In Columbus, Mother’s Day is traditionally considered the start of the warm weather growing season. We technically have three growing seasons with the warm weather growing season running roughly May-August bookended by two shorter cool growing seasons in early spring and fall. However, those cool seasons are so erratic anymore with temps often swinging wildly back and forth between hot and cold they’re too unpredictable for me to do more than tuck some seeds into a bed and appreciate whatever manages to grow.

Roughly six weeks ago I did just that, and today I was rewarded with my first harvest: two radishes.

Gardening is a hopeful practice. It requires an inherent belief in the future and yourself as well. Anyone who has grown anything knows it’s rarely an entirely straightforward process; instead it’s an ongoing practice marked by potential pitfalls and obstacles to overcome, but persistence, patience, and a sprinkle of humility is sometimes met with reward—or can be reward in itself.

I’m not a natural gardener; many a plant has suffered under my thumb in order to gain the knowledge I exercise today. Through trial-and-error, learning from my mistakes, stubborness stick-to-itiveness, continuous research, and an appreciation for dirt under my nails, I’ve reached a place where gardening is a fulfilling and rewarding pursuit—one that compliments my desire to slow down, engage with nature, and embrace an optimistic perspective.

All this to say: grow something! I’m a fan.

Last year I shared a monthly garden check in and I intend to do so again this year.

Sunday was Mother’s Day so this week I planted tomato and pepper plants, parsley, rosemary, and basil to accompany the mint, thyme, lavender, and chives already growing in my herb bed, scattered zinnia and sunflower seeds, and tucked in okra, cucumber and the first round of green bean seeds.

Now we water and wait.

Tell me:

• Do you do any outdoor gardening/growing?
  
  
  

  Leave a comment

Reading

• Celestial Lights by Cecile Pin. Quiet, literary sci-fi about an astronaut named Ollie on a 10 year mission to Europa. The story toggles between the mission and its day-to-day happenings as told through the captain’s log and flashbacks to Ollie’s childhood, coming-of-age, falling in love, and deciding to go on this mission. It’s very introspective and concerned with ambition, sacrifice, and how personal choices impact those close to us. For fans of Samantha Harvey’s Orbital.

• The Mad Wife by Meagan Church. Set in the 1950s, Lulu is struggling to meet the perfectionist expectations of the suburban housewife she is after her second baby. When a new neighbor moves in across the street, Lulu becomes fixated upon her in a way that has Lulu suspicious and questioning. I’ve seen this book around quite a bit, frequently attached to a positive review. It seems to have gained some momentum based largely on word-of-mouth, or at least that’s my impression. Given that context, I was surprised to find it rather uneven. It’s difficult to talk about without revealing key plot details so I’ll just say, I liked the setting, appreciated the themes, and didn’t find it an unworthwhile read, but I think the author tried to do too much. The author’s note at the end gave me the impression Church had some personally meaningful ideas she really wanted to incorporate into the story. I think this could have been a stronger story had it been more focused.

• Cherry Baby by Rainbow Rowell. I spent Mother’s Day reading on the deck and it was glorious and everything I wanted! Even the weather cooperated with sun instead of clouds and rain as forecasted. All things considered, my reading selection required a sure thing—Rainbow Rowell’s newest release did not disappoint!
  
  While her soon-to-be-ex-husband is off in Hollywood working on the film adaptation for his semiautobiographical megahit webcomic, Cherry finds herself alone in the home they once shared, caring for the dog they got in lieu of the children she wanted, saddled with a level of notoriety she’s uncomfortable with as the star of her husband’s series. With her marriage on pause, Cherry bumps into her college crush, a sort of almost, but didn’t happen, the-one-who-got-away situation, except this time, the time is right and the two begin a romantic relationship. The story toggles between Cherry’s present interspersed with flashbacks to the rise and fall of her marriage--which might not be as over as she thought. There’s so much going on here and I appreciated all of it—second chance romance, Jesse Plemons (this may be niche, but it’s my niche), complicated feelings around fatness in the GLP-1 era, Midwestern culture, complicated but loving big family dynamics, bonus points absolutely awarded for Cherry’s cute style and dog. I had such an enjoyable time getting lost in this story for a day.
  
  Rowell’s adult fiction always strikes me as Ephron-esque in that her emotionally resonate books feature messy, recognizable characters who are at times frustrating, but you can’t help root for, whose stories feature romance, but whose journeys are bigger than just a simple happy ever after.

• More Than Enough by Anna Quindlen. A quiet, character-driven story about a forty-something woman struggling with infertility who questions her own origins after taking an ancestry test on a whim. This story features family, friendship (shout out to small, long-running, close-knit book clubs!), loss, dreamy New England country homes, and supportive husbands. A warm, satisfying story.

Listening

• This Story Might Save Your Life by Tiffany Crum. A fine thriller whose clever premise centering a survival-themed podcast makes for an elevated listening experience narrated by Julia Whelan and Sean Patrick Hopkins. I’m a sucker for a podcast-themed story.

• One Bad Mother by Ej Dickson. A thoughtful and sometimes funny exploration of of our cultural understanding and performance of the good vs bad mother binary. Dickson looks at ever-evolving standards and how motherhood is currently portrayed and perceived in pop culture through different archetypes and icons such as stage moms, tradwife influencers, Tiger Moms, MILFs, and more.

• Love Trapped. This 12-episode podcast tells the story of The Bachelor’s Clayton Echard’s years long paternity nightmare involving a one-night hookup. I knew nothing about this story before listening and no one is more surprised than me by how invested I became in this series—truly a wild ride. The final episode aired last week.

Watching

• Rooster (HBO Max). I’ll watch Steve Carrell in anything and especially appreciate here he’s playing a successful pulp fiction writer (think Lee Child’s Jack Reacher meets Carl Hiaasen’s absurdity) railroaded into being a writer-in-residence at a small liberal arts college. It’s very much on par with the upmarket sitcom vibe of Shrinking and Ted Lasso (though I think the particular magic of Ted Lasso as a character is singular to a certain extent), all three share a show creator and have overlap in production.

• Send Help (Hulu). A surprisingly fun watch—sort of a campy survival horror about a jilted office underling stuck on a deserted island with her boss following a plane crash. It’s like Cast Away only Misery’s Annie Wilkes is there instead of Tom Hanks. I didn’t realize until after watching, Send Help is directed by Sam Raimi (Evil Dead) and that totally tracks.

Eating & Drinking

• Sheet-Pan Mustard Salmon Dinner

• Crockpot Chicken Bowls with Yellow Rice and Cilantro Pesto. This is a slightly elevated chicken and rice situation that comes together in a snap. It took 2 mins to get the chicken going earlier in the day. I cooked the rice in my Instant Pot (forever and always) and while that was under way I mixed up the pesto (basically threw a handful of items in a blender—the pesto totally makes the meal). Functionally, this is a 30 minute meal. I ate my bowl topped with baby spinach, some grape tomatoes, and pickled onions.

• Another batch of these make-ahead breakfast sandwiches, upon request.

• And another round of our favorite granola.

Links + Loves

• Since we’re talking gardening, here are two things that make my growing life easier:

  • I use this handy-dandy Precip app to track local rainfall totals at a glace. I love that it keeps a history so I can see when and how much rain we’ve received over the last month.

  • We have a lot of squirrels, birds, and other wildlife critters around our yard. The squirrels especially are assholes and love to come right behind me and dig up any seeds I plant. Last year, I finally got smart and started covering my beds with this netting until sprouts are big enough to stand a chance. It allows water, air, and light through, but keeps the critters out.

• The Guardian is doing a countdown of the greatest literature ever published in English, as voted for by authors, critics and academics worldwide.

• A traveling used bookstore crisscrossing the nation? Retirement goals unlocked! (NYT)

• Historian and journalist Jill Lepore talks about the challenges of writing the Trump years into history. (The New Yorker)

• Top French court rejects Amazon challenge over French book delivery fees. (Reuters) The practice is in place to help local independent bookstores stay competitive. Imagine that.

• We have a trailer for the upcoming Netflix series adaptation of East of Eden releasing this fall. (YouTube)

• And speaking of Netflix and book-to-screen adaptations, The Remembered Soldier movie is in the works. (Deadline) Having recently read The Remembered Soldier, I can absolutely see the potential for a great film adaptation!

• The Best Comic Books of the Century So Far, according to Book Riot.

• Modern Mrs. Darcy’s 2026 Minimalist Summer Reading Guide is here.

• In Utah, nearly all statewide book bans originate from just 2 school districts. (The Salt Lake Tribune) “Under Utah law, once three school districts (or two districts and five charters) remove the same book for containing “objective sensitive material,” all public schools in the state must also pull — and destroy — the title.” Again and again we see book challenges originating with a small minority of people (typically affiliated with the same conservative political advocacy groups) targeting the same books, which often feature LGBTQ+ themes/characters and/or characters of color. This Utah law further empowers tyranny of the minority; it’s anything but free and democratic.

• And speaking of the book ban beat, Book Riot’s Literary Activism newsletter does an excellent job keeping up with all the relevant news. This week they’re diving into book ban data: Five Years of Banned Books Data and What Do We Know?

What are you reading, listening to, eating, watching, liking, and/or linking this week? Let’s chat!

Leave a comment

That Bookish Life is a weekly newsletter publishing on Saturdays. If you enjoy my rambles please consider subscribing, sharing, liking, or recommending to a friend.

I sometimes share affiliate links. If you make a purchase I may earn a small commission at no cost to you. Thank you for supporting my work in this way.

If you’d like to keep up with me between newsletters I’m on IG @that_bookish_life. You can also find me on Goodreads and StoryGraph.

Until next time!

Share That Bookish Life

It’s complicated for mothers. It’s complicated for children. Vital to society, yet often underappreciated, under supported, and tokenized, motherhood takes on a host of meanings that are deeply personal and far from simple.

I am always interested in books with themes related to motherhood, especially so when they are stories that are complicated, weird, dark, challenging, and/or unhinged. (Please don’t think my reading selections reflect me as a mother as I’m entirely hinged at all times, of course 😜)

IHO Mother’s Day here are five backlist books exploring the dark, challenging, weird, complexities of motherhood.

Browse these books and more at Bookshop.org

Tell me:

• What are your motherhood related book recommendations? (Both hinged and unhinged suggestions are welcome 😁)
  
  

  Leave a comment

Reading

• Beloved by Toni Morrison. Read for the year long virtual book club I’m participating in through Literary Cleveland IHO America’s 250th birthday and the upcoming 100th anniversary of Ohio-native Toni Morrison’s birthday. The book club is reading all 11 of Morrison’s novels in chronological order based on setting. Beloved is the second book in the series and Honorée Fanonne Jeffers spoke at the meeting—the book club is open to all and I highly recommend checking it out!
  
  This was a re-read for me. I first read Beloved in my late teens, it may have been for AP English or something I read on my own. I do remember it being a very impactful read that has always stood out to me among Morrison’s other novels. Reading it a second time, 20 years later, now a mother myself, in the current environment of historical erasure, where Beloved remains a frequently challenged and banned book, I found it even more impactful.
  
  Winner of the 1988 Pulitzer Prize for fiction (the second and last time a Black women won—the first was Alice Walker for The Color Purple (1983)) Beloved is set in post-Civil War Cincinnati, Ohio where Sethe risked everything and endured much to free herself and her children from the grips of slavery only to be faced with impossible choices and unthinkable tragedy all on “free” soil. This is a book exploring motherhood, love, community, trauma, freedom, and the far reaching horrors of slavery. It’s incredibly powerful and that’s precisely why it’s a dangerous book for those who wish to control our understanding of history, revising facts to fit their preferred narrative.
  
  In some ways Beloved is not an easy read, both in content and structure. At the same time, in Morrison’s masterful hands, it’s a captivating narrative that sometimes functions as a page-turner. This is the kind of book that demands to be read at least twice; once to allow the reader to familiarize themselves with the unique style, structure, and to experience the plot, the second time to really dig into the brilliance and unlock the magic Morrison is able to wield through words alone. Though I also suspect this is one of those books with something new to offer every time its cover is opened. Beloved is undoubtedly among the greatest American novels ever written and I’m glad to have had an excuse to read it again.

• The Reservation by Rebecca Kauffman. I think Kauffman is a terribly underrated author. She’s been an auto-read author for me since The Gunners (2018). If you enjoy slice of life stories that explore everyday people with quiet, emotional depth then you must read her! Kauffman’s newest release, The Reservation, is set over a single day at an upscale restaurant preparing to host a VIP, who pleasingly happens to be John Grisham, and grappling with the mysterious disappearance of 22 ribeye steaks. We jump from character to character moving through different employees, getting glimpses into their lives and their role in the restaurant. Kauffman does an excellent job of not only capturing individual characters, but also the essence of working in a restaurant.

• Good People by Patmeena Sabit. This book has garnered a good bit of attention and, as it turns out, for good reason! A polyphonic novel told through the structure of something like a documentary that allows a Greek chorus of characters to shape our understanding of a tragedy which has occurred. At the center of the tragedy is an Afghan refugee family, their story is shaped by others close to them within their immigrant community, American friends of their teenaged children, investigators, journalists, neighbors, and so on, everyone with a slightly different perspective and interpretation of events due to their own personal experiences and context. Cleverly structured, smartly layered, and quite a page-turner.

Listening

• Go Gentle by Maria Semple. This was… fine? This is my third Semple book (I also read Where’d You Go, Bernadette? (2012) in 2014 and Today Will Be Different (2016) in 2017) and every time I read her books I expect to like them more than I do. Her writing is upmarket, sort of off-beat and zany. Go Gentle has A LOT going on: Stoicism, Me Too, billionaires, madcap mystery, the 2016 election, woman of a certain age navigating NYC life—it’s a lot. And it was a fine listen, but it never fully came together for me into something cohesive. I think this is a case where Semple’s style just might not be for me.

