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Showing posts from 2025

Dream State by Eric Puchner: book review

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Dream State  by Eric Puchner (Out February 18) Thank you to Doubleday for sending me an ARC of this book so I can bring you this early review! Opinions all my own. Overview: Cece finds herself as the point of a love triangle on her wedding day. Having gone to Montana a month early, without her fiancé, to plan the wedding, she finds herself falling into an enemies to lover's romance with her fiancé's best friend. The book starts right before the wedding in 2004 and charts Garrett, Charlie, and CeCe's lives and unlikely friendship through to their deaths—from finding careers to raising kids to growing old and watching the planet deteriorate around them, this is the most holistic look at a set of characters I've seen. Overall: 4 Characters: 4  The dynamics here are interesting, but there's a certain lack of depth to these characters where they struggle to move beyond being archetypes with little quirks. Their relationships, overall, are what drive the book, but they co...

I Hope This Finds You Well by Natalie Sue: book review

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I Hope This Finds You Well  by Natalie Sue Overview: Jolene is stuck in an office job she hates but can't give up because it stops her from being thirty-three and living with her parents. After getting bullied all through high school, Jolene's life hasn't gotten much better, especially as she realizes after an HR glitch that all her co-workers are gossiping about her. Equipped with the new power to read everyone in the office's correspondence, Jolene sets off on a mission to manipulate her co-workers and insulate herself from the impending layoff. Overall: 4 Characters: 4 I liked all of the characters in the novel, and Sue does a good job of revealing slowly to Jolene and the reader what makes all the office villains complex and compelling. Jolene is cutting and sharp and closed down to the world for good reason. It hasn't been nice to her. Jolene was bullied as a kid; she's made out to be an outsider by her coworkers as an adult. I thought the book did a great ...

You Didn't Hear This From Me: (Mostly) True Notes on Gossip by Kelsey McKinney: nonfiction review

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You Didn't Hear This From Me: (Mostly) True Notes on Gossip by Kelsey McKinney (Out February 11) Thank you to Grand Central Publishing for sending me an advanced copy for review purposes. All opinions are my own.  Overview: Kelsey McKinney takes a deep dive into gossip through a series of essays in a spinoff of her podcast, Normal Gossip. On the podcast, McKinney and her co-host delve into stories from strangers, perfect bits of juicy gossip, and in this series of essay, McKinney breaks down different types of gossip and gossip adjacent constructs (urban legends, parasocialism, conspiracy theories, anonymous gossip, why Chat GPT can't gossip, etc) in well researched, thoughtful essays that infuse her personal experiences as a lifelong gossip and internet resident with scientific literature, literature-literature, and pieces of the art world. Overall: 4.5 Notes: I'm going to be totally honest and say that while this was an early "most anticipated" of 2025 for me, ...

January Reading Wrap Up 2025

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Oh January, the fresh start of the year, a blank spreadsheet and a blank reading slate. The possibilities are endless. This is also when goals are freshest. I always feel a pressure in January to give myself the strongest possible foundation for the rest of the year, but this is likely because in the last few years I've had some of the most time to read all year in January due to school schedules, or, in the case of this year, taking some time out to be freelance. I feel this pressure even more strongly since my downtime for the year will be entirely weighted to the beginning. Mid-April, I'll start working full time or more again, and in August, I'll be moving to Dublin and starting a creative writing program. Hopefully that at least partially encourages reading, but adjusting to a whole new country, living on my own again, and classes will definitely somewhat reduce the amount of time I have to read. I know I shouldn't feel pressure about my reading goals. So many post...

Weather by Jenny Offill: book review

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Weather  by Jenny Offill  Overview: Lizzie's life is tethered to many different people. She has her family with Ben and her young son Eli. She supports her mom both financially and through phone therapy sessions. Her brother, Henry, feels like an even bigger responsibility as one person in her life characterizes them as "enmeshed" as Lizzie tries to help him through his sobriety and drug relapses. Lizzie never finished grad school or her dissertation. She's somewhat haunted by the idea that she never did make it big, her life didn't follow the expected arc. Now, she works in the university library and answers fan emails for the podcast her old advisor runs. This is a difficult book to write a plot summary for since there's very little plot. This is slice of life in its purest form. Overall: 4.5 Characters: 4 Lizzie sacrifices a lot of herself for others, and because she's pulled in so many directions, she can't fully satisfy any of her obligation witho...

Backlist Books I Need to Read In 2025

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I have a running Notes app list of books I've seen in bookstores and recommended online that I want to read eventually. I used to just put in Libby requests, but sometimes they don't have the book, and that was also a great way to create a holds avalanche. At the start of the year, I started using Storygraph for the first time, and I decided to transfer my list into the app to formalize it. Now, I'm sharing them all with you along with where I heard about the books and why I want to read them to both hold myself accountable to reading these throughout the year and share some reading inspo with you.   Scaffolding by Lauren Elkin This is a book that I saw talked about in Jack Edwards's video of books he wants to read this year. It's from 2024 and is about 2 different couples that live in the same apartments at different points in time. I am very sentimental about the places that I've lived, so I feel like this will be a super interesting read. Slow Days, Fast Comp...

