Reading, Writing, and Me

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:...