Jessica Woodbury

Reading as much as I do requires a certain amount of magical thinking. It's very easy for me to feel like I'm in a slump. Two or three books in a row that are just fine is enough to do it. Even a book that'

Since the death of Book Twitter sometimes I feel like I've been cut off from the reading world. I have never really felt at home in the bookish corners of Instagram and I refuse to download Tiktok so now all the book discourse feels like it happens somewhere

Look. I have attempted to write a fun opener for this a few times and it keeps being not all that fun. But the more time that passes the more books that I will have to include in this newsletter! So for now we are going to say fuck it

Well. I didn't mean to go away for 6 months. The last time I sent a newsletter was October 29. Soooooo I think you can make some assumptions there! The world (and my brain) has felt rather hostile to a lot of things lately and that tends to

The illusion of this newsletter is that no one reads it so I can say whatever I want here. This is just a convenient fiction. You do read it, there is a dashboard with an uncomfortable amount of detail. And while you are a small group in internet world, you

There's been a lot of fiction exploring gender recently. It's long overdue, of course, and we have really just begun. But I've been thinking, where are the men? I think this a lot. Ever since the beginning of #metoo, even since I gained a

Romance is not my genre. Not that I haven't tried! Once I got into the world of readers on the internet, I learned that everything I'd been told about the Romance genre was basically wrong. They weren't trashy and stupid. Romance novels are like

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