Marlena by Julie Buntin: book review

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Marlena  by Julie Buntin Overview: Cat is 15 when she moves to Silver Lake in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan. There, she meets her next door neighbor, Marlena, who is 17 and undeniably cool. Cat struggles with the move and her parents' divorce, and Marlena offers an escape into a world that's unlike any she's known before as a straight A, strait-laced student. She skips school and is thrown into a world of drugs, drinking, and little supervision. Still, as much as Cat is exposed to, she recognizes that she has a safety net Marlena never had. The book is told in reflection, looking back from a time in her thirties when she'd moved to New York long after Marlena died. Overall: 4 Characters: 4 Cat is an interesting character to tell this story through, and there's an argument that our true main character is Marlena, who has the most dramatic arc of the story. Cat has an undeniable reverence for Marlena as the older cool kid, but her telling is also colored by her adul...

Enter Ghost by Isabella Hammad: book review

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Enter Ghost  by Isabella Hammad Overview: After a bad break-up in London and a dry spell in her acting career, Sonia decides to go back to Palestine for the first time in a decade. While she spent her summers there as a child and teenager, she hadn't wanted to go back. For a break, she decides to stay with her sister, who works at an Israeli university, for a month. Once there, though, Sonia finds a new stage—this time in a production of Hamlet  in Palestine. Overall: 4.5  Characters: 5 Sonia is a great main character. She has an incredible amount of depth and the perfect personality for first person narration where she can wind deep inside herself but also perceive small nuances from others with her attuned eye as an actress. She's also the perfect guide into this novel for someone who isn't the most well-versed in Palestinian history as she's grown up in this place but at a distance and never with great interest. Sonia becomes increasingly involved and educated as the...

Should You Watch or Read Normal People First?

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If you've read this blog at all in the last two years, you'll know I love Sally Rooney's novels. I didn't always feel that way. I read them the first time in the major frenzy around Rooney when the BBC adaption released in 2020, and it wasn't the right time for me. Honestly, I was too young to get it. I hadn't read enough literary fiction to be acclimated to the quirks in the prose like the lack of quotation marks that feel second nature now. I got lucky and read it again a while later and found the spark of the book. Normal People  is now among the books that have most changed my life. To date, I believe I've read Normal People  four times and seen the show all the way through three times. I've read passages and watched random episodes here and there, but after finishing my most recent re-read, I was struck by the reminder that the largely faithful TV adaptation does often deviate or alter details to better suit the screen. Which got me thinking about a...

Notes on Heartbreak by Annie Lord: nonfiction book review

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Notes on Heartbreak  by Annie Lord Overview: Annie Lord is a culture writer living in London. She'd been dating a guy she'd met in university for five years until one day he abruptly dumped her. Untangling her feelings about the guy, the break-up, and love as a whole consumes her next year as she tries to figure out how to process and move on. Overall: 4 Thoughts: I am honestly confused why some names weren't changed to enable this book to be sold as a novel. I know Annie Lord has a platform from her online writing background, particularly when it comes to dating, so there's a natural crossover in launching this book, but it reads like Dolly Alderton's forays into novel writing. Stylistically, the book resembles a novel more than a memoir. Every page is a part of a scene with full dialogue and inner monologue and all the bits that make a book feel like a story. It weaves between flashbacks within the relationship told in past tense second person and present tense sc...

Orbital by Samantha Harvey: book review

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Orbital  by Samantha Harvey Overview: Six astronaut are living in the International Space Station. The book follows a single day of orbiting the Earth and gives glimpses into the pasts and presents of all of the astronauts from the US, England, Japan, and Russia. As they watch the world go by, they consider the world in a macro fashion. Orbital is the winner of the 2024 Booker Prize.  Overall: 3.25 Characters: 3 We don't get to know any of these astronauts very well. Even though we briefly get into the minds of all of the astronauts, they aren't given much depth. Many are forgettable or have interchangeable backgrounds. The only ones that stuck with me were Nell and her fascination with the Challenger explosion and Chei, whose mom dies during the orbit. These are just about the only characteristics they're given. While I understand the limitations of showcasing characters trapped in a confined space for a short period of time, the novel is so short that there was much more...

New Releases I'm Looking Forward To 2025: Winter/Spring (Fiction & Nonfiction)

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It's a brand new year, which means brand new books. I've been diving into the many listicles coming out and the depths of NetGalley to figure out what books are going to be my big 2025 release priorities in the next few months. I'm starting off by making picks for spring (by publisher definition), winter by the fact that I will be surrounded by snow until at least May. I apologize for the release dates not being in order within months, that just didn't happen this time around, but I hope it will be useful nonetheless. Because I haven't read (almost) any of these books because they haven't been released, I can't offer you the self-made summaries that I love to write, so we're settling for the Goodreads blurbs. If you want to add any of these to your Goodreads lists, the pages are linked over the word "summary" for each blurb.  Also, any books I've received an ARC of is noted with a *. These books are gifted for review purposes, and while som...