• Whidbey by T Kira Madden. Something of a literary whodunit following the threads of three women impacted by child sexual abuse (two victims, and the abuser’s mother) and the fallout from the abuser’s death. Madden has explored an extremely sensitive topic with a deep level of thought and nuance and does a great job of digging into complex themes related to trauma of this nature—there’s really a lot to appreciate here. The characters themselves felt a bit two-dimensional to me, some more so than others. The character I found most layered and interesting was actually the abuser’s mother. Perhaps because this is a perspective we rarely get, or because she was just better captured on the page.

Watching

• Wuthering Heights (HBO Max). I finally got to see the Emerald Fennell adaptation! I’ve long been a WH fan, you may recall I did a reread earlier this year to properly prepare for the new film adaptation. And… it was… ok? I had very mixed feelings. I was fully prepared for the film to be a, let’s say, reimagining of the source material, and that it only covers the first half (common among WH screen adaptations). I was fine with all of this. I’m far from a purist when it comes to screen adaptations of books. Yes, I love to point out where adaptations differ from the source material, and typically think the book is better (because it is), but I like seeing stories brought to life through another’s eyes. WH is often misunderstood as some sort of star-crossed love story—it’s decidedly not that, but ok! Give the people what they want, Emerald! My problem with this reimagining, or reframing—however we want to look at it—is the relationship between Cathy and Heathcliff in this film just let me rather cold. The film is visually stunning, the imagery nails the dark, unhinged vibe of the book, but if you’re telling me this is the dark romance some readers want from WH I want to feel it… and… I just didn’t 🤷‍♀️ I suppose unsurprisingly, the narrow focus of the film and the sloughing away of all the layers of the book made for a very shallow story. I’m glad I finally got to watch, but I was hoping for something more.

• Marty Supreme (HBO Max). Seemed longer than it needed to be—but who am I to say? I’m not particularly a fan of Timothée Chalamet but he’s quite good in this role.

• The Dark Wizard (HBO Max). I’ve never climbed or jumped off anything for sport. I don’t have any interest, nor do I possess the physical characteristics that are probably necessary to successfully do so. I’m not much over 5’ tall, my short reach alone tells me I’m really just meant to stay on solid ground. Nevertheless, I found this 4 part docuseries about legendary climber Dean Potter fascinating. Recommended for fans of Free Solo.

Eating & Drinking

• Teriyaki Turkey Burgers and Sweet Potato Fries

• Grilled Chicken Street Tacos topped with Quick Pickled Red Onions and guacamole alongside

• One Pan Chicken Sausage and Orzo

• Instant Pot Egg Bites for the kids’ breakfasts

• and Baked Oatmeal for me

Links + Loves

• I just restocked on my favorite, can’t-live-without dry shampoo.

• For this all-male book club, reading has been a shared pleasure for 30 years (WaPo)

• I’m a frequent and fluent Libby user so I was surprised to learn a new-to-me trick or two from Libby Life’s Staff picks: 10 Libby hacks & features we can’t live without.

• The Literary Film & TV You Need to Stream in May according to Lit Hub.

• We have a trailer for Christopher Nolen’s film adaptation of The Odyssey slated for July release. (YouTube)

• Five publishers, including Hachette and Macmillan, have filed a class-action lawsuit against Meta and Mark Zuckerberg alleging copyright infringement with regards to training the company’s AI program. (NYT)

What are you reading, listening to, eating, watching, liking, and/or linking this week? Let’s chat!

Leave a comment

That Bookish Life is a weekly newsletter publishing on Saturdays. If you enjoy my rambles please consider subscribing, sharing, liking, or recommending to a friend.

I sometimes share affiliate links. If you make a purchase I may earn a small commission at no cost to you. Thank you for supporting my work in this way.

If you’d like to keep up with me between newsletters I’m on IG @that_bookish_life. You can also find me on Goodreads and StoryGraph.

Until next time!

Share That Bookish Life

I got myself into a bit of a pickle late in the month regarding library return dates 😬 I’m forever juggling due dates—my best reading motivation—and utilizing renews for borrows, when available, or pausing holds I’m not yet ready for. But this month, between a combination of several new release holds coming in at once (which means no opportunity to renew due to a waitlist) and limited print reading time coinciding with a long read… well, I regret to say The Remembered Soldier was overdue when I returned it 🙈 I threw myself at the mercy of my public library (and their three week grace period) and I think I’m back in good standing.

Back to the juggle!

Everything I Read in April

I read 21 books in April. Here’s a little breakdown of my reading month:

• My entire reading month was courtesy of library/Libby borrows!

• 3 backlist titles (14%)

• 4 non-fiction (19%)

• 13 audio (62 %), 8 print

April Favorites

Each of my April favorites contributed to my library due date problems this month— luckily they were well worth the hassle!

Tell me:

• What did you enjoy reading in April?

  
  

  Leave a comment

  
  

  Thanks for reading That Bookish Life! If you like what you see subscribe to receive future posts.

  
  

Reading

• The Remembered Soldier by Anjet Daange, translated by David McKay. A National Book Award finalist, longlisted for the Booker Prize, and inspired by real events. Set in war-torn Belgium shortly after WWI, a former soldier living in a psychiatric asylum with no memory of who he is and where he came from, is claimed by a woman, responding to an ad placed by his doctors, identifying him as her long missing husband. The story follows the pair in the year following as the soldier attempts to reintegrate and reorient himself into life outside the battlefield. The story is brilliantly structured, written in an almost hypnotic way with lots of “ands” but little punctuation; a free-flowing, stream of consciousness style that uniquely brings readers viscerally into the characters’ experience chronicling the domestic minutiae populating their days, punctuated by profound passages of the brutality of war, the intimacy of marriage, and the disorientation of unknowing oneself, one’s family, and one’s place, all wrapped in a shroud of mystery. Smart, singular, and I can think of no better illustration of the art and craft required of fiction translators.

• Life As We Knew It by Susan Beth Pfeffer. Our most recent family read aloud. Originally published in 2006, I first read this YA book in 2008, the same year the 2nd book published in what would eventually become a four-part series by 2013. Told through a 16-year-old girl’s diary entries, Life As We Knew It chronicles a family’s struggle to survive after a meteor knocks the moon closer to Earth causing a slow building series of apocalyptic natural disasters ending life as they knew it. A strong, engrossing YA offering that held all of our attention and an especially interesting book to revisit post-pandemic. I also read The Hopkins Manuscript last summer and noted some interesting parallels between the stories, though I have not found Pfeffer referencing The Hopkins Manuscript as a direct influence.

• Ruins by Lily Brooks-Dalton. As a fan of Brooks-Dalton’s previous literary cli-fi novels, Good Morning, Midnight (2016) and The Light Pirate (2022), I was eager to read Ruins even though, I’ll be honest, the jacket copy wasn’t calling to me the same way those others did. This is one of those books intended to come into focus as you read so I won’t go into details beyond the somewhat vague synopsis, but I will say I think Brooks-Dalton is a talented storyteller and thoughtful explorer of timely, and relevant ideas. Though my actual reading experience somewhat lagged behind that of Light Pirate and Midnight I found the themes in this book the most interesting. Ruins explores civilizational life cycles, the subjective nature of history, knowledge and the way it shapes understanding and societal structure, and the thin line between ambition and obsession.

Listening

• The Most Wonderful Terrible Person: A Memoir of Murder in the Golden State by Debra Miller. Behind the first essay (originally published in 1966) in Joan Didion's famous collection Slouching Towards Bethlehem was a teenaged girl whose father died and whose mother was sentenced to prison for his murder. Many decades and a lifetime later Debra Miller is telling her own story, though I think it’s being mismarketed as a, “memoir of murder in the Golden State,” for, “fans of Joan Didion and anyone fascinated by true crime.” Though The Most Wonderful Terrible Person does provide an account of the inciting incident, it’s much more a memoir of growing up amidst the ensuing chaos and the long term impacts of the complicated relationship she had with her mother. An honest account lacking the depth deeper focus and analysis could provide.

• Screen People: How We Entertained Ourselves into a State of Emergency by Megan Garber. If there’s a book exploring the way screens are eroding our social fabric you know I’m reading it! Atlantic writer Garber gives a broad overview of the ways screens and online culture, and our participation as creators and consumers, are warping society, culture, and politics. A good entry point on the topic.

Watching

• Beef, Season 2 (Netflix). A good watch, though I preferred the tight focus of the first season.

• DTF St. Louis (HBO Max). This show is weeeeird. Starring Jason Bateman, David Harbour, and Linda Cardellini. Pitch-black dark comedy meets offbeat suburban noir featuring a love triangle and a twisty murder mystery. Tough one to describe, but I’d recommend it for fans of shows like Barry and maybe Fargo.

• Traitors Australia, Seasons 1 and 2 (Peacock). Australia has a different setting (boo) and a new host (meh). I found the production on season 1 especially bad, most notably I thought there was far too little time dedicated to the players themselves and game strategy, it felt like way too much focus on challenges, which are never my favorite part . They got it together a little bit for season 2, but I think the franchise was cancelled afterwards. I can’t say I’m especially surprised. Still, I guess some Traitors is better than no Traitors. Onto New Zealand?

Eating & Drinking

• Smoked Pulled Pork with Baked Mac and Cheese

• These Spring Roll Bowls are an excellent spring meal with lots of fresh veggies and herbs. I added in some cubed, pan-seared tofu for protein.

• Slow Cooker Enchilada Quinoa takes about 5 minutes of hands-on effort—an excellent pantry meal for busy days, AND leftovers reheat really well. Everyone can top it how they like (I had mine with tomatoes, avocado, and a dollop of sour cream) and we eat it with tortilla chips on the side for scooping.

• Sourdough Pancakes—I always make some with blueberries, some without.

• Scotcheroos for a treat—the recipe calls for Rice Krispies, we like to make these bars with Corn Flakes.

Links + Loves

• Re: the above Scotcheroos; I’ve long wanted a little spatula for pan style treats like cookie bars, brownies, etc. Well, I recently got one! It’s just the right size and I love it so much.

• The best books of the year so far according to The New York Times and The New Yorker.

• “Mashed Potato May” Will Change Your Reading Life according to Book Riot. I’ve never heard the term “mashed potato book” before, perhaps it’s not a real thing, though it does describe a real phenomenon—I can attest. I’m just glad to know I’m not the only weirdo who manages to put off reading the books I know I’ll love best.

• Scottdale Public Library staff and volunteers created a wedding dress from damaged books to promote their annual book sale. (People)

• The 250 most influential books in United States history according to the Brooklyn Public Library.

• A lost letter, preserved in a little free library, sparks a friendship 23 years later. (WaPo) Books bring people together! Is Ann Patchett personally responsible? She’s not not!

What are you reading, listening to, eating, watching, liking, and/or linking this week? Let’s chat!

Leave a comment

That Bookish Life is a weekly newsletter publishing on Saturdays. If you enjoy my rambles please consider subscribing, sharing, liking, or recommending to a friend.

I sometimes share affiliate links. If you make a purchase I may earn a small commission at no cost to you. Thank you for supporting my work in this way.

If you’d like to keep up with me between newsletters I’m on IG @that_bookish_life. You can also find me on Goodreads and StoryGraph.

Until next time!

Share That Bookish Life

Here are 21 May book releases on my reading radar.

May 5

• Enormous Wings by Laurie Frankel. At seventy-seven, Pepper Mills is too old to be a stranger in a strange land. She didn’t choose the Vista View Retirement Community of Austin, Texas—that would be her three grown children—but when she grudgingly moves in, she not only makes new friends, she falls in love. Then the exhaustion, vomiting, and confusion start. She fears it’s cancer, dementia, a stroke. But a raft of tests later, the news is even more shocking: She’s pregnant.

• The Supper Club Saints by Claire Swinarski. A dynamic, honest, and beautifully written novel about a young mother who returns to her small-town Wisconsin home after living in a cult-like “Mommune,” and what happens with the other women in her family as they each navigate the constraints, complexities, and joys of modern motherhood.

• Look What You Made Me Do by John Lanchester. A black comedy of love, trust, resentment, and entitlement, Look What You Made Me Do is the sharply observed and suspenseful story of two very different women from two very different generations, entangled in a battle only one of them can win.

• The Things We Never Say by Elizabeth Strout. A chance incident sparks a powerful realization in a beloved teacher’s life—a poignant meditation on loneliness, friendship, parenthood, and the importance of truth in a capsizing world.
  
  My understanding is The Things We Never Say is a true standalone story with new characters and setting, but perhaps contains some subtle Easter eggs for dedicated Strout readers. If anyone can confirm/correct please let me know!

• Mercy Hill by Hannah Thurman. A debut family novel about four sisters growing up on the campus of the underfunded state mental hospital where their strong-willed mother serves as head of psychiatry. A richly moving story of sisterhood, loyalty, and mental health in America.

• How the Story Goes by Andrew Forrester. A young widower of a famous children’s fantasy author teams up with a down-on-her-luck MFA dropout to write the final book in his late wife’s series...and find their own perfect ending along the way.

• John of John by Douglas Stuart. From the Booker Prize-winning and New York Times bestselling author of Shuggie Bain and Young Mungo comes a vivid, moving novel following a young man returning to his Hebridean island home, a portrait of a father's expectations and a son's desires.

• Homebound by Portia Elan. Five lives are entangled across time by one story of survival and hope, uploaded to a floppy disk in the 1980s and destined to ripple across the centuries.

• Seek Immediate Shelter by Vincent Yu. A breathtaking debut novel about survival, hope, and second chances in an Asian American community in Massachusetts, when a false missile throws the residents' lives into chaos.

• Accumulation by Aimee Pokwatka. A twisty, searing, conversation-starting novel about a filmmaker-turned-housewife who moves into her dream house and is forced to consider whether it's the house or herself that is haunted.

