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...