#recommending books is weird because I have incredibly eclectic tastes

[hawnks]

Hello!! I feel like you’d be a good person to ask for book recs :] so, care to share? (ps I love your writing, thank you for sharing it with us ❤️)

Always <3

Station 11, Emily St. John Mandel— Speculative fiction. After the Georgia Flu kills off 90% of the population, a group of actors and musicians travel the midwest, preforming for the towns that have cropped up post-apocalypse. So like...... very unfortunately about a pandemic, but it you can look past that it’s an excellent treatise on what art means to humanity. (tw: death, cults)

The Night Circus, Erin Morgenstern— Historical romance. Two kind-of-orphans are taken under the training of rival magicians, who plan to pit them against each other, preforming increasingly amazing acts of magic within the guise of a traveling circus. Not pictured? They fall in love. And make a couple of friends along the way (tw: physical abuse)

All the Light We Cannot See, Anthony Doerr— Historical fiction. A blind Parisian girl and an orphaned German boy discover the meaning of life, love and hope in the midst of WWII (tw: it’s a war novel)

Heartbreaker, Claudia Dey— Literary fiction. In a town that used to be a cult, a young woman is trapped between the legacy of her mother, and whatever else the outside world might offer. (tw: cults, guns, drugs, sexual content, death. this book changed the way I view storytelling, but if you’re squeamish about basically anything don’t touch this one haha).

Devil in Winter, Lisa Kleypas— Historical romance. Evie is the heiress to a gambling hall, being raised by her abusive extended family. It becomes clear that her only hope of escaping with her life is to marry, but with her stutter and shyness she’s having trouble finding a husband. Queue Sebastian, Lord St. Vincent, irreverent, self important, crass, and in desperate need of cash. (tw: physical abuse, sexual content, guns, this is like romance romance so quite cheesy at times of that’s a turn off for you makkxkskd)

Ten Thousand Doors of January, Alex E Harrow— Historical magical realism. January is the ward of a very rich, very busy man. She feels trapped among his collection of oddities...until she discovers the magic of stories and... Doors. I just started this one so I can’t say much for plot yet, but i love the characterization so far.

I’m adding these last three for absolutely bonkers beautiful styles, but they all have very complicated trigger warnings, so make sure to look them up if you’re interested— The Shipping News, Annie Proloux; Six of Crows, Leigh Bardugo; Ceremony, Leslie Marion Silko

Books of poetry—

Life on Mars, Tracy K Smith

Book of Delights, Ross Gay

Crush, Richard Siken

[erinpagewrites]

In Which I Set Myself a Very Big Task

Right at the end of 2016, I Marie Kondo’d my To-Be-Read List of books down to 60. I was ruthless; not only did I give away a big stack of physical books, but I even deleted a bunch of Kindle books (over 100 files). Even though Kindle files don’t take up any space-- ok, they do, but I’m not likely to reach the upper limits of my Kindle device’s storage anytime soon-- just having to sift through a bunch of books I felt burdened to read based on a (sometimes years) old reason for doing so was stifling to me. I read less than I could over the last few years because I gave myself task-after-task-after-task on my TBR instead of letting myself pursue spur of the moment interests and real passions in my reading.

And what does a TBR list matter, anyway? It was only a goal that I had set for myself. I’m not a student with a bunch of required reading; I don’t have to answer to anyone but myself when it comes to finishing any books for the rest of my life. If I’m not enjoying and/or learning from my reading, if my eyes glaze over every time I try to read a few pages, if it’s too easy to set down and pick up my phone instead, then what’s the point of reading it?

I couldn’t read a book per my friends’ recommendations anymore because I already had too many books that I was “in the middle of” (read: loathing). I felt guilty every time I bought a new book knowing that I was just adding to a pile that would be impossible to ever whittle down. Reading in my spare time was now such a chore and a weird and a source of a weird guilt complex that I wasn’t letting myself enjoy it anymore.