• My Mother’s Daughter: Finding Myself in My Family’s Fractured Past by Tracy Clark-Flory. A tender, revelatory, and deeply moving story of family secrets, sisterhood, and the importance of untangling all that we inherit from our mothers.

May 12

• Ash by Louise Wallace. A dazzlingly original and bleakly funny debut novel that follows one harried working mother before and after a devastating weather event, capturing the everyday wonders and infuriating indignities of mothering in a time of ecological crisis.

• The Forgotten Midwife by Laura Anthony. Set in the dual timelines of present-day New Jersey and 1950s Ireland, and based on real historical events, comes a powerful, poignant novel of sisterhood, family secrets, and resilience.

• Make Me Better by Sarah Gailey. An eerily seductive look at the desire for community connection and self-improvement---and the darkest places inside us all. Urgent and yet timeless, this read is perfect for fans of Shirley Jackson, Ari Aster, and Patricia Highsmith.

May 19

• Score by Kennedy Ryan. More than a decade after their disastrous breakup, Verity and Monk must work together on the set of an epic Harlem Renaissance biopic. With Monk, now a world-class musician, creating the score, and Verity, an award-winning screenwriter, penning the script, there's Oscar buzz before shooting even begins. This once-in-a-lifetime project could catapult them both to new heights, but can they can put the past behind them for the sake of the film…for the sake of something more?

• Hungered by Amanda Rizkalla. For readers of The House on Mango Street and We the Animals, this striking debut brings to life an unforgettable young narrator and the complicated, loving, cruel, and generous figures that make up her universe. This haunting and lyrical novel captures the fault lines of an existence marked by economic insecurity, exploring what it means to come of age during a moment of displacement.

• Take Me With You by Steven Rowley. College professor Jesse del Ruth has been abandoned. Thirty years into their relationship, Jesse witnesses his husband, Norman, get out of bed late one night, walk into their Joshua Tree backyard, step into a strange beam of light and . . . disappear. How could Norman desert him after a lifetime together? Where did he go? And, most confoundingly . . . will he ever return? Jesse knew they were both feeling stuck, longing for something they couldn’t quite name. But was their rut so deep that Norman’s only option was to leave Jesse behind? Steven Rowley brings his resonant wit and emotional insight to an epic love story—an exploration of the forces that draw two people into the same orbit and the gravity that threatens to pull them apart.
  
  Steven Rowley is giving us an epic love story involving a *checks notes* alien abduction?! Immediately yes!

• Returns and Exchanges by Kayla Rae Whitaker. A sweeping novel of one Kentucky family’s rise and fall throughout the 1980s—a tragicomic tour de force about love and marriage, parents and children, and the perils of mixing family with business, from the acclaimed author of The Animators.

• The Burning Side by Sarah Damoff. From the author of The Bright Years, the story of April and Leo, a couple on the brink of collapse. When their house goes up in flames, family secrets and thorny histories emerge as they are forced to decide what is worth salvaging.
  

May 26

• Dolly All the Time by Annabel Monaghan. A hardworking single mom returns to her seaside hometown and stumbles into a fake dating situationship with a wealthy, workaholic scion.
  
  Monaghan has been an auto-read author for me since Nora Goes Off Script (2023). It’s becoming something of a tradition for me to kick off summer with an early read of Monaghan’s newest release over Memorial Day weekend. I have every intention of doing so this year with Dolly!

• The Midnight Train by Matt Haig. A magical, time-travelling love story, from the world of The Midnight Library.

Tell me:

• Which May releases are on your radar?

• What are you looking forward to reading next month (front or backlist!)

Leave a comment

Reading

• So Old, So Young by Grant Ginder. The publisher’s jacket copy promises six friends, five parties, and twenty years, and that’s exactly what we get. The story checks in with a group of college friends as recent grads in aughts NYC up to present day and middle age. I love this kind of story that follows a cast of characters through time as they grow and their relationships evolve (or don’t) and I found this book especially well done. Excellent reading experience!

Listening

• Famesick: A Memoir by Lena Dunham. Dunham unpacks her early rise to fame and the unintended consequences and fallout of being thrust into the spotlight in her early 20s. From Girls to her relationship with Jack Antonoff to chronic illness and addiction; a juicy, honest, and brash personal reflection narrated by Dunham.

• Anything Is Possible by Elizabeth Strout. Technically my third Strout. About 10 years ago I read Olive Kitteridge and didn’t love. I actually don’t recall now why I didn’t enjoy it (this is part of why I now try to write at least a few sentences about my reading experience for every book I read), it could have been a number of things. After many personal recommendations and steeping in general praise for Elizabeth Strout among readers I consider of similar taste, I finally gave Strout another try last year with My Name is Lucy Barton—I really enjoyed it! Spring had me craving a return to the (fictional) small, rural town of Amagash, Illinois and its inhabitants. Anything Is Possible did not disappoint!

• Ruth by Kate Riley. A quiet, subtle story covering decades in the everyday life from childhood into middle age of Ruth, a woman born in 1963 into an Anabaptist Christian commune of Hutterites in Michigan. This community is reminiscent of the Amish in many ways including belief in separation from the world, plain dress, and pacifism, but unlike the Amish, Hutterites embrace modern technology and more importantly true communisim—it quite an interesting community and culture to explore. While I enjoyed learning about the ins and outs of Ruth’s world and found the book smartly written overall, I really craved getting closer to Ruth herself. The story is written in third-person present tense meaning the narrative remains very external and observational. It’s clearly an authorial choice, but my personal preference would have been to see Ruth’s life through her own eyes, instead I felt at arm's length throughout.

• The Caretaker by Marcus Kliewer. This was a highly anticipated read for me as I loved Kliewer’s 2024 debut We Used to Live Here. The Caretaker is about a young woman who takes a job housesitting for a home located in the wilderness of the Oregon coast. The Craigslist(!) ad is vague, but the pay is good, and she desperately needs the money, even if the instructions are strange, as detailed by a homemade VHS tape warning that once she steps onto the property intended to be its caretaker there’s no going back—I’m not even sure the whole “if it sounds too good to be true, it probably is” thing is really relevant here because this all seems like a very bad idea right from the start. The Caretaker appears to be set in the same universe as We Used to Live Here—a good thing for me since I loved that book, but not so good when one can’t help but compare the two and I think We Used to Live Here is a superior book. Still, I enjoyed The Caretaker and it featured a lot of what I appreciated about We Used to Live Here: it’s weird, unsettling, and moves at a thrilling pace; there’s a good bit of ambiguity leaving plenty of space for speculation/interpretation (which some readers will not appreciate, but I tend to when properly deployed). While fully standalone stories, the books are very much in conversation with one another, close reading will yield lots of Easter eggs and matching puzzle pieces—super fun! I ended up listening on audio because that’s the format that first dropped into my greedy little hands ears and it was a good listen!

Watching

• The Pitt, Season 2 (HBO Max). Finally able to watch season 2 now that the season is complete (because HBO doesn’t tell me what to do.) Such a smartly crafted show and impressive in its ability to go full throttle across 15(!) episodes—an unheard of treasure trove in the current television landscape where somehow 6 half hour episodes can be considered a full television season 🤨 I’m left yearning for more punched up network television of yore!

Eating & Drinking

• Herb-Crusted Pork Loin Roast with mashed potatoes and roasted asparagus

• Sweetgreen-inspired Hot Honey Chicken Bowls

• The Baked Crispy Shrimp Tacos that everyone enjoyed last week ended up back on the menu immediately as shrimp was still on sale.

• Trader Joe’s Orange Chicken (freezer to oven), rice (in the Instant Pot), and steam-in-bag veggies (from the microwave) on a night we needed something speedy-quick with minimal cleanup. I always have this meal on hand for those kind of nights!

• A batch of Breakfast Sandwiches for the fam—some went in the fridge for immediate consumption, some are tucked in the freezer for later.

• The return of warm weather means the return of yogurt bowls! Two Good vanilla topped with whatever fruit is on sale (lately, berries), and some of our favorite granola.

Links + Loves

• Happy Indie Bookstore Day to all those who celebrate! 🎉 Today, independent bookstores across the U.S. will offer special events, items, and maybe even a city-wide crawl if you’re lucky enough (Columbus is!) It’s one big party and an excuse to engage with the bookish community in your area. Click here for more info and a map of participating stores near you. (American Booksellers Association)

• If you’re unable to participate in person, Bookshop.org is offering free shipping all weekend (they also have an Earth Day sale with 20% off select titles going through May 1!) and Libro.fm is celebrating with an Indie Bookshop Appreciation Sale featuring bookseller favorites, bestsellers, and more. They’re also offering new monthly members three audiobooks for the price of one. In addition to their monthly credit, members always get 30% off additional audiobooks including those already on sale. Libro.fm and Bookshop.org share profits with indie bookstores so every purchase you make supports indie bookstores—you can even choose a specific shop to support!

• IHO of the recent observance of Earth Day I thought it an appropriate time to share our experience with Hefty ReNew. Hefty’s ReNew program allows us to put hard to recycle plastic items—for example, chip/snack/coffee/shredded cheese/plastic zipper bags, fresh and frozen produce bags, granola bar/candy wrappers, foam containers (including take-out and egg cartons), plastic straws and utensils, bubble wrap and mailers including the kind Amazon uses, and plenty more, it’s an impressive list!—in with our regular curbside recycling. It does require you purchase special (recycled plastic) Hefty bags so that these items can be easily separated out. I don’t love that, but understand the necessity at this time. I usually make sure our bags are packed pretty full before I toss them in with the recycling so one bag ends up lasting several weeks. The bags are available to purchase at my local Target and Kroger. We’ve been participating for a year now and it’s very simple and definitely worthwhile. Of course it’s optimal to avoid single-use plastics entirely, but even being a thoughtful consumer it’s really challenging to avoid and an incredible amount ends up coming through my house. Between this program, our community curbside recycling, and backyard composting we’re able to divert a satisfying amount of waste from the landfill ♻ The downside is the program is currently available in only 9 states. You can see if your community participates here and sign up for a free starter kit here.

• The 2026 Aspen Words Literary Prize has been announced! (Aspen Institute)

• The Los Angeles Times Book Prizes have been announced. (L.A. Times)

• Publishers Weekly Summer Reads recommendations have arrived! (PW)

• Whiting Foundation names its 10 emerging authors of 2026 (NPR)

• 15 Must-Read Small Press Books of Spring 2026 according to Electric Lit.

• I love a good book dedication. If you do too, this treasury of book dedications is absolutely worth a browse. (The Life and Errors of Molly Young Substack)

• We have a trailer for Ridley Scott’s film adaptation of Peter Heller’s The Dog Stars. (YouTube) The book is excellent and the trailer looks promising! Release date is scheduled for August.

• This week was National Library Week. The American Library Association celebrated by releasing their list of the most challenged books of 2025. 2025 was the second highest year for most individually challenged titles (4,235 compared with 4,240 in 2023—don’t fret, there’s always next year! 😣) Many of those thousands of titles feature LGBTQ+ and/or BIPOC representation. Additionally, the ALA found, “92 percent of all book challenges were initiated by pressure groups, government officials and decision makers, up from 72 percent in 2024. Less than 3 percent of challenges originated from individual parents.” This is a very important piece to understand. The same books are being repeatedly challenged across the U.S. by a small number of well-funded, politically-motivated, coordinated groups who want to control what everyone has access to based on their own personal whims and opinions of whose stories deserve to told, not by concerned parents or grassroots efforts within individual communities. It’s a strategic attempt to silence and erase targeted groups coming from a minority of loud voices.

What are you reading, listening to, eating, watching, liking, and/or linking this week? Let’s chat!

Leave a comment

That Bookish Life is a weekly newsletter publishing on Saturdays. If you enjoy my rambles please consider subscribing, sharing, liking, or recommending to a friend.

I sometimes share affiliate links. If you make a purchase I may earn a small commission at no cost to you. Thank you for supporting my work in this way.

If you’d like to keep up with me between newsletters I’m on IG @that_bookish_life. You can also find me on Goodreads and StoryGraph.

Until next time!

Share That Bookish Life

Our house was bank-owned when we purchased it 10 years ago and desperately in need of some TLC (and some busted water pipe repair so as not to have an indoor water feature free flowing through our kitchen ceiling.) We’ve done flooring and landscaping, changed light fixtures and outlets, replaced the roof and siding (not ourselves, even I have my limits), and painted many, many walls, and scraped, and scraped, and scraped too many popcorn ceilings (why was this ever, ever a thing?!) We’re to the point where there are far fewer spaces and places in our house that we haven’t touched than those we have.

Last week, it was time to tackle our upstairs hall bath. It was long overdue. Thursday evening we made the first of several Lowe’s trips (one and done is impossible). Friday afternoon, we gutted the bathroom down to the subfloor—save the shower, luckily that was fine. Friday night, after a frustrating ceiling repair (see: aforementioned involuntary indoor water feature) I was questioning why I wanted to torture myself this way when we had a perfectly functional bathroom mere hours before, most of which was now scattered at the curb waiting for trash day. Saturday, I fought with flooring and reminded myself I always feel regretful at some point during a major project. Sunday I started painting and we were able to access the shower again. By Monday all the painting was complete, my husband installed a new light fixture and with it, I began to see light at the end of the tunnel.

It’s Friday again and we have everything one would expect from a bathroom including a functional toilet, running water from our new sink faucet, a towel bar, and even some shelves. Pretty safe to say this project is just about in the bag. Safe enough to share some before and afters!

Reading

• Westward Women by Alice Martin. Debut literary speculative fiction set in the 70s where a mysterious plague is infecting women with an itch (both literal and figurative) compelling them to abandon their lives in order to go west, seeking the Pacific Ocean. This one’s a vibe. I think if you enjoy authors like Claire Vaye Watkins and maybe Melissa Broder (I do) you’ll dig this.

