A surprise bonus July newsletter! Because the rules of the newsletter are my rules for reading: do what you want. Do what feels good. I'm not doing it for money so I might as well do it for love. I have been on a several-year reading slump only

Sometimes this thing happens where you get a flurry of similar books around the same time. This year we've had Lyz Lenz's This American Ex-Wife, Leslie Jamison's Splinters, and now Sarah Manguso's Liars all within just a few months and it feels

I am on a streak of books I didn't really like. I just logged three 2.5-star reviews in a row into Goodreads. We're halfway through June and I haven't enjoyed a single thing. Normally this kind of streak would depress me. I would

Congratulations to me, it is still May, I didn't miss getting a newsletter out! I actually have one newsletter already finished and another I'm ready to write, but they're all about July or later releases, which feels mean to write about so early. But

An hour ago I finished a really great audiobook. My whole experience with this audiobook was perfection, it even ended perfectly, the last sentence coming just before the timer went off and dinner was ready. (The only thing better is when the last sentence of your audiobook plays while you

Rating and reviewing is more complicated than it seems at first glance. At some point you have to make a decision: is it about whether you enjoyed the book or whether the book is good? Because yes a lot of the time these things go together but sometimes they don&

I have been thinking a lot lately about very long books. Because I mostly read on kindle, and I mostly read galleys, and there is usually a few months between the time I request a book and the time I read it, I almost always start a book having no

Am I possibly going to write an actual regular newsletter this month? It seems like I am! What a surprise! Sometimes things just align like that. To be honest, it has been a real shitty year so far even though we are not even two full weeks in as I

Surprise! You forgot you signed up for this newsletter, didn't you? My bad, really. It's been 5 months since I last posted. To be fair, this is the risk of a model built not on compensation but on VIBES alone. And while I still prefer this