The part everyone skips.
A personal book review and marginalia blog focused on reflective reading, annotated passages, and the books that stay with you.
Last Night in Brooklyn by Xochitl Gonzalez
Everybody in Brooklyn—our kind of Brooklyn—believed in a fair fucking fight. But this, we all knew, had been dirty pool.
Quick Lit Short and Sweet Reviews, April 2026
Short reviews of six books I read over the last month and a half — Sisters in Yellow, Last Night in Brooklyn, The Witch, Vigil, How to Commit a Postcolonial Murder, and Down Time.
How to Commit a Postcolonial Murder by Nina McConigley
A good life in spite of. In spite of bad ancestors. In spite of your skin. In spite of colonialism. In spite of capitalism. In spite of nationalism. In spite of the internet. In spite of war. In spite of the patriarchy.
Down Time by Andrew Martin
Maggie spent her time trying to solve problems; she’d be the person trying to untangle the ropes for the lifeboats as the crew sang plaintive death songs up on deck.
Buzzwords and Phrases That Make Me Want to Read (or Avoid) a Book
The descriptors book marketers use tell you a lot about who they think you are. These are the ones that pull me in and the ones that send me running.
Simply More by Cynthia Erivo
With music everywhere, home felt like a place I belonged. I could ask all the questions in the world and was never shamed for my curiosity. I could bring in as much music as I wanted and play it wherever and whenever I wanted.
Books About the Southwest: History, Fiction, and the Stories We Were Never Told
The American Southwest has been mythologized so thoroughly and for so long that the myth has become almost impossible to see around. These books are a corrective.
Helen of Nowhere by Makenna Goodman
Helen had money. You betcha. She used to say her life was like the inside of a golden egg, and that people with normal shells wanted nothing more than to be golden. And instead of thinking about their yolks or whites, they thought only of their shells and how they were missing some kind of decoration, whereas she had the decoration and wanted it to be normal, like theirs.
New-to-me Authors Read in 2025
A Top Ten Tuesday list of new-to-me authors I read in 2025, plus the real question underneath: was I pulled in by the author, the premise, or the hype, and did the book deliver?
Books I Wish I Could Read Again for the First Time
A list of books I'd love to read again for the first time, that didn’t just entertain me, but woke something up too.
Goals for 2026 & Defensive Book Quoting
This year I'm setting reading and book goals while trying to stay out of the performance trap.
The Grace of Reading for Transformation, Not Consumption
Reading doesn’t need to be optimized. An essay on escaping reading-as-productivity and rediscovering reading as transformation, not consumption.