• Kin by Tayari Jones. I loved Jones’ previous novel An American Marriage. So much so that although I eagerly anticipated the release of Kin, I was a smidge apprehensive about reading it—Kin had a lot to live up to with my reading experience of An American Marriage. Well, I have to say, my apprehension was absurd because I also LOVED Kin. Kin is set in the mid-century South about two motherless Black girls in the small, rural town of Honeysuckle, Louisiana. Cradle friends who have known one another their entire lives, their paths fork as they enter adulthood with one going off to Spelman College in Atlanta, the other to Memphis seeking the mother who left her behind days after she was born. As with An American Marriage, Jones’ writing is incredibly rich; her characters feel realistic enough to touch, and though the the words on the page go down deceptively easy, the story and the world in which it exists is impressively layered becoming exponentially faceted as it goes along. The easiest 5-star rating I’ve logged in a while.

Listening

• Her One Regret by Donna Freitas. Mystery-thriller about a missing mother whose high-profile disappearance investigation becomes complicated when it comes to light she expressed regret about having a child. Not exactly a stand out read, but an easy listen, and I appreciated the added layer exploring regret in motherhood.

• Yesteryear by Caro Claire Burke. Definitively the buzziest book of 2026, at least so far, though I would not be surprised if it takes the crown for the entire calendar year. I am fascinated by the tradwife trend. Less the wives themselves, or the aesthetic of it all (I avoid tradwife content like the plague and it gets served up to me often on algorithmic social media), more from a sociological or anthropological perspective—what the trend and our collective interest—whether that be rooted in disgust, aspiration, or as a vehicle of propaganda—means more broadly. I’ve long wanted to write a piece on this topic, though I have so many thoughts it’s a challenge to put them into a succinct piece. Anyway, the book. I worked really hard to set the hype aside going into reading and I think I did so successfully. Yesteryear is about a tradwife influencer who one day wakes to find herself living in the 19th century. I think this is a successful commercial novel (I mean, it’s obviously successful based on sales and attention garnered, successful craft-wise) and I found it easily readable with an acceptable level of depth. There’s a lot to appreciate here and the main theme appears to me: no woman, no matter how closely they’re willing to adhere to traditional womanhood, wins under patriarchy—I like this. From what I’ve gleaned Burke herself is not a tradwife, she’s an outsider looking in. While this book seems custom made to resonate with a progressive audience, I’d actually love to hear thoughts from more conservative women.

• Adult Braces: Driving Myself Sane by Lindy West. I’ve seen/heard much chatter surrounding this book written on a cross-country road trip after West discovers her non-monogamous husband has girlfriends West doesn’t know about—yes, this is widely, if not near universally considered cheating, it’s all very messy—I’ve seen fewer people actually reading it. I like West and I like this book, a more intimate offering than her previous works, but the sharp, funny, honest writing is still there.

• The Wind Knows My Name by Isabel Allende. My first Isabel Allende! Read for my IRL book club. Published in 2023, this book weaves together the story of a young Jewish boy sent away by his family via Kindertransport to escape Nazi occupied Vienna, and a refugee from El Salvador near present day separated from her mother and taken into custody at the U.S. border. I may have incorrectly assumed Allende’s writing to be more literary and lyrical, or perhaps this book just wasn’t that, but I was surprised by how heavy handed the book is. There are a lot of big topics and multiple storylines and perhaps it was just too much to take on in fewer than 300 pages. Not a bad read, I just craved deeper development all things considered. If you have an Allende rec for me I’m all ears!

Watching

• The Traitors U.K., All The Seasons 😢 (Peacock). We finished all of Traitors U.K. and I’m very sad to announce it seems that though there are other Traitors franchises (Australia, New Zealand, apparently Canada?) they aren’t set in the cool mansion in Scotland and none of them have Alan Cumming (a short Cumming to be sure 🤣) Basically, I have no where to go from here—send thoughts/prayers/suggestions.

• Shrinking, Season 3 (Apple TV). It seems this show was originally conceived as a 3 season arc (I think?) but has been renewed for a 4th season, which is going to have a bit of a time jump? I don’t know how I feel about this. Why? Is Harrison Ford returning?

Eating & Drinking

• These new-to-us Crispy Shrimp Baked Tacos came together quickly and were a hit with the fam—I’ll definitely be making these again.

• Grilled chicken thighs in this easy marinade I return to again and again with roasted potatoes

• Another batch of our favorite granola

Links + Loves

• Author of The Last Samurai Helen DeWitt turns down $175k Windham-Campbell prize over promotional requirements. (The Guardian) Respect.

• Lit Hub is hosting a bracket for the best literary film adaptation of the last 50 years. Voting is happening now.

• Pew Research Center takes a look at Americans’ reading habits. The (actual) headline: Americans still opt for print books over digital or audio versions; few are in book clubs.

• Meet These Delightful Bookshop Cats (and One Dog!) (Lit Hub) Yet another example of why indies are superior to corporate bookstores everywhere and nowhere.

• The official trailer for the film adaptation of Sunrise on the Reaping is here. (YouTube)

• Five of our greatest novelists on what it takes to write something true. (Harper’s Bazaar) Margaret Atwood, Ottessa Moshfegh, Jhumpa Lahiri, Joyce Carol Oates, and Jesmyn Ward are featured.

• Patrick Schwarzenegger was announced as the male lead in the film adaptation of Emily Henry’s Beach Read and readers aren’t thrilled with the casting to say the least. Here’s everything we know about the film so far. (Deadline)

What are you reading, listening to, eating, watching, liking, and/or linking this week? Let’s chat!

Leave a comment

That Bookish Life is a weekly newsletter publishing on Saturdays. If you enjoy my rambles please consider subscribing, sharing, liking, or recommending to a friend.

I sometimes share affiliate links. If you make a purchase I may earn a small commission at no cost to you. Thank you for supporting my work in this way.

If you’d like to keep up with me between newsletters I’m on IG @that_bookish_life. You can also find me on Goodreads and StoryGraph.

Until next time!

Share That Bookish Life

In much less dubious outings, we went to see Project Hail Mary, which was a really enjoyable watch, an excellent adaptation, in my opinion, a treat to see on the big screen, and hit the sweet spot of a good film for our entire family, which has become a little more challenging with teens. My 16yo especially loved the movie. Everyone was happy, I got to eat popcorn in the theater with the fancy recliners, and watch a long anticipated book-to-screen adaptation—winning all around!

I know we’re cruising headlong into mid-April, but let’s talk March reading!

I read 22 books in March. Here’s a little breakdown of my reading month:

• 19 library/Libby borrows

• 2 gifted (Clutch and Family Drama)

• 1 owned (Mercy)

• 2 backlist titles (9%)

• 6 non-fiction (27%)

• 11 audio (50%), 8 print, 3 digital

March Favorites

Tell me:

• What did you enjoy reading in March?

  
  

  Leave a comment

A bit of housekeeping: a few weeks ago I polled readers about publishing schedule for this newsletter. Most respondents preferred the status quo—one long post on Saturdays. The second largest group of respondents had no opinion. A minority said they preferred two shorter newsletters per week. I’m sticking with status quo for now, though I may sometimes pop into your inbox twice weekly when it makes sense to do so. Thanks for weighing in!

Reading

• We Don’t Talk About Carol by Kristen L. Berry. This book had been hanging out in my library borrow stack for so long I reached the point where I either had to read or return it unread—I decided to give it a read. A suspense-thriller with a healthy dose of family drama about a woman who digs into the mysterious disappearance of her aunt, one of several local Black teen girls who went missing from their Raleigh, North Carolina neighborhood in the mid-1960s with little investigation. Something of a slow burn focusing a lot on the investigator who is also in the process of a years-long IVF journey, satisfyingly layered with family secrets and twisty mystery while highlighting racial disparities in crime solving.

• A Good Animal by Sara Maurer. A coming-of-age story set in the mid-90s in a farming community in rural Sault Ste. Marie, a border town on Michigan’s Upper Peninsula. Everett is a high school senior who dreams of becoming a sheep farmer like his father and generations in his family before him. His very clear path intersects with that of Mary, a newcomer to town who hopes to be there only long enough to graduate and move on to college in a state far away. A quiet story with a very strong sense of place about first love, growing pains on the path to adulthood, and the ripple effect of choices big and small.

• Room 706 by Ellie Levenson. A quick afternoon tryst becomes complicated and clarifying when a woman is unexpectedly trapped in a ritzy London hotel under terrorist occupation alongside the man with whom she’s having an affair. Anxiously biding time hidden in their room, not knowing when, or if, she will be returning to her family, the woman flashes back on previous points in her life: meeting and marrying her husband, day-to-day life with their children, beginning the affair she’s currently engaged in. The central element of the affair is provocative; as the story unfolds we’re offered a nuanced, wider picture of what led her to that hotel room. It’s not a direct comparison, but Room 706 sort of reminded me of Loretta Rothschild’s Finding Grace—if you liked that, you’ll probably appreciate this one.

• This Is Not About Us by Allegra Goodman. A modern Jewish American family explored through three generations of members on various branches of the family tree following the estrangement of their octogenarian matriarchs surrounding an apple cake served at their third sister's deathbed. Each chapter focuses on a different character, which makes this feel like a book of short stories. Like other short story collections some offerings are more interesting and compelling than others, but I generally enjoyed spending time with this family and Goodman's writing.

Listening

• Marsha: The Joy and Defiance of Marsha P. Johnson by Tourmaline. I picked this up IHO the Trans Rights Readathon. A vivid biography of trans icon and pioneering activist Marsha P. Johnson in all her complexity. Johnson’s story also encapsulates the trans community more broadly from 1960s-early 1990s NYC.

• Brawler by Lauren Groff. A readerly confession: short stories aren’t my jam. I recognize the skill that goes into writing a short story, but when a short story is good I generally just want more of it and find it ends just as I’m settling in—it’s just the type of reader I am. If anyone can get me truly interested in reading a collection of short stories it’s Lauren Groff. I enjoyed this collection, and Groff’s narration, though my feelings remain unchanged on the format more generally.

• Upward Bound by Woody Brown. A novel told through various perspectives of inhabitants—both staff and clients— of a day care center serving profoundly disabled adults, many of whom are nonspeaking and/or require wheelchairs. Brown, the author, is a nonspeaking autistic person, offering not only insider perspective and representation for an often overlooked or in many ways unknown community, but also a touching story full of wit, insight, and authenticity.

• Paper Cut by Rachel Taff. 20 years after her controversial memoir Rattlesnake published, true crime icon Lucy Golden has agreed to participate in a documentary about her deadly escape from a California desert cult as a teen. There are a lot of intriguing elements at play here: complicated family relationships, the blurry line between fact and fiction, art and exploitation, what happens when your personal story becomes public fodder, and of course the cult angle—an instant in for me. Despite so much juicy potential I never really felt drawn into the story and the characters always appeared flat. A lot of promise, but the execution just never coalesced in a satisfying way for me.

Watching

• If I Had Legs I’d Kick You (HBO Max). Dark, weird, psychologically intense; Rose Byrne gives an excellent performance of a deeply burnt out therapist and mother to a daughter with special medical needs.

• Paradise, Season 2 (Hulu). Season 2 takes a real sci-fi turn from the political dystopia of season 1. I think season 1 was a little more mysterious and cohesive; season 2 ramps up the melodrama (? I guess that’s the best term), but honestly, I’m here for this twisty-apocalypse with Sterling K. Brown running around like a secret service superhero. Sometimes we just need a plotty, mid-list genre series! I’m sure it will surprise no one when I say: season 2 is only 8 episodes and there are a lot of moving pieces—it needed more episodes!

• The Testament of Ann Lee (Hulu). How to even categorize this 🤔 This is a musical biopic about Ann Lee, English mystic and founding leader of the Shakers in America—culty, utopic, persecuted as all weird sects are, even in the land of religious freedom; their clean, functional wood designs are still around even if they really aren’t—a web search tells me 3 Shakers remain in the U.S. which… to be fair, it’s kind of hard to build a movement when celibacy is a core tenant of your community 😬 Anyway—the film! You know how some books are all vibes, no plot? That’s what this movie is. There is a plot (there’s always a plot), but this is definitely more about the vibes, which are… compelling and interesting and strikingly bizarre at times. It’s a vibe—a weird one. Did I like this? I’m not sure. But I was riveted throughout nonetheless.

• Jury Duty Presents: Company Retreat (Prime Video). I don’t know why they have to get all cute with the title—I guess because there is no jury this season? But this is season 2 of Jury Duty. This time no jury, no James Marsden, we’re on a company retreat with a small hot sauce company who hires a temp (the one real person, everyone else are actors). It’s like… The Truman Show meets The Office.

Eating & Drinking

• Burgers! Our weather is still swinging back and forth between days of high and low temps, but we ended up with a Sunday where it was warm enough and light enough to grill dinner. I served them with some sweet potato fries from the freezer for an easy weekend meal.

• Herb-crusted Pork Loin Roast with mashed potatoes and roasted asparagus.

• Breakfast Bake

• French Toast Casserole for Easter breakfast and Grape Salad and Carrot Cake for celebration with extended family.

• Tuna Noodle Casserole

• Cafe Rio-inspired Pork Bowls

Links + Loves

• Indies Choice Book Award winners have been announced. (American Booksellers Association)

• The Best Historical Fiction Books of the Century So Far according to Book Riot.

• Octavia E. Butler’s Parable of the Sower is getting a film adaptation. (Variety)

• The Millions’ Great Spring 2026 Book Preview is here!

• What Are the Routines of So-Called Super-Readers? (Lit Hub) As a bona fide Super Reader (this sounds such much better than anomaly, which is what I typically consider myself 😜) I can say all of these are true in my experience!

• Channing Tatum (yes, Magic Mike himself) is apparently penning a “very sexy” romance novel with co-writer Roxanne Gay 👀 (InStyle) This has to be so much better than whatever James Patterson is co-writing, right?!