As the year wound to a close and I thought about what I would like to accomplish in 2017, I realized that I could change a few things and make reading good for myself again. So, like I did with my clothes after I moved into my current apartment with my (then) fiance, now husband, I de-cluttered my TBR list. I looked at every book in my home and every book in my Kindle and thought “am I excited to read this? will reading this book mean something to me?” If it didn’t pass muster, it went in the giveaway pile or it got the delete key. It was hard, and there are some that I may yet come back to down the road when my interests have changed, and there were some that I had purchased and now felt bad that I had essentially wasted money. But I got all the way through all of the books I owned, and by the end I felt incredibly refreshed, eager to open my kindle or pick something off of my shelves without guilt anymore.

I thought that 60 TBR was a good number: it only takes up three pages of books on Goodreads, and I was excited to read all of the ones remaining.

But as early as mid-January, it was too easy to skim the Daily Deals on Amazon, adding a book here or there that cost a dollar or two to buy. I made a few trips to pick up books that I’d set in my community library and take them back (I’m not stealing from a library, though, haha! The community where I live has a free library where you can take and give books at will, and the shelves overflow every summer as people move in and out, so when I say I took books back from my library, well, I just picked them back off the same stack I’d left them in two months ago). I also added a decent number of books that are research for my novel-in-progress.

Personally, I’ve also been going through some challenges and severe stress this Winter, and that’s not good for my shopping habits. I self-soothe by picking up a little book gift for myself, or reward overcoming a challenge with a new book purchase.

Within just three months I built my TBR list back up. Yesterday, marking off a few more books that I earmarked to read this summer, I hit the magic 100 number. Suddenly, I felt the crushing weight of not being able to ever clear out my list of things to read. If you’re a list-maker like I am, you know how it feels when you’ve got a task list that never ends; it feels like shit. At times, when I skim through a long TBR list, I am hit by the realization that I might have books on there that I will never read, I will actually die of old age before I ever read them. Someday my great grandkids might have to ask Goodreads for my password so that they can delete this list on my dead behalf.

And I don’t need my TBR list to be yet another reminder of my own mortality, thank you. I’ve got enough of those in other aspects of life.

I’m revamping this blog. It doesn’t look like it yet, ha... ha... but I am revamping it, behind the scenes. As my writing is developing I really want to focus this blog, which will eventually become a part of my personal website, for my writing life. I thought about what I could do to generate more unique content, and I was really struggling as the professionally published author of two (count ‘em TWO) short stories what I could write about on here that might be of interest to someone else, and also of interest to me. I’ve been thinking about this for a couple of weeks now, and then yesterday I hit that magic number, and I realized what I could write about.

I am going to conquer my TBR list in 2017.

So what does that mean for my blog?

I’m going to write more about what I’m reading. That doesn’t mean I’ll write about all 100 books-- since I’m supposed to be completing my novel, after all, I won’t have the time or the interest to review everything, and I don’t like to harp on a book that just didn’t sit well with me, anyway. And I’m definitely not going to write about all 100, not by a long shot. But I used to keep something of a reading diary in middle school and it was always nice to look back on what I was interested in and when. I abandoned that, and a lot of non-required reading, in college, and post-college I went through some real struggles finding a job that I liked and balancing work and life, and reading and writing fell by the way side.

2016 is symbolic to me of real sea changes in my life. I got married to the best person I’ve ever known. I got serious about writing again. I started posting some (ahem, fan) fiction online for the pure joy of it. I made myself confront some hard times I’d had in my life over the last few years and show myself that I had overcome some things, that I’d made it through. By the end of the year, I committed to pursuing only knowledge and important voices and joy in my reading, all of which were what made me love reading in the first place, back to my childhood, and all of which contribute to a well-rounded life, I think.

Here I go. Writing about reading. Committing publicly to something I haven’t been able to do for years. Scary, but good.

Feel free to join me! My TBR list is here on Goodreads if you’d like to follow along. I would love to hear about anyone else working through a reading project, or conquering their own TBR list, or who just likes chatting about some of the same books. I come bearing an eclectic reading taste and an out-of-practice way of writing about it: you’ve been warned.