a Leap Card, and a few other admin things to sort out first, but by week two, I was on my way to my local library branch to get access to even more amazing books. You all know I love to collect library cards from all the places I've lived to add them to my quiver.  So what was it like to get a library card in Ireland? Very similar to getting my LA library card, not surprising as this is another quest in a major city. It's a two step process. I got online through the library's outpost of the government services website and registered. This gives you access to a few basic online parts of the library by providing your address, phone number, email, and other details. Then, to use the physical library, you take a confirmation number to a local branch along with some form of proof of address. For me, I used my ultimate pro...

Culpability  by Bruce Holsinger Overview: The book opens during the car accident that ensures that Cassidy-Shaws's life will never be the same. Their autonomously driven minivan collides with another car, killing its two passengers. While various members of their family are injured, all five of the Cassidy-Shaws survive and are left to reckon with the roles they played in this fatal car accident where the two people in the second car died. A family vacation to attempt to regroup only makes things worse as a second tragedy befalls the family, further complicated by the involvement of the tech billionaire next door. In the backdrop of these incidents and the family's attempt to cope through the investigation, Holsinger demonstrates how AI and LLMs are pressing in on everyday parts of being alive, interfering with our lives, and calling certain freedoms into question. Overall: 3.5 Bruce Holsinger attempts to package a kind of crime thriller with a family drama and then swirl in a ...

Gunk  by Saba Sams Overview: Jules is accustomed to strange situations. After a hen do takes her to a student bar as a twenty-eight-year-old woman in Brighton, she meets the club owner, starts working at the bar, and eventually marries him. They're together for years before they divorce, but Jules keeps working at the club. During their marriage, Jules never gets the baby she so desperately wants. Then Nim, nineteen and the adult version of a teenage runaway, comes into the picture and offers Jules a very strange, roundabout way to having a child. That journey is what constitutes Gunk . Overall: 4.5 Characters: 4 Jules and Nim and Leon are interesting character sketches that feel both very human and also watery and impressionistic. Leon is an addict who likes to pick up students at the bar. He's scummy and provides a constant low hum of disaster in the background. Jules has never had great love in her life, and what she feels with Nim isn't quite that either. It's neith...

Breakdown  by Cathy Sweeney Overview: One day, a woman wakes up in the morning and decides not to turn right and go to work. Instead, she goes left to the seaside town she grew up in that she hasn't seen in years. From there, she continues making choices that push her further afield from the Dublin suburb she lives in, from the family she's raised to maturity and the husband who sends impatient texts about wanting his gym bag brought to him. The book is told in a vignette style that plays with linear time. Each cluster of vignettes is arranged by the general place she's in where the majority of the scenes take place—the town, the boat, the train, the bus, the breakfast room of the hotel, etc. But she also dips heavily into memory and pulls us forward into her present time, working to contextualize these near term memories as she tells this story of her escape from regular life that is at once extremely mundane and truly wild. Overall: 5 Characters: 5 We are deep inside this...

Intimacies  by Lucy Caldwell Thoughts: Short story collections are so difficult because they usually end up feeling somewhat unbalanced. There's the blockbuster short stories that necessitate the volume in the first place and then there are stories that feel like they exist to fill space in the book. I think this is part of the problem with selling the general public on short fiction and collections and anthologies (where this feels like an even more pronounced issue). I can say all these harsh things about collections here because Caldwell manages to bypass these pitfalls beautifully in her 2020 collection, Intimacies .  This is a tight collection of eleven stories that all center mothers with young children navigating motherhood and their larger place in the universe. Now, this probably sounds like a strange collection for me in particular to be raving about as it's a topic I find personally sticky and also have no firsthand experience of myself. I didn't honestly know th...

Heart the Lover  by Lily King  Overview: The narrator makes it clear from the outset, she is writing a book, finally, about, in many ways, the one that got away. The first page reads: "You knew I'd write a book about you someday. You said once that I'd dredged up the whole hit parade minus you. I'll never know how you'd tell it. For me it begins here. Like this." The story then travels through three parts—the college years where the narrator meets Yash and the romance begins, a fragment in the middle when she has a young family and her life has turned away from him, and a third part where she's drawn back to him under dark and unfortunate circumstances, not in a romantic way but in a sense that ultimately offers reflective closure. Based on the flap copy that describes how Yash returns to her life "crashing into the present, forcing her to confront the decision and deceptions of her youth," I was honestly expecting a very different book. Overall:...

Discontent  by Beatriz Serrano Overview: Marisa has a cushy middle management position in the creative department of a swanky agency. She really doesn't have to do much in her job. This is both great and horrible. Great because Marisa isn't interested in doing much but horrible because this thing that defines her provides no fulfillment as she finds the entire corporate world and everyone in it boring and stupid. Marisa spends the entire novel just hoping to get hit by a bus as she endures the hot August Madrid days going into the office. Overall: 3.5 Characters: 4 I don't disagree with Marisa. I enjoyed her disaffected, snarky voice in general. I did, ultimately, struggle with the fact that she thinks she's so much smarter than everyone else, inherently better than them, but she chooses to continue working at the same horrible company as the rest of them. She's not actually going to do anything about the fact that she hates her life. She's not repulsed enough t...

Sugartown  by Caragh Maxwell Overview: Saoirse leaves London and returns to her hometown in the Midlands of Ireland suddenly. She's twenty-four, has dropped out of her college program and then broke up with her boyfriend who was also her landlord, and has no choice but to go home. She's always struggled with her mental health, and this return home only makes things worse. Saoirse falls into familiar patterns with old friends, drinking heavily and spiraling about her life until one particularly bad night makes her truly reckon with her choices, maybe for the first time. Overall: 4 Characters: 4 Saoirse is headstrong to her own detriment. She's unsure what she wants, but she wants forcefully, creating tension in her life with her family, her friends, her love interest. She's resentful of coming home and of her mother's new rules and new life with her stepdad and three younger sisters that are so much younger that Saoirse hardly knows them. Her best friend Doireann is ...

Oh October, what a whirlwind. I went to three plays, had my parents in town for the week, did tons of assignments as the semester ratcheted up, and went on a number of other social events from the zoo to Halloween. Mixed into all this, I tried to dedicate a massive chunk of my life to both reading and writing since that's what I moved to Ireland to do. I've gotten back into audiobook listening along with podcasts as I've settled into living alone again. I've also gotten into the library hold system, so now I have tons of books coming in with time limits, incentivizing me to read quickly. On top of that, I've read lots of short stories, some for class but mostly for fun.  The Stats In total, I read 13 books with two books I've been reading throughout October that I will be finishing today or tomorrow, making a solid start to my November reading. I read 5 novels (I'm roping Simple Passion in here cause it's more akin to a novel than the other nonfiction bo...

Thirst Trap  by Gráinne O'Hare Overview: Harley, Róise, and Maggie all turn thirty this year. The novel opens as they try to get into a club with a succulent at one of these fabled birthday celebrations. The housemates and best friends are all in the same boat—jobs they don't really love, falling down house, unstable romantic lives, and a relationship to partying that is fueled by their dissatisfaction with life. They're also absorbing an immense amount of grief as the one year anniversary of their fourth friend, Lydia's, passing rolls around. This is the year when they need to make changes, and O'Hare proves with this novel that the coming of age arc is never really over. Overall: 4.5 Characters: 4 I really came to love all of the girls, and I'm impressed at what nuanced, complicated lives O'Hare manages to render on the page for every single character, even Lydia who is no longer physically a part of their narrative. There's messy relationship entangle...