What are you reading, listening to, eating, watching, liking, and/or linking this week? Let’s chat!

Leave a comment

That Bookish Life is a weekly newsletter publishing on Saturdays. If you enjoy my rambles please consider subscribing, sharing, liking, or recommending to a friend.

I sometimes share affiliate links. If you make a purchase I may earn a small commission at no cost to you. Thank you for supporting my work in this way.

If you’d like to keep up with me between newsletters I’m on IG @that_bookish_life. You can also find me on Goodreads and StoryGraph.

Until next time!

Share That Bookish Life

Here are 25 April book releases on my reading radar.

April 7

• American Fantasy by Emma Straub. From New York Times bestselling author of This Time Tomorrow, an irresistible story about what happens when your teenage fantasy comes true after you’re already an adult.
  
  Emma Straub is one of my auto-read authors—I’m so looking forward to reading this! Though it begs to be read on a beach somewhere—might have to save it for vacation reading!
  

• Love by the Book by Jessica George. In Jessica George’s (author of Maame) heartwarming, funny, and soulful second novel, she explores the restorative nature of female friendship and the life-changing power of platonic love.
  

• Yesteryear by Caro Claire Burke. A traditional American woman, a beautiful wife and mother who sells her pioneer lifestyle of raw milk and farm-fresh eggs to her millions of social media followers, suddenly awakens cold, filthy, and terrified in the brutal reality of 1855—where she must unravel whether this living nightmare is an elaborate hoax, a twisted reality show, or something far more sinister in this sensational debut novel.
  

• The Book Witch by Meg Shaffer. She can hop into any novel, but she just can’t stay there. Come along with the Book Witch in this magical and inspiring love letter to reading from the USA Today bestselling author of The Wishing Game.
  

• The Infinite Sadness of Small Appliances by Glenn Dixon. In a near future, where even the smallest of appliances are sentient, a young Roomba vacuum sets out to save the humans of her house from a rising technological power in this compelling, original novel.
  

• Transcription by Ben Lerner. A lightning flash of a novel that is at once a gripping emotional drama and a brilliant examination of the devices, digital and literary, we use to store—or to erase—our memories.
  

• London Falling: A Mysterious Death in a Gilded City and a Family’s Search for Truth by Patrick Radden Keefe. From the bestselling, prize-winning author of Say Nothing and Empire of Pain, a spellbinding account of a family devastated by the sudden death of their nineteen-year-old son, only to discover that he had created a secret life which drew him into the dangerous criminal underworld that lies beneath London’s glittering surface.

April 14

• Cherry Baby by Rainbow Rowell. Rainbow Rowell returns with a breathtakingly honest novel about a woman who lost everything — and isn't sure she wants it back.
  
  LOVE RR—this is at the top of my TBR!
  

• Go Gentle by Maria Semple. The New York Times bestselling author of Where'd You Go, Bernadette returns to form in her most exuberant and life-affirming novel yet with the story of one woman’s cheerful determination to live a life of the mind only to have the heart force its way in.

• Leave Your Mess at Home by Tolani Akinola. Big-hearted, hilarious, and wise, Leave Your Mess At Home is a poignant exploration of forgiveness, unconditional love, and becoming who you want to be, asking the question: what do we owe to our families, and what do we owe to ourselves?
  

• Morsel by Carter Keane. A delicious folk horror debut about learning to bite back when the world is determined to eat you alive.
  

• Happy Ending by Chloe Liese. A clever and heartwarming rom-com that is perfect for fans of Christina Lauren and Annabel Monaghan about two best friends who must fake a relationship for their exes.
  
  I’ve never read any Chloe Liese, though I know her books get a lot of love from bookish social media—this one is going straight to my beach bag!
  

• American Spirits by Anna Dorn. Smart, entertaining, and edgy, American Spirits is a compelling exploration of the dark side of fame.
  

• Invasive Species by Ellery Adams. The women in Cold Harbor all have something to prove, and they'll have to do it in a world full of monsters.
  

• Dear Monica Lewinsky by Julia Langbein. From the acclaimed author of American Mermaid comes a wise, funny, and wildly original examination of female desire and the price women pay for giving in to their appetites.
  

• Cleo Dang Would Rather Be Dead by Mai Nguyen. A darkly humorous yet uplifting novel about a grieving mother who starts working at a funeral home and discovers that the best way to honor the dead is to live.
  

• Wife Shaped Bodies by Laura Cranehill. A literary horror debut in which an isolated newlywed—covered in mushroom growths like all the other wives in her community—strikes a precarious balance between following her husband’s strict rules and pursuing an intense connection with a woman who makes her question everything.
  

• Famesick: A Memoir by Lena Dunham. In this rowdy, frank reflection on illness, fame, sex, and everything in between, the remarkable mind behind the hit series Girls and the bestselling author of Not That Kind of Girl asks whether fulfilling her creative ambitions has been worth the pain.

April 21

• The Caretaker by Marcus Kliewer. A supernatural horror about a young woman who accepts a caretaking job from Craigslist, only to discover the position has consequences far greater—and more dangerous—than she ever could have imagined.
  
  I loved Kliewer’s We Used to Live Here—I’m desperately hoping his sophomore novel lives up to the high expectations set with his debut!
  

• Small Boat by Vincent Delecroix, translated by Helen Stevenson. A singular, gut-punching parable for our times about complicity in the face of tragedy, based on the true story of a French navy officer who ignored distress calls from migrants drowning in the English Channel.
  
  Shortlisted for the 2025 International Booker Prize.
  

• Underlake by Erin L. McCoy. When a mother claims her missing daughter is alive beneath a lake in a flooded valley, a marine biologist descends into a hidden underwater settlement where those who refused to leave have built a sealed-off world—and where the consequences of that choice are beginning to surface.
  
  Marketing is making some pretty lofty author comps that have me extremely interested: Emily St. John Mandel, Lauren Groff, Marilynn Robinson, and Margaret Atwood. 👀
  

• Small Town Girls: A Writer’s Memoir by Jayne Anne Phillips. A luminous memoir in essays from the Pulitzer Prize–winning novelist, who reflects on her origins and the mysteries of memory.

April 28

• We Burned So Bright by TJ Klune. A heart-wrenching standalone novel by #1 New York Times bestselling author TJ Klune, We Burned So Bright follows an elder gay couple on an end-of-the-world road-trip.
  

• The Radiant Dark by Alexandra Olivia. Arrival meets Wild Dark Shore in this captivating novel that follows a family over fifty years—a bold and compassionate exploration of the universe around us and what it truly means to be human.
  

• Ghost Town by Tom Perrotta. A gripping and darkly nostalgic tale about a tumultuous summer in 1970s suburban New Jersey, from the perspective of a middle-aged writer looking back on a series of events that changed his life—and the story he finally has the courage to tell.

Tell me:

• Which April releases are on your radar?

• What are you planning to read in April? (Front or backlist!)
  
  

  Leave a comment

Reading

• A Mercy by Toni Morrison. I am participating in a year long virtual book club with Literary Cleveland as part of Ohio’s Toni Morrison celebration in honor of America’s 250th birthday and the upcoming 100th anniversary of Morrison’s birth. The book club (open to all, not just Ohioans; scheduled guest speakers include Imani Perry, Honorée Fanonne Jeffers, Tayari Jones, and Namwali Serpell and Hanif Abdurraqib have already spoken—an incredible lineup if you’re interested!) is reading all 11 of Morrison’s novels in the order in which they are set beginning with A Mercy. I have previously read about half of Morrison’s novels, though most I read 20+ years ago so this is a fantastic opportunity to revisit those as well as read the rest of her catalog! The time feels right in a lot of ways.
  
  I first read A Mercy in 2016, the last and most recent Morrison book I’ve read. Set in the late 17th century, A Mercy portrays the early, harsh, colonial days of the New World through the lives of people on a Maryland farm: a Dutch settler and trader unfamiliar with slavery, his European-born wife sent by her family to marry, and three women of varying ages, experiences, and levels of bondage. Morrison’s writing is magically complex and readable and I look forward to studying America through her stories.

• Medium Rare by A. Natasha Joukovsky. I don’t care about sports. My personal level of interaction with March Madness begins and ends with a totally uninformed filling out of a bracket for family fun purposes (I never win). What I can always get behind is a timely book with relevant seasonal themes—enter Medium Rare, which I picked up on recommendation from . Described as, “a modern tragicomedy transform[ing] the myth of Icarus into a blazing romp through bureaucracy, B-list fame, and college basketball,” the story follows a very mid man’s brush with fame after he wins a billion dollar prize completing a perfect 2019 NCAA Tournament bracket. Suddenly he has media attention, houses in desirable locations across the U.S., a private jet, and maybe a campaign for high level government office? The story is told through the eyes of an adjacent friend, aptly named Cassandra. An interesting blend of modern literary myth retelling and sociopolitical satire.
  

Listening

• Missing Sam by Thrity Umrigar. Set in the upper-middle class, liberal enclave of Cleveland Heights, Ohio an Indian-American woman becomes the prime suspect after her wife goes missing on an early morning neighborhood run. This is a crime thriller with a domestic drama element that wades into the complicated context of identity. While I appreciate Umrigar’s willingness to explore meatier elements I felt about Missing Sam similarly to the way I felt about her 2022 novel Honor—unfortunately the story doesn’t have the necessary structure to properly support these weighty topics so it comes off feeling incredibly heavy handed.

• No Matter What by Cara Bastone. I really, really dislike a miscommunication trope, but I really enjoy Cara Bastone and I also enjoy a marriage-in-crisis romance so I was able to just accept the unreasonable level of miscommunication in this story and enjoy it—a testament to Bastone’s writing to be sure. A married couple dealing with grief and trauma surrounding an accident find healing and their way back to one another in this slow burn romance. Bastone writes such endearing characters (including entire communities of side characters you wish you knew!) I’m willing to overlook a lot.

• Notes on Heartbreak: A Memoir by Annie Lord. Publisher’s Weekly puts it perfectly: a raw and riveting take on love, loss, and moving on.

• You with the Sad Eyes: A Memoir by Christina Applegate. A good, engaging listen with Applegate narrating.

Watching

• Is This Thing On? (Hulu). I guess this is a dramedy leaning heavily towards the drama end about a middle-aged married couple who separate. I love Laura Dern, which is primarily my reason for watching this, I do not love stand-up comedy and the primary story line is about Will Arnett’s character discovering stand-up comedy as something of a cathartic outlet—so, there’s that. Directed by Bradley Cooper, who plays a character named Balls who seems like he would be more at home in something like The Hangover rather than this more serious character study. Also, Peyton Manning is there? Watchable, but I have many questions.

• Neighbors (HBO Max). After watching I feel really great about my neighbors in a similar way Hoarders makes me feel really great about my housekeeping.

Eating & Drinking

• Creamy Lemon Chicken Pasta with asparagus—I tossed the asparagus in with the pasta the last minute it was cooking.

• 30-Minute Butternut Squash and Black Bean Enchilada Skillet—I made it with sweet potatoes this time and homemade enchilada sauce.

• Slow Cooker Kielbasa and Sauerkraut with Beer & Brown Sugar—made with smoked turkey sausage.

• Sourdough Bagels

Links + Loves

• I just repurchased this shower cap for the third time. I wash my hair 2-3 times per week depending on a complex algorithm I won’t bore everyone with—IYKYK. This cap allows me to keep my hair dry in the shower on days I’m not washing. It’s machine washable, I like the interior terry cloth lining, and I think it holds up pretty well considering—I’ve gotten 3 years of frequent use out of each of my previous two caps, eventually the elastic gives out.

• Winners of The National Book Critics Circle Award have been announced. (NBCC)

• Bridgerton season 5 to follow show’s first major queer love story and we have a teaser! (Entertainment Weekly)

• Better than Wuthering Heights? The Brontës’ novels – ranked! (The Guardian)

• “I Will Not Comply”: Librarian Luanne James Fights Censorship Demands of Rutherford County Library System’s Board. (Book Riot) A true patriot, and a must read.

• The Life-Changing Power of a Book Review Before Algorithms: How The Washington Post’s now-defunct Book World transformed the careers of two giants of American literature. (NYT)

• How Silicon Valley Borrowed Ideas From Sci-Fi and Bastardized Them: Tech barons like Elon Musk love science fiction. They also misunderstand it completely. (Slate) Losers 🙄

• The Women’s Prize for non-fiction finalists have been announced. (Women’s Prize)

• For Women’s History Month, A Reproductive Rights Reading List (Lit Hub)

• Gwyneth Paltrow is starring in, and producing, a Netflix adaptation of Belle Burden’s bestselling divorce memoir Strangers. (Vogue)

• What Horror Book You Should Read Based on Your Fave Academy Award-Nominated Horror Movie. (Book Riot)

• As AI Discourse Rages, Publishing Has More Questions Than Answers (Publishers Weekly) “One week after Hachette Book Group pulled Mia Ballard’s Shy Girl for strong suspicions of AI use, the industry is reeling—and struggling to contend with the implications of the novel’s cancelation.” The mess continues.

What are you reading, listening to, eating, watching, liking, and/or linking this week? Let’s chat!

Leave a comment

That Bookish Life is a weekly newsletter publishing on Saturdays. If you enjoy my rambles please consider subscribing, sharing, liking, or recommending to a friend.

I sometimes share affiliate links. If you make a purchase I may earn a small commission at no cost to you. Thank you for supporting my work in this way.

If you’d like to keep up with me between newsletters I’m on IG @that_bookish_life. You can also find me on Goodreads and StoryGraph.

Until next time!

Share That Bookish Life

But this time of year, right now, this brief window of time as the harshness of winter transitions to the bloom of spring, when things are visibly beginning to awaken outside is actually my favorite. There’s something special about the first brave plants reaching sunwards after a long winter, a hint of green creeping into long dead grass, and buds on trees with the promise of blooms to come. Nature is returning to life just as I too feel something of a rebirth after a long winter (no doubt fueled by a reunion with vitamin D.)

