Reading, Writing, and Me

Considering it's already October 12 when I'm posting this, I am definitely coming to terms with the fact that I'm not going to get through all of these books before the month is over. Maybe if I spend all of fall break reading nonstop I'll make it, but I'm not holding my breath. Still, I figured I'd share the books that I'm hoping to get through this October to possibly inspire you to pick up a new book or two sometime this month. The Bookshop.org links noted below are affiliate links. That means that a purchase made through this link will directly go towards supporting the blog! At no extra cost to you, the blog will get a small percentage of the sale. It is a great way to support the blog and indie bookstores at the same time! Beautiful World, Where Are You by Sally Rooney  Get It On Bookshop! I started reading the new Sally Rooney book a few days ago without having really absorbed the title or read the summary at all. I guess that shows you what name reco...

As you might have noticed, in the last week, Reading, Writing, and Me has gone through a bit of a rebrand. After nearly five years, it started to feel like some major changes were needed. Both in mission statement and design, the choices I made at 14 no longer align with the current version of me that exists at 18. While, in a way, it was as simple as tweaking my Blogger template and rewriting some policy pages, this new chapter for the blog has unearthed many feelings about growing up and realizing just how much I've changed as a person over the last few years.  I'd been considering a shift for the blog since this past summer. I'd played around with changing the design and giving it an update away from the signature hot pink. Every time I went to change it, though, I got nervous about what changing something that felt so foundational to the blog would do. Hot pink has always been one of my favorite colors (I had a scarily pink room when I was around 8), and I loved that I ...

Happy Fall finally! Fall in LA definitely looks different than the fall I'm used to (I miss the pretty trees!), but it's still a cozy reading season. September was definitely not cozy and was a full extension of summer. Even as I got into the swing of school, I still managed to have a better reading month than August, which was technically less busy. I finished 5 books this month, which I'm actually quite proud of considering how much reading I've done from textbooks and for classes all month. Over the course of the month, I made a trip to a couple bookstores where I exercised (some) restraint in how many books I bought. I also really learned to take advantage of the LA public library's E-Library card that means that I can access their entire catalogue without ever having been to a library branch (I would love to go, but all the branches are way too far away from me to get to). All my library holds came in at once, so I need to keep up the momentum through October. ...

People We Meet on Vacation  by Emily Henry Bookshop Affiliate Link Overview: Poppy and Alex have been taking summer trips since college. They started as dirt cheap trips around North America on their shoestring college budgets that Poppy chronicled on her budget traveling blog. Over a series of ten summers, Poppy's blog grew enough to land her a staff writing job at the elite travel magazine, R+R , and the trips got increasingly fancy to match. Still, regardless of if they were staying in a five star hotel or a cheap Airbnb, what mattered is that the two best friends were getting to spend a week together after their adult lives had pulled them in totally separate directions. Now, after a year of not speaking, Poppy is determined to fix things with one more summer trip. Overall: 4  Shout out to Nicole Rafiee who convinced me to pick up this book because she loved it so much. Here's her recent video of book recommendations that tend to trend towards romance.  Characters: 4...

  Little Fires Everywhere  by Celeste Ng Overview: Mrs. Richardson has done everything right as prescribed for women in 1998. She went to college, got married, had four children, and promptly returned to work as a journalist at the small paper in Shaker, Ohio where they live the perfect suburban lives. Never mind that Mrs. Richardson is less than satisfied with how it's all panned out if she really  listens to that tiny, niggling part of her brain. But she holds the moral high ground in every situation, so that's fine. Mia, the Richardson's new tenant, paints a sharp relief as the, societally speaking, the wrong to Mrs. Richardson's right. A college drop out, Mia has flitted around the country with her daughter in tow, moving whenever she got the urge, making a living through a series of minimum wage jobs and her photography. She does what's required to survive and leave as much time as possible for her art. Their children serve as fascinating refractions of their d...

I'm not sure if book hauls on blogs is a thing or ever was a thing, but I've actually bought and was gifted books for the first time in a very very long time, and I'm excited to share, so you're getting a book haul. I thought this might be an interesting update on how my reading tastes have started to evolve since I first started college. My tastes have started shifting around in ways that feel sudden and confusing. I've been reading a lot more literary fiction lately and less YA. There are certainly tons of YA books that I'm excited for, but since the genre doesn't have much about kids in college, I've found myself starting to pull away from it a bit more. It's honestly confusing and disconcerting and deserves its own essay. But I've also had a ton of fun exploring a new category. If you'd like to explore these books and authors more, click on the author's name to visit their website.  Aside from actual book purchases I've made latel...

  Yesterday, I took myself on a bit of an adventure. I took myself on a date, per se. From the second I set foot in LA, my life has been pure chaos. From trying to settle my first apartment to adjusting to long days spent walking around campus to the actual workload that comes with university, I realized two things. 1) I was exhausted, constantly anxious, and feeling extremely stuck, and 2) I'd hardly seen any of the city that I'd recently moved to. This weekend, I decided to remedy both issues by imposing a single day ban on all school related thoughts and heading to one of the places on the top of my To See list in LA- Skylight Books .  While I was much more familiar with the other prominent LA bookstore (which I will visit at some point!), The Ripped Bodice , because of the YA world's close proximity to romance, I was immediately intrigued by the tree growing up in the middle of Skylight. I'd first seen it featured in Claudia Sulewski's  vlogs . Located on a st...