Someone Named Eva has to be my favorite children’s/middle grade novel. I’m not sure how many times I read this growing up. I wanted something quick and beloved to finish out 2024, so I quickly downed this book last night. It’s about a young Czechoslakian girl named Milada who is kidnapped and forced to enter […]

Jennette McCurdy’s memoir I’m Glad My Mom Died is my first completed audiobook. I’ve never been drawn to that reading format, as I prefer to visually see the words on a physical copy and perhaps annotate it up the wazoo. But this memoir is perfectly suited for an audiobook. I did miss annotating it, since […]

This novel didn’t claim to be anything it wasn’t. It’s just a light, cute, and cozy read to get lost with in an evening. The protagonist Nina loses her job as a librarian, decides to buy a van, turn it into a bookstore on wheels, and heads to Scotland to become an entrepreneur, finding love […]

Arthur Miller’s The Crucible is a play about the Salem witch trials, somehow capturing what propelled it, sustained it, and ended it in a very short timeframe. This play took me on a journey. Let’s start at the beginning. A very good place to start. (Sorry, I couldn’t resist.) I wasn’t so sure about the […]

I knew prior to reading that people rave about this book, but after my nonchalant impression of The Starless Sea by the same author, I was fully expecting to be unimpressed by The Night Circus. Fantasy isn’t the genre I’m typically drawn to, anyways. But I flew through this. I remember muttering to myself near […]

I first encountered the story of George R. Tweed through the movie No Man Is An Island with Jeffrey Hunter that my family and I watch and rewatch all the time. My father let me borrow Robinson Crusoe, USN, which chronicles the true life story of George R. Tweed. Tweed was a U.S Navy radioman […]

The thing that most stood out to me in reading Hamnet is Maggie O’Farrell’s writing. I admire it so much. She has a way of sitting, living, and moving at the same pace as her characters rather than rushing from plot point to plot point (as I tend to do in my own writing). She […]

My editions of Gentlemen Prefer Blondes and But Gentlemen Marry Brunettes are together within the same bound book, and I read them consecutively as if they were one novel, so I’m going to review each together, referring to Gentlemen Prefer Blondes as GPB, and But Gentlemen Marry Brunettes as BGMB.  I thought the novels themselves […]

This is my third time reading my favorite or second favorite book of all time, depending on the day: Crime and Punishment. I read it again with the express purpose of annotating it, because prior to the last couple years, I was totally adverse to writing in books, which I thought as vandalizing the sacred, […]

I had a hard time figuring out how I felt about this book. Perhaps because I read this during a particularly busy time in my life and was distracted, but it might also be because this book exists in that space where there’s a lot of technical skill, but I felt like something undefinable is […]