I’ve previously shared my summer and autumn reading vibe—these are distinct reading seasons for me. But I’ve come to realize spring has its own special identity in my reading life. It’s a little more subtle than the buzzy beach reads of summer, or cozy, dark, literary titles I’m drawn to in fall.

My reading is always best described as eclectic; I’m forever a mood reader, one especially influenced by the season and spring in Ohio is quite varied. Over the 12 weeks of spring we are likely to see snow as well as days with temps rivaling those in summer; rain, sunshine, and maybe even the threat of a tornado of two are all normal. It’s also common to experience all of these things over the course of a very short time period—in fact, the last few weeks have all begun with snow on the ground and I’ve been outside in a tank top by the end of it. It’s really no surprise this season finds me picking up a deep backlist book one day, a buzzy new release the next; these might be thrillers, literary fiction, historical, contemporary, romance, fantasy, sci fi, or non-fiction—nothing is off the table this time of year!

When I look carefully at the titles I’m drawn to I do see something of a through line emerge: I like stories of rebirth and renewal, awakenings, quieter stories of introspection with characters who are evolving and growing, perhaps even emerging from their own emotional winter, their lives opening to a brighter reality.

Today, in honor of the official arrival of spring (🙌) I’m sharing five backlist books that feel like spring to me to help welcome the season!

Browse these books and more spring reading recommendations on Bookshop.org

Tell me:

• What kind of books are you drawn to reading in spring?

• What’s on your spring TBR?

Leave a comment

Reading

• The Shadow Throne by Jennifer A. Nielsen. Book 3 in the Ascendance series we’ve been working our way through as a family read aloud. This is the final book in the original trilogy released 2012-2013. In 2020 and 2021 two additional books were added to the series. As the original trilogy comprises a complete story arc I think we’re going to take a break from the series now and likely circle back to the later books at a future time. We’re ready for something fresh!

• Intemperance by Sonora Jha. Finalist for the 2026 Aspen Words Literary Prize. I was introduced to Jha via the 2024 Aspen Words Lit Prize longlist with her novel The Laughter, which I loved. Not only did I think it a highlight of the longlist, I also thought it was incredibly readable and deserved much more attention than I got among readers—an under the radar gem, if you will. I was thrilled to see Jha’s new novel, Intemperance, again make the longlist, and even better, this time it’s a finalist! Again, this book is incredibly readable and flying much lower on the radar than it should. A twice divorced feminist academic in present day Seattle plans to celebrate her 55th birthday with a swayamvar, an ancient custom from her native Indian culture, wherein suitors compete in feats of strength and will to win a bride’s hand in marriage. Something of a fresh take on a traditional rom-com, Intemperance is sharp, satirical, and bitingly funny; it’s deeply concerned with gender norms, marriage conventions, and what society tells women about who and what they should desire when it comes to love and partnership. It’s very rooted in reality, but there’s almost a sheen of an upside down fairytale with something of a love story at its heart. It’s brilliant and I really think Jha is an author more people should be reading. I’m so glad I got to pick up Intemperance as part of my Aspen Words Lit Prize longlist reading—book #8/15.

• Family Drama by Rebecca Fallon. Family Drama is, well… a family drama spanning the 1980s-2010s set in Boston and L.A.. It opens in 1997, at the funeral of a mother to seven-year-old twins; the day their father, in a fit of grief, destroys the video tapes chronicling her acting career and tenure as a successful soap opera star. The story primarily toggles between the twins coming of age while seeking understanding of a mother they never really knew, and the forming of their family as their parents fall in love, make a life, and their mother becomes caught between a desire for home and family and ambition in her acting career. Marketing for this book is comping Fallon to my favorite Ann(e)s: Tyler, Patchett, and Napolitano—hefty claims. I was skeptical going in, but having now read, I have to say, I can see it. Family Drama is a thoughtful, tender account of the messy, competing demands of family and the complicated dynamics of sharing a messy, imperfect life with other messy, imperfect people.

Listening

• The Frequency of Living Things by Nick Fuller Googins. A serviceable family saga about 4 women: twins with a washed up, one-hit wonder music career, their slightly younger scientist sister, and their absent social activist mother. A quick, engaging listen on audio.

• Judy Blume: A Life by Mark Oppenheimer. There’s some sort or rift, or at least the perception of such, between Oppenheimer and Blume. I’m not entirely sure what, if anything specific, she took issue with as no one has been forthcoming about why she initially participated in the project and then distanced herself from this biography after it was drafted. Like generations of readers I grew up with Judy Blume and her novels evolved with me from middle grade, to YA, to adult fiction. Blume is a trailblazer in many ways, her life story is interesting, and well told by Oppenheimer, a journalist and fan. I enjoyed this biography quite a lot. The audio is a great format, narrated by Molly Ringwald. After reading, I listened to Zero to Well-Read’s episode on Forever—an excellent pairing!

Watching

Deciding I needed to finish watching all the (available to stream) Oscar Best Picture noms at the last minute continued:

• F1 (Apple TV+). A crowd pleasing Bruckheimer blockbuster. Sort of like Top Gun/Maverick meets Cars 3 🏎

• Hamnet (Peacock). An excellent adaptation, Jessie Buckley absolutely deserved her Best Actress award. Though (unsurprisingly) I much preferred the book. The film was like a nice supplement to the source material.

• Frankenstein (Netflix). This was… weird and long? It was fine. This was never going to be my jam. Though I enjoyed reading the book for high school English.

• Vladimir (Netflix). Another one where the book was better, but really, isn’t that usually the case? Vladimir is a very interior novel and while I think this was a decent adaptation the vibe of the show was just… different. The constant breaking of the fourth wall made me feel like I was watching Ferris Bueller or Saved By the Bell. A good, quick watch at just 8 30-minute episodes.

Eating & Drinking

• Slow Cooker Beef and Barley Stew with Sourdough Rolls

• Instant Pot Santa Fe Beans and Rice, an oft repeated, quick and easy pantry meal.

• Instant Pot Creamy “Baked” Ziti with Garlic Bread and salad. (Can you tell we had yet another week where we needed some quick, and/or hands-off meals? 🙃)

• A double batch of Instant Pot Egg Bites—I make them with bacon and cheddar. These reheat well for breakfasts alongside some toast and/or fruit.

• Fridays are for pizza in our house—something so standard I rarely even think to mention it. For many years, Fridays always meant homemade pizza and a family movie. Our current season is much more chaotic and unpredictable with two teens in the house. Fridays are still for pizza, but sometimes it’s homemade, sometimes it’s takeout; sometimes there is a movie, sometimes not; sometimes not all of us are home, and others we end up with extra kids to feed.
  
  This sourdough pizza crust was my go-to for many years. The recipe calls for discard plus a little commercial yeast. I always make it with active sourdough, omitting the commercial yeast, and half AP flour, half bread flour. It can easily be made in a single day and the dough is super easy to work with.
  
  I recently decided what I really needed in my life was to pursue a fancy pants homemade sourdough pizza dough—you know, like the kind you get at a sit-down pizza place that’s crisp, yet chewy? After a few tries, I think I’ve got it. I use this recipe with 400g 00 flour and 100g bread flour and divide the dough into two larger balls. It must be made days in advance, requiring some forethought, but by Friday I’m thankful to have pizza dough ready and waiting. The method itself is fairly unfussy, shaping the higher hydration dough takes just a little more effort and technique than my old go-to but it’s worth it for the end result.

Links + Loves

• I’m diffusing this spring essential oil blend from Edens Garden on repeat. It’s citrus forward with pleasing herb undertones—the perfect, uplifting blend for this time of year!

• I put out the bird feeder I got last year and I’m so enjoying watching the birds stop in for some seed.

• The fourth annual Trans Rights Readathon is going on now through March 31st, when we celebrate Trans Day of Visibility. This is an opportunity to read, support, review, and uplift books written by and/or featuring trans, genderqueer, nonbinary, gender-nonconforming, and 2Spirit authors and characters and/or donate to support trans aid organizations. Here are some of my reading recommendations from past years.

• Finalists for the 38th Lambda Literary Awards have been announced. (Lambda Literary) This award celebrates outstanding voices in LGBTQ+ literature.

• Inside Literary Prize Reveals 2026 Shortlist. (Center for Justice Innovation) The nation’s first major literary prize decided exclusively by people in prison, the winner will be selected by incarcerated readers.

• Jane Fonda is set to star in a film adaptation of Virginia Evans’ The Correspondent. (Deadline)

• UK Society of Authors launches logo to identify books written by humans not AI (The Guardian)

• "Hot, sexy, dangerous boys—central to virtually all young adult romance novels—cannot be copyrighted," this according to a judge in the Southern District of New York ruling on an alleged Romantasy plagiarism case. (Publishers Weekly) The New Yorker did a full story on this interesting case in January 2025.

• UNESCO designates Medellín, Colombia as World Book Capital for 2027. (UNESCO) “As Colombia’s second-largest city, Medellín is home to over 110 bookstores and 25 libraries, many of which were transformed from former prisons and police facilities. Once affected by prolonged periods of conflict, the city is now internationally known for urban and cultural innovation, where books and libraries serve as essential sanctuaries and spaces for resistance. Today, Medellín embodies the power of culture in peace and reconciliation.”

• Goodreads Readers’ most anticipated books of spring. (Goodreads)

• A.I. Is Writing Fiction. Publishers Are Unprepared. (NYT) Oof, what a mess.

What are you reading, listening to, eating, watching, liking, and/or linking this week? Let’s chat!

Leave a comment

That Bookish Life is a weekly newsletter publishing on Saturdays. If you enjoy my rambles please consider subscribing, sharing, liking, or recommending to a friend.

I sometimes share affiliate links. If you make a purchase I may earn a small commission at no cost to you. Thank you for supporting my work in this way.

If you’d like to keep up with me between newsletters I’m on IG @that_bookish_life. You can also find me on Goodreads and Storygraph.

Until next time!

Share That Bookish Life

I’m curious about your preferred publishing cadence for Substack newsletters. I’m considering publishing twice weekly—two shorter posts, likely Tuesday or Wednesday and Saturday—instead of the one long Saturday post.

I’ve been on a once a week publishing schedule since I started this Substack in January 2024. Switching to twice weekly would be a change.

So, tell me: do you like seeing Substackers show up in your inbox more frequently with shorter posts? Are we close enough friends to chat more than once a week?! Or do you prefer settling in with a long newsletter to kick off your weekend?

As a reader I don’t have a strong preference either way, as a writer I can see benefits to both options. I’d love to know your thoughts!

Leave a comment

Reading

• Is This a Cry for Help? by Emily Austin. An auto-read author for me since Everyone in this Room Will Someday Be Dead (2021); I just love Austin’s writing style and getting to know her endearing, quirky, relatably anxious heroines. I think Is This a Cry for Help? is my favorite book since that first brush with Austin’s work in 2021. It doesn’t hurt that our MC is a public librarian, one recently returning to work after an acute mental health episode triggered by the death of her ex-boyfriend only to be faced with the reality of a culture war invasion and community unrest surrounding her library. Not only did I appreciate the characters, Austin manages to navigate timely issues like threats to intellectual freedom and libraries being a safe space for all in a more thoughtful and nuanced way than is often seen.

• Real Life and Other Fictions by Susan Coll. I (alone?) enjoyed Coll’s previous release, Bookish People (2022) so when I realized her newest book featured the Mothman it immediately earned a spot on my TBR. Do people outside Ohio and West Virginia know the Mothman? The 2002 feature film starring Richard Gere and Laura Linney leads to me think… maybe? Real Life and Other Fictions is about a 50-something woman, a recent empty-nester, fed up with her unraveling marriage with a disgraced, memefied meteorologist, and the secrets which have plagued her entire life related to the loss of her parents in the December 1967 Silver Bridge collapse over the Ohio River. She packs herself and her puppy setting out on a roadtrip eventually ending in Point Pleasant, WV (the town on the WV side of the bridge) days before Christmas and just in time for a snowstorm of epic proportions. There she uncovers the Mothman legend and the truth of her own history. Coll has a unique, zany, literary leaning, darkly comedic writing style I find appealing. I was thrilled for her to take on generational trauma, midlife epiphanies, and Ohio River cryptids—these are alluring ingredients! Unfortunately, I’m not sure Coll quite pulled it off as successfully as I had hoped. While there were certainly elements I enjoyed and appreciated there were others I found scattered and underdeveloped to the detriment of the overall narrative, though I’m not mad about the amount of time spent exploring the Mothman and the strange town of Point Pleasant—seems I’m not the only one fascinated by this mysterious legend.

Listening

• The Mixed Marriage Project: A Memoir of Love, Race, and Family by Dorothy Roberts. A fascinating blend of family memoir, history, and social analysis as Roberts recounts her experience growing up in an interracial family in 1960s Chicago while also digging into her white anthropologist father’s decades long research into interracial couples via documents and transcripts she took possession of upon his death.

• Warning Signs by Tracy Sierra. I loved Sierra’s Nightwatching (2024) which I found to be a fierce, feminist, horror thriller. Warning Signs, a snowy survival story set during a father-son mountain retreat with business associates, was a perfectly good, entertaining listen, though I found it to be much more a run of the mill thriller lacking the meat and depth I appreciated from Nightwatching.

• Cave Mountain: A Disappearance and a Reckoning in the Ozarks by Benjamin Hale. This is a true story about the author’s 6-year-old cousin lost for several days in the Arkansas Ozarks and the eerie intersection with a disappearance connected with a strange cult 20 years earlier. An interesting blend of family history, local lore, and true crime though the narrative tends to be rambly and rabbit holey in a distracting way at times. A rare instance where I think the shorter magazine article is better than the full length book.

