Angieville

Once upon a time, January came for us and proclaimed itself supremely uninterested in taking prisoners. Under the sustained assault, there were simply too many avenues of stress tearing into my brain. On one side of the field stood so many books (as they have always been there for me) ready to be read—to help. And on the other side loomed a distressing number of chasms inside me desperate to find solace and reprieve. But the two could not meet. No matter how many peace talks I attempted to broker.  In February, in a move so unprecedented that I can only describe it as a lifeline thrown down into the deepest of the chasms, my exhausted mind decided it would be a good idea to finally give fanfiction a whirl. Now, there's no getting around the fact that for someone who has read as many novels that involve fic in some way or another as I have—seriously, novels that began as fic, novels written by authors who got their start writing fic, novels about characters who write/illustrate/love...

I am winded, you guys. Winded  from laboring over this list. This is the first time I've attempted to cobble together a Best Books of the Decade list, and I can't say I'll be up to it for another ten years or so. But my, I couldn't resist the challenge (or profound pleasure, if we're being honest). I kept trying to winnow it down, kept forcing myself to be ruthless. Like somehow I could (or should) keep it to a top ten (flat impossible) or at least a top twenty-five (who are we kidding?). But after bidding those constraints good riddance, I really did press myself to take a hard, clear look at what hurts (to mangle my favorite Hemingway quote). Because these novels hurt in the best way. Each entry on this list is a five-star book in my books. Which means I wouldn't change a single thing about a single one of them. They are the ones I call perfect when I recommend them to friends and strangers. They are the ones I have read and reread over the past ten years and...

I've wanted to post about this for the last while, but . . . life. Ever since we took a family trip a few years ago and ran across one of these Little Free Libraries  somewhere in the wilds of Colorado, I've dreamed of putting one up in our yard and filling it with all the books. Since I am a serial book collector, it seemed as though it wouldn't be a hardship keeping one stocked. I can't even imagine the various ways my head would have exploded as a kid if I'd stumbled across one of these in any of the many neighborhoods where we lived when I was growing up. I would have absolutely  haunted it. And then my beautiful husband and his beautiful siblings went and gave me one. They even dug the hole and poured the concrete. I painted it, carefully selected the first books, and before I knew it there were actual people stopping. They were actually  browsing . And it was approximately one thousand percent as magical as I imagined it might be. So I threw caution to the...

Guys. We are going on a trip―a trip we have been planning for years. And it is finally happening next week! We're going to visit my parents in France, and we are taking the whole gang. Or rather, all three kids but not the dog. Who  I am desperately sad about leaving and really hope he doesn't think we've up and given him to another family and proceed to forget all about us. It's just two weeks. But we've never left him that long before, and I am obviously emotional about it. Have I posted pics of Sodapop here before? I'm not sure that I ever have. Here he is on the day we got him: And here he is now in his natural habitat, which is to say in my library on laundry day: Ahem.  The actual point of this post is to get your reading recs for the trip! I'm completely torn over which physical books to take with me. Yes, I realize most of my reading will be done on my Kindle by necessity, but I always have to have some physical copies with me. For both ...

 Well, hi there. It's been . . . it's been awhile, hasn't it? I'm sitting here gazing at the tower of books I have to review (or finish reviews on), and I'm not gonna lie. It's gotten a little on top of me. The thing is, I definitely want to review each one of them. Because I've had some spectacular reading this year, guys. Really spectacular. I want to share my thoughts. And this is still my favorite place to do so. It will probably always be. All the other formats seem too limited, too awkwardly shaped, for the size of my thoughts. So. I'll keep trucking. More reviews to come before the end of the year. Promise. For now, I wanted to just give you a heads up on the full-fledged binge I've fallen into with my discovery of Mariana Zapata 's novels. She writes contemporary, frequently sports-themed (yay!) stories set in Texas, with strong central romances of the slowest of slow burn varieties. Like, whoa do these couples take their time work...

A little while ago, Book Riot published an article on "one-sitting books." The post was part of their Read Harder challenge and included suggestions for books you might be able to inhale in a day, should you be so inclined. Though making a habit of it would likely wreak havoc on my health, I love it when a one-sitting book reveals itself to me out of the blue, when I find myself swallowed up in a novel and it dawns on me that I'm going to be finishing it in one gulp. That, in fact, I don't really have much of a say in the matter—the characters, the writing, the sheer magic of it all have me in that much of a glorious stranglehold. So I thought I'd share a list of titles I actually did read in one 24-hour period the very first time I cracked them open. These memories are all choice ones for me, as evidenced by the fact that the sights and sounds of where I was when I read them are imprinted in my memory. I can still feel the slats of my son's crib pressi...