Reading, Writing, and Me

Liquid  by Mariam Rahmani Overview: Liquid 's narrator decides to test out the joke we've all made at one time or another. "All my problems would be solved if I married rich." After struggling to get a foothold in academia or a book deal after graduating from UCLA's PhD program, the narrator decides that marrying rich is the only way to both solve her problems and get ahead. So in the summer of her unemployment, she breaks out a spreadsheet and starts a new project. You can't marry rich without dating, and you need a large sample size to find a match, so she sets out to go on 100 dates, multiple per day, in her study period. Alongside this, there's the tension with her longtime best friend Adam and a diversion to Iran when her father has a heart attack. Liquid  sets out to answer the fundamental question we're all faced with: how do we adult under these conditions?  Overall: 4.25 Characters: 5  The character construction here is the masterwork of the n...

I don't want to talk about March... I had so much discipline in February, and it all went out the window this month. I started strong, on a whirlwind 3 day trip to New York City and then came back so tired that I let everything fall by the wayside for the rest of the month. I had taken the app timers off my phone for the trip, and I never put them back on, so I had unfettered Instagram and Internet access all month. I spent more of my time scrolling through the r/Broadway thread than I want to admit. I felt a little nauseous when my screen time report popped up with over 7 hours for last week. Doing kind things for my body went right out the window with the phone usage, losing all my discipline from February. Needless to say, the reading aspect of my life also could've gone better.  The one thing I will defend myself on is that I always struggle to read other fiction while I'm editing my own, and I spent March editing the draft I wrote in February. I've been making myse...

We Could Be Funny  by Emily Austin TW: this whole book is about a suicide attempt and the aftermath Overview: The first half of the book chronicles twenty-one labeled attempts at writing a suicide note. Sigrid is grappling with why she has to die and establishing she is the most unreliable of narrators. Some of these notes are addressed to her sister, Margit. Others are to her former best friend Greta. Even when she isn't directly writing to them, you get the sense they are the intended audience. Sigrid is very paranoid about not making the note too much of a downer, and surprisingly, for a book about suicide, the humor, sarcasm, and snark are defining features as well as a wistful view of childhood. I'd tell you what happens in the second half, but that would give away some of the major twists and turns. Overall: 4 Characters: 4  Sigrid copes with humor. That's immediately obvious. The beginning of the book establishes Sigrid's voice through the letters as well as her ...

Dinner Party  by Sarah Gilmartin Overview: Kate's life has been marked by grief. First, her father passed away when she was a young teenager. Then her twin sister died at seventeen. The novel takes on the impact of the grief and her family's sensibilities on Kate from her childhood through middle age. The novel opens and closes with two anniversary dinner parties a year apart. In between, chapters take place in 1999, 2016, and 2018 to build out the full scope of Kate's life and her family. Overall: 4 Characters: 5  All of the characters feel incredibly real, deep, and believable. There's an impressive mastery in creating each character's complexity as a person as well as designating their role in the family. Everyone is much more than how they first appear on paper. I don't often mention trigger warnings in reviews anymore, but I will note that a large part of Kate's arc has to do with developing an eating disorder and an unhealthy relationship with alcohol ...

The first week of March, I took a whirlwind trip with my grandmother to New York City. We both were visiting Brooklyn for the first time, specifically to see A Streetcar Named Desire  at BAM. But, for the two and a half days we were in the city, I wanted to see as many of the amazing bookstores I've seen on Instagram as possible. This, of course, shattered my book buying ban, but for a good cause. I visited stores across three different Brooklyn bookstores and bought a new book at nearly every store. So here's my diary of a bookstore trip.  Fort Greene(ish) The Center For Fiction The Center For Fiction looks as impressive in real life as it does on Instagram with the towering book cases that rise to their extremely high ceilings. It's a sight to behold for any fiction lover. More accessibly, they have a column of staff picks and tables for new fiction (divided by paperback and hardcover) as well as nonfiction. They also, strangely, in my view, have a table of UK editions at...

Jane and Dan at the End of the World  by Colleen Oakley (on sale March 11) Overview: Jane and Dan's marriage is on the rocks by their nineteenth wedding anniversary. When Dan wins a reservation to the most exclusive restaurant in Southern California, they break their tradition of going to Macaroni Grill to have a date night surrounded by celebrities and billionaires. Jane's plan to ask for a divorce makes the dinner tense, but this is escalated when the restaurant is taken hostage by terrorists. As the night goes on, Jane starts to realize this terror plot feels exceedingly familiar as she starts to put the pieces together back to her only published novel from six years ago. Overall: 4 Characters: 4 Jane's voice is the strongest in the book. The chapters alternate between her perspective and Dan's, and a part of me wishes that she'd just stuck to Jane's because it feels so much more embodied than Dan's. Still, that balance doesn't really detract from the...

I'm going to be on planes a bit more than I'm used to this year, so I thought that I'd start a fun series around the books that I've downloaded to make sure I can't possibly run out of entertainment on the plane. For context, I'm flying to New York to see A Streetcar Named Desire at BAM and see my grandmother for 2 days in the city, four days gone with flying, so the time in the air will be a lot of the trip! From where I live, it's about 4.5 hours there and 5 hours back (I guess the winds are bad?), so it's not an insignificant amount of time I'll have to entertain myself. I am glad that I managed to get direct flights, though, to lower the stress of having multiple connections go right. With airport time, I'll have over 10 hours to dedicate to reading if I can focus for that long, so I wanted to make sure my Kindle was stuffed with options.  I know this number of books is total overkill, and I won't be able to read anything close to all of ...