Watching

• Love is Blind, Season 10 (Netflix). It was fun seeing my hometown, Columbus, OH, as the setting for this season’s filming! I saved this show to watch until all the episodes were out because Netflix doesn’t own me and then I blew through them all in spectacular fashion because I have no restraint when it comes to watching couples ride this rollercoaster. One of the couples visited the Topiary Park located behind our impressive main library. I don’t know why they didn’t stop in for a quick browse—I certainly would have!

• A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms (HBO Max). Adapted from a George R. R. Martin novella set in the same world a century before Game of Thrones. Very good, but so short at just 6 30-minute episodes 😩

• The Traitors UK, Season 1 (Peacock). After a disastrous run in with Love Island [insert Pam Beasley look to camera here] while in mourning after finishing season 4 of The Traitors we decided to take the next logical step and begin watching The Traitors UK (do they refer to our Traitors as The Traitors US 🤔) I’m happy to report that while The Traitors US is so far superior (sorry UK, you don’t have Alan) The Traitors UK does indeed scratch the itch. Thank goodness because I need to forget Love Island is something that exists in this world.

• Train Dreams (Netflix). We watched this quiet, well crafted, character driven film adapted from a novella of the same name because I decided we needed to catch up on all our unwatched Oscar best picture noms prior to Sunday’s awards show.

Eating & Drinking

• Arby’s copycat Slow Cooker Beef and Cheddar Sandwiches with curly fries from the freezer

• These Spicy Bean Burritos are a super quick, crowd-pleasing pantry meal I’ve been making for many years.

• Sheet Pan Chipotle Chicken Thighs with Broccoli is another quick, satisfying meal. I usually serve it alongside some sort of potato; this time Trader Joe’s Mashed Sweet Potatoes I had stashed in the freezer.

• More Energy Bites and Instant Pot Hard Boiled Eggs

Links + Loves

• The 2026 Aspen Words Literary Prize finalists have been announced. (Aspen Words) This is my favorite literary prize. The last several years I’ve read the entire longlist (announced in November) before finalists are announced in March. This year, I’m still reading my way through the longlist (I think I had already read close to half before it was announced—that helps!) but I’m okay with it being a 2026 project rather than racing to get to all the titles in the first couple months of the year. Lucky for me I have already read 3/5 finalists with a 4th to be read very soon courtesy of library due dates—forever one of my biggest reading motivators!

• In case you live under a rock: Romantasy queen Sarah J. Maas announced the release of not one, but two new books in the ACOTAR series. Book 6 will publish in October of this year with book 7 publishing in January 2027. (Cosmopolitan) It seems to me this is sort of a multi-book arc within the series? These books aren’t my jam—I didn’t make it past A Court of Thorns and Roses 🤷‍♀️—though I do love a book world Event and know intimately that feeling of a highly anticipated release. I’m excited readers are excited.

• Check out the trailer for Hulu’s adaptation of The Testaments, Margaret Atwood’s 2019 sequel to The Handmaid’s Tale, premiering in April. (YouTube)

• The 2026 Carol Shields Prize for Fiction longlist has been announced. This award celebrates creativity and excellence in fiction by women and non-binary writers in the United States and Canada. (Carol Shields Prize for Fiction)

• The Indies Choice Book Awards are back and this year’s finalists across 7 categories have been announced. (American Booksellers Association) This literary prize is awarded based upon votes cast by independent booksellers across the U.S..

• Daisy Edgar-Jones to star in Paramount‘s upcoming adaptation of Gabrielle Zevin’s Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow. (Variety)

• Interestingly, I read two related pieces back-to-back: No Stars, or: Are We Reviewing Ourselves to Death? (Lit Hub) and Why Criticism Continues to Matter: Book Reviews and Our Literary Community. (Chicago Review of Books) While the No Stars piece does resonate—I too long for discovery and experience of art free of knowing what everyone around me thinks before I’ve had a chance to think for myself—I tend to think reviews and criticism are a valid and valuable way to engage with art. I doubt many artists create art hoping no one will have an opinion or be provoked into thinking about that art. Art is meant to be experienced, interpreted, dissected, and discussed; especially when done in a thoughtful way this seems to me the highest form of respect. That is to say: I much more appreciated the piece on why criticism continues to matter.

• Our favorite bookish number cruncher, , takes us on a supremely interesting dive into book ban data: which books are targeted, what is the real impact, and what the data suggest is the true motivation behind these bans—a must read!

• Billie Eilish to Make Feature Acting Debut in ‘The Bell Jar’ Adaptation (IndieWire)

• The Books Behind the 2026 Academy Award Nominees (Publishers Weekly)

• Official BookTok chart set to launch in the UK. (The Guardian) Offering a monthly Top 20 rundown, the ranking will combine retail sales data with social media engagement on TikTok.
  

What are you reading, listening to, eating, watching, liking, and/or linking this week? Let’s chat!

Leave a comment

That Bookish Life is a weekly newsletter publishing on Saturdays. If you enjoy my rambles please consider subscribing, sharing, liking, or recommending to a friend.

I sometimes share affiliate links. If you make a purchase I may earn a small commission at no cost to you. Thank you for supporting my work in this way.

If you’d like to keep up with me between newsletters I’m on IG @that_bookish_life. You can also find me on Goodreads and Storygraph.

Until next time!

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The Best Book Podcasts I Listen to Every Week

I don’t miss an episode

• Book Riot - The Podcast. Hosts Jeff O’Neal and Rebecca Schinsky talk all things books: industry news, new releases, book-to-screen adaptations, trends; basically anything interesting happening in the bookish world—they’re on it. Book Riot is the largest independent editorial book site in North America and Jeff and Rebecca have been around the bookish internet for a long time.

• FictionMatters. I never miss a Substack post from public reader and I always look forward to her audio content: monthly ranked reading recaps, This Month in Books with Bookstagrammer Liz Hein, and her newest series Books That Matter where Sara chats with writers about their reading life and books that are important to them. Sara creates thoughtful, valuable content for readers’ ears and eyes.

• Book Talk, Etc. Their tagline is, “a conversational podcast about books and more from two midwest mood readers, easily distracted by new releases,” and that sums this podcast up well! This podcast from bookish content creators Tina and Hannah (though I’ve been listening since was a host!) is like chatting with friends.

• From the Front Porch. As the tagline says, “a weekly conversational podcast on books, small business, and life in the South,” from Annie B. Jones, owner of Thomasville, Georgia indie bookstore The Bookshelf. This is such a comfort listen for me! I love listening to Annie talk about books from new releases, to monthly reading recaps, backlist recs, listener Q&As, and more!

More

Podcasts I dip In and out of

• What Should I Read Next? Anne Bogel has been blogging as Modern Mrs Darcy since 2011! Each week on What Should I Read Next? Bogel chats with readers about books they’ve loved and loathed in order to make recommendations on what they should read next.

• Sarah’s Bookshelves Live. Book recommendations and interviews with authors, readers, and bookish content creators.

• Poured Over. A podcast from Barnes & Noble hosted by career bookseller Miwa Messer offers really excellent author interviews! If I finish a book and want to do a little post-read deep dive I start by searching to see if this podcast has an episode!

• The Book Review. Author interviews, book news, and more from The New York Times.

• Zero to Well-Read. This is another podcast from Book Riot and hosts Rebecca Schinsky and Jeff O’Neal. In this podcast they deep dive into the books everyone’s talking about from classics you should have read in high school to modern influential titles.
  

I sometimes listen to other book-related podcasts, but these are the pods I don’t miss an episode of or return to again and again.

Tell me:

• Do you listen to any of these podcasts?

• Or have any bookish podcasts to recommend?

  
  

Leave a comment

Reading

• Clutch by Emily Nemens. A slice-of-life novel with Big Chill vibes about a tight friend group of 5 women established in college now entering their 40s and scattered across the U.S. Clutch does an excellent job capturing modern dynamics of womanhood, motherhood, and female friendship among a successful, college educated, upper middle class+ cohort, both the elements that evolve as life progresses and the things that perennially endure. It took me a minute to settle in with the writing style—the omniscient narrator hops from character to character pretty freely and frequently, which was confusing until I became fairly familiar with the characters. Once I did, I grew to appreciate the style which included sprinkles of backstory as well as subtle peeks into the future. I generally appreciated the characters and cared enough about their stories to enjoy my time spent with them (certainly helped along by being a woman of a similar age and experience), though I can understand why I’m seeing mixed reviews.

• 59 Minutes by Holly Seddon. A breakneck doomsday thriller I gulped down in two sittings. Spanning 300 pages and (mostly) just 59 minutes, this novel follows three women desperately trying to reunite with their families after receiving notice of an imminent nuclear attack in South England. The tight timeframe and high stakes create a real urgency to see where these characters end up even if gets a bit melodramatic in places. Read if you’re up for a page-turning thriller and/or wanted to see what was happening from the general population’s perspective while reading Annie Jacobson’s Nuclear War or watching Netflix’s A House of Dynamite.

Listening

• The Rest of Our Lives by Benjamin Markovits. A Booker Prize finalist. Have you ever fanaticized about leaving your life behind? Just getting in the car and driving away from it all? Well, that's exactly what 55-year-old Tom does. After dropping his youngest daughter off at college he just... keeps driving. Throughout this unplanned road trip, Tom reunites with people he hasn't seen in a while, contemplates writing a book, stops at a big box store for a change of clothes, meets some new people, and grapples with being an aging white man in a changing world. Teased apart it all sounds rather banal, together it's a subtle, authentic work, grappling with big existential things like a life lived, mortality, and forks in the road between the there and now. I’m also seeing mixed reviews for this one and also understand it. Tom is a well constructed character who is often rather challenging to like, at least from my perspective, which is not that of a 50-something male.

• Plain English with Derek Thompson: How Metrics Make Us Miserable. Not only did I appreciate this entire conversation about the pitfalls of datafication and chasing optimization it dovetails nicely with the thoughts I shared not long ago about reading tracking.

• In 2015, there was a perfect, 6-episode podcast called Mystery Show hosted by Starlee Kine. Each episode focused on solving a low-stakes mystery that couldn’t be easily solved with a simple internet search. The sleuthing managed to take fascinating twists and turns thanks to Kine’s inquisitive, skilled interview skills. 10+ years and innumerable podcasts later I’m still chasing that Mystery Show feeling. If you’ve never had the pleasure of listening to Mystery Show—do it, do it now! Once you’ve done that you can check out Beth’s Dead from Armchair Expert co-host Monica Padman about a podcast that shut down under mysterious circumstances. It’s not exactly Mystery Show, but it offers some similar vibes and actually makes a Mystery Show reference, which I was, of course, delighted by.

Watching

• Bridgerton, Season 4 (Netflix). Always a fun watch. Perhaps due in part to novelty or nostalgia season 1 remains my favorite and I’m bummed Daphne and Simon have disappeared from the series entirely.

Eating & Drinking

• More snow. More soup. This time Instant Pot Rice and Bean Enchilada Soup.

• Marry Me Shrimp Pasta

• Baked Oatmeal for my breakfast

• And Protein McGriddle Muffins for others

• My 13-year-old gymnast has decided to add track to her activities. This means Monday through Thursday she leaves for school around 8:30AM, has track immediately after school from 4-5:30PM, hops in the car for a quick ride to arrive at gymnastics practice late where she is from 5:45-8PM. Friday she only has track to contend with, but it’s competition season so we often have gymnastics meets on weekends as well 😵 I’m in overdrive trying to make sure she’s taking in enough calories and proper nutrients to support so much activity. I like to keep a variety of grab-and-go food options and try to switch things up often enough that she doesn’t get burnt out eating the same things over and over. To that end, this week I made Energy Bites and Instant Pot Hard Boiled Eggs (I use the 5-5-5 method1), which seemed a welcome addition to the mix.

Links + Loves

• I started using a new recipe keeper called RecipeSage. Prior to this I mostly utilized Pinterest to organize online recipes, but I wanted something that had menu planning capabilities. I checked out a few options and decided on RecipeSage. It’s open source, free to use with the option to make a one time or recurring donation to help support the platform, and syncs between mobile app and computer. It’s simple, user-friendly, and offers exactly the features I was looking for: the ability to upload, edit, and organize recipes and add them to a weekly meal plan. My favorite thing is when adding recipes from a website or blog I can just copy and paste the URL and RecipeSage populates just the recipe stripped of all extraneous text (and ads. and popups. and requests to sign up for things you don’t want. and autoplay videos. andandand.) into a simply formatted, easy to reference recipe. You can also create recipes from text, PDF, or photos (like, say, a screen shot), or just type it in yourself. You can create tags to organize saved recipes, link back to recipes you’ve saved/created/edited, add them to a menu, or create a shopping list from selected recipes or menus. Basically, it’s exactly what I was looking for and so far I’m very happy.

• The Women’s Prize for Fiction 2026 longlist has been announced. (Women’s Prize)

• The 2026 Audie Award winners have been announced. (Audio Publishers Association) This award recognizes achievement in audiobooks and spoken-word entertainment.

• Finalists for the 2026 PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction have been announced. (PEN/Faulkner Foundation)

• A nationwide book ban bill has been introduced in the House. (Book Riot) Part of an anti-trans bill known as the “Stop the Sexualization of Children Act”, this provision threatens public school and library funding using the same vague language as other state book ban bills regarding “sexually oriented material” that will be used to target any books containing LGBTQ+ characters and themes. This, of course, has nothing to do with sexualizing children (which absolutely no one is advocating for) and everything to do with certain politicians and people desiring exclusive right to dictate whose stories can be told, and which groups they personally believe should be erased from existence entirely. You can read the language and check co-sponsors of the bill here. Everyone can contact their representatives to ask that they oppose this bill, especially important if your elected representative is listed on the bill.

• Let’s turn to a more uplifting library-related story: Kansas City illustrator turns library checkout cards into tiny works of art. (NPR)

• Lit Hub has the Literary Film & TV You Need to Stream in March.

• And Book Marks has The Best Reviewed Books of the Month.

