Reading, Writing, and Me

Oh goals and resolutions season... I wrote out my personal ones back in December, but in the lazy days of winter break (I've had a full six weeks off from my master's program), I've fallen behind on my end/beginning of the year blogging tasks. And I found when I sat down to write my bookish goals for 2026, they pretty much boiled down to 'have fewer goals', which isn't the strongest start for a post of this theme. But I think it is aligned with the shifts happening in my life and where my head is at as a reader and a blogger and an adult. More than anything, in 2026, I want to think about how to make blogging exciting to me again. It's thriving, stats-wise, more than ever, and I want to find a personal spark for creating new and interesting content that lives up to that. How I'm going to do it, I have no clue. I guess, to start, by setting goals very differently than I ever have.  2025 Goals Check-In Goal 1:  Read 75 books.  " Really, it's 100 b...

The Benefactors  by Wendy Erskine Overview: Going by the summary on the back of the book, this is a story about three Belfast mothers who are brought together by each of their sons being accused of sexual assault by the same girl after an incident at a houseparty. While this is certainly one component of the book, I question if it is truly the heart of the book. Clearly, though, this is a hard book to boil down to its plot because the happenings of the book are somewhat irrelevant. I guess I would call this a book about four Belfast families with voices incorporated from every inch this story reaches. It is a book that addresses the realities of sexual assault and reporting a case, but it is also a book about grief, about family and the many unconventional forms it can take, about how perspective is warped and ideals are lost. It is, maybe, mostly, a book about parental love and how complicated that can be. Overall: 4.5 This is a difficult book to pin down. It’s brilliant, but it...