• Libraries pay 5 times more for e-books than consumers. N.J. lawmakers want to change that. (Philly Voice) New Jersey librarians and lawmakers have joined forces introducing a bill to prohibit publishers from entering into contracts or licensing agreements with libraries that limit normal lending practices or cost them more than what the public pays.

• A year later, an update on The Ensh*ttification of the Institute of Museum and Library Services. (Book Riot) Including how $14 million of your taxpayer dollars are being funneled to conservative activist organization PragerU.

• First look at Sally Field starring in the Netflix film adaptation of Remarkably Bright Creatures. (People)

• Firefighters in Sicily rescue 400 rare library books from precipice after landslide (The Guardian)

What are you reading, listening to, eating, watching, liking, and/or linking this week? Let’s chat!

Leave a comment

That Bookish Life is a weekly newsletter publishing on Saturdays. If you enjoy my rambles please consider subscribing, sharing, liking, or recommending to a friend.

I sometimes share affiliate links. If you make a purchase I may earn a small commission at no cost to you. Thank you for supporting my work in this way.

If you’d like to keep up with me between newsletters I’m on IG @that_bookish_life. You can also find me on Goodreads and Storygraph.

Until next time!

Share That Bookish Life

Read on for everything I read in February, some reading stats, and this month’s favorite reads!

I read 20 books in February. Here’s a little breakdown of my reading month:

• 15 library/Libby borrows

• 1 gifted (Lost Lambs)

• 1 borrowed (The Briar Club)

• 3 owned (Bel Canto, Wuthering Heights, and The Runaway King)

• 7(!) backlist titles (35%)

• 4 non-fiction (20%)

• 10 audio, 9 print, 1 hybrid read (print + audio)

February Favorites

Tell me:

• What did you enjoy reading in February?
  

Leave a comment

Reading

• Cursed Daughters by Oyinkan Braithwaite. From the author of My Sister, the Serial Killer, a generational family drama set in 90s/2000s/present day Lagos swirling around three women shouldering the burden of an old family curse said to prevent women of their family finding happiness in love. There’s a bit of a mystery element as one of the women dies early in adulthood on the same day her cousin’s daughter is born—how she died and whether the newest daughter is a reincarnation of some sort is slowly revealed. The writing style and non-linear structure really kept the pages turning.

• Dandelion is Dead by Rosie Storey. Deeply mourning the loss of her sister, Dandelion, Poppy responds to a message on her sister’s dating app pretending to be her and soon finds herself dating a man, Jake, a recently divorced father of a young child, while impersonating Dandelion—wearing her clothes, adopting her personality, using her name. If this all sounds messy, it’s because it is. Very messy. And look, I love a messy character! Cloudy morals are interesting! Unfortunately, extremely messy characters can be a challenge to successfully pull off and I don’t think Storey was quite able to do it here. I really expected to enjoy this book more than I did, and as I’m a reader who enjoys messy, morally gray characters more than most I expect a lot of readers will struggle with this one. I liked the premise and found the story strongest while exploring the depths of grief and strange, unexpected ways those feelings manifest—this is a main theme and fairly well done. On the other hand, I found the characters extremely hard to empathize with beyond the, wow, they’re really going through it and could use some grace level, which made reading their story quite a slog at points.

Listening

• An Offer From a Gentleman by Julia Quinn. Book 3 in the Bridgerton series and the focus of the season 4 Netflix adaptation—you know I have to read before I watch! This Cinderella-inspired romance was a quick, fun listen.

• Stone Yard Devotional by Charlotte Wood. A Booker Prize Finalist. A quiet, contemplative novel about a woman who leaves her life in Sydney behind, retreating to a small convent in the rural Australian outback. The story is told through her journal entries offering an account of day-to-day happenings at the convent, both big and small, as well as rumination on past life experiences. A thoughtful, soothing, introspective, and deeply resonate exploration of life, grief, faith, and the search for meaning. Because the narrative is told through journal entries audio format works especially well.

Watching

• Song Sung Blue (Peacock). I really didn’t know much about this movie going in; a auto-play trailer caught my attention (they usually just exist to punish me.) This is a biopic about husband and wife performers who achieve a surprising level of success leading a Neil Diamond tribute band in 90s Milwaukee. It’s very watchable with Hugh Jackman unsurprisingly good in his role, and Kate Hudson’s performance is surprisingly great earning her best actress nominations at the Academy Awards, Golden Globes, and SAG Awards. Definitely a film to watch ahead of awards season!

• Reality Check: Inside America’s Next Top Model (Netflix). This three-part docuseries looks at the iconic reality series which I was surprised to learn ran from 2003 all the way to 2018?! While I was never a true watcher of the show every now and again I’d get sucked into a VH1 weekend marathon and become very, if briefly, invested. The docuseries includes interviews with models, judges, and insiders including Tyra Banks, Jay Manuel, Miss J. Alexander, and Nigel Barker. There was a predictable lack of accountability or apology from anyone on the production side. The doc focuses on sensational happenings from early seasons (rightfully so) and provided scant context for the environment of reality television at the time which was very exploitative, sensational, boundary pushing, and mired in upholding harmful cultural norms—all of which ANTM participated in and was far from alone in doing so. I don’t say this to give ANTM a pass, and I think that context is important. This doc took me back to being a teen/young adult in the aughts when reality television really became popular, acting as a funhouse mirror reflecting culture. All this to say, I’d love a doc exploring the broader context of aughts reality television!

Eating & Drinking

• A belated Valentine’s Day family dinner 💘Our annual tradition is cheese fondue with a variety of dippers: bread, green apples, steamed broccoli, mini potatoes, cherry tomatoes, and smoked sausage. Little is not improved by a quick dunk in melty cheese!

• Last week, all but trace amounts of snow from our January storm had melted. This week, snow is on the ground again 😥 It’s still winter; though it is supposed to be near 60 degrees today before we get a few more flurries early next week—welcome to Ohio! I’m coping with soup. This week, Lasagna Soup from the Instant Pot served with Sourdough Garlic Knots for good measure.

• Sheet Pan Chicken Fajitas is a flavorful, true 30-minute meal with very minimal clean-up and a good stand-in while awaiting the arrival of grilling season.

• Another 30-minute meal with minimal clean-up (can you tell it was a busy week this week?): Sheet Pan Mustard Salmon Dinner is a frequent-flyer in our household. Over time I’ve streamlined a few things: I don’t bother with the lemon slices and good quality bottled lemon juice and dried dill work just fine here if you don’t have fresh on hand; I use garlic powder in place of fresh cloves as I find the powder actually does a better job of seasoning in this application. Also, unless you have some sort of giant sheet pan I find things cook better spread between two pans.

• Today is my eldest’s 16th birthday! Funfetti Pancakes are a birthday tradition to start the day right. He also requested dinner out (TBD) and Oreo Cake, his birthday treat of choice for many years running—I don’t blame him; it’s an impressive and very tasty cake!

Links + Loves

• February is Library Lovers Month! To celebrate, Libro.fm is offering a free library credit when you donate $15+ to a public library of your choosing. This offer ends today so don’t delay if you want to take advantage!

• A bill currently wending its way through the Georgia legislature seeks to allow librarians to be criminally charged with distributing harmful materials (aka pornography) to minors. (The Georgia Recorder) What “harmful material” are librarians in the state of Georgia distributing to minors, you may ask? Well, that’s unclear and incredibly subjective and that’s the point; to scare librarians into self-policing and removing any materials from shelves that anyone could possibly personally take issue with (fun!) According to Georgia law, any books depicting homosexuality can be considered “harmful” (pornographic) to minors. Coolcoolcool.

• In better library news: Leonardo DiCaprio quietly funds a tiny library in the middle of LA. (SFGATE) The branch was built on the grounds of DiCaprio’s childhood home.

• The L.A. Times Book Prize honorees and finalists across have been announced (Los Angeles Times)

• A horror expert examines the enduring nature of vampires in art and pop culture. (NYT)

• Those who, like me, grew up on a steady diet of the The Baby-sitters Club will appreciate Lit Hub’s Where are they now? Baby-Sitters Club edition.

• Speaking of the BSC, Scholastic is celebrating the club’s 40th birthday with 3 new projects publishing this year. (Publishers Weekly)

• Some interesting behind the scenes: A Movie Deal Is a Writer’s Dream—or Is It? 5 Authors Get Real About the IP Machine. (Cultured)

• UK Launches National Year of Reading (Book Riot) What’s the current unconstitutional tariff rate for importing something like this, anyone know?

• Tom Hanks to Play Abraham Lincoln in ‘Lincoln in the Bardo’ Movie Adaptation (Variety) Well, I suppose I’ll finally have to get around to reading the book.

• The New York Library’s Top 10 Checkouts of All Time are not exactly surprising, but still a fun browse! (NYPL)

• 🚨 We have an official teaser trailer for Dolly Alderton’s upcoming Pride and Prejudice Netflix series adaptation. The series is slated to release this fall.

• And speaking of classics adaptations: Aimee Lou Wood To Star In New TV Adaptation Of ‘Jane Eyre’ (Deadline)

What are you reading, listening to, eating, watching, liking, and/or linking this week? Let’s chat!

Leave a comment

That Bookish Life is a weekly newsletter publishing on Saturdays. If you enjoy my rambles please consider subscribing, sharing, liking, or recommending to a friend.

I sometimes share affiliate links. If you make a purchase I may earn a small commission at no cost to you. Thank you for supporting my work in this way.

If you’d like to keep up with me between newsletters I’m on IG @that_bookish_life. You can also find me on Goodreads and Storygraph.

Until next time!

Share That Bookish Life

March 3

• Wait For Me by Amy Jo Burns. From the author of Mercury and Shiner comes a novel about the bond between two female folk singers, the love stories that haunt them, and the music that brings them together to burn bright.

• Lake Effect by Cynthia D’Aprix Sweeney. From the New York Times bestselling author of The Nest and Good Company comes a wry and tender portrait of two families forever changed by one lovestruck decision that will reverberate for decades.

• Medium Rare by A. Natasha Joukovsky. A modern tragicomedy transforms the myth of Icarus into a blazing romp through bureaucracy, B-list fame, and college basketball.

• Turn Off the Light by Jacquie Walters. Two women living centuries apart are bound by the same dark secret in this haunting novel that upends everything you think you know about ghost stories.

• Where the Girls Were by Kate Schatz. In this electrifying historical novel about coming of age in tumultuous 1960s San Francisco, a pregnant teenager reckons with womanhood and agency after being sent to a home for unwed mothers.

• No Matter What by Cara Bastone. After a traumatic accident threatens the foundations of their happy marriage, a couple tries to rebuild and find their way back to each other—and themselves—in this tender, slow-burn romance.

• A Far-flung Life by M.L. Stedman. From the author of the acclaimed bestseller The Light Between Oceans comes a breathtaking and epic novel set in the vast outback of Australia—about tragedy, family secrets, and the enduring power of love.

March 10

• Nonesuch by Francis Spufford. A spellbinding tale about an ambitious young woman who must thwart an occult plot by time-traveling fascists during the chaos of the London Blitz.

• This Story Might Save Your Life by Tiffany Crum. Best friends Benny and Joy like to say they’ve been saving each other’s lives since the moment they met. Until the day Joy disappears and Benny is suspected of murder.

• Whidbey by T Kira Madden. A portrait of three women connected through one man in the aftermath of his murder—a stunning literary achievement and the explosive and highly anticipated debut novel from a beloved award-winning memoirist.

• Westward Women by Alice Martin. For fans of Emma Cline and Emily St. John Mandel, Westward Women is a hypnotic and hopeful debut—part fever dream, part dystopian road trip that claws its way towards a jaw-dropping finale.

• Judy Blume: A Life by Mark Oppenheimer. The highly anticipated biography of one of the world’s most treasured literary voices, showcasing a life as triumphant and inspiring as the stories she crafted.

March 17

• The Fountain by Casey Scieszka. A propulsive and deeply moving novel about eternity and mortality that asks what it would mean to live forever.

• Paradiso 17 by Hannah Lillith Assadi. The intimate, sweeping tale of one man’s restless search for home the world over, as the pendulum of fate swings between loss and life, grief and euphoria, regret and hope.

• A Woman’s Work: Reclaiming the Radical History of Mothering by Elinor Cleghorn. A powerful and groundbreaking new narrative history of motherhood and mothering.

March 31

• Ruins by Lily Brooks-Dalton. From critically acclaimed, bestselling author of The Light Pirate comes a powerful, deeply resonant novel about an ambitious archaeologist in pursuit of a rare artifact from an ancient civilization that would not only change her life but potentially society at large.

• Mothers and Other Strangers by Corey Ann Haydu. Two estranged childhood best friends reunite as expectant mothers, after a mysterious falling-out between their own mothers keeps them apart for years​. Perfect for readers of Claire Lombardo and J. Courtney Sullivan.

• Nothing Tastes as Good by Luke Dumas. A spine-tingling new thriller about a weight loss treatment with potentially murderous side effects.

• A Good Person by Kirsten King. An electric binge-of-a-debut about a millennial antihero who seeks revenge on her ex-situationship with a hex, only for him to actually, literally die.

Tell me:

• Which March releases are on your radar?

• What are you planning to read in March? (Front or backlist!)
  
  

  Leave a comment

  
  

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Reading

• Bel Canto by Ann Patchett. Patchett is a favorite author of mine. That status was really cemented in 2020 when I read Commonwealth (2016). It was my third Patchett novel, typically the point at which I’m willing to recognize a favorite. I’m slowly working my way through her body of work, which at this time consists of 9 novels (a 10th is publishing in June!) and 5 non-fiction works—I’ve read around half.
  
  Next up on my list was Bel Canto, a title I’ve waited way too long to read for a variety of reasons. I was determined to get to it early this year when by a bit of serendipity my in-person book club was resurrected. This club consists of a small group of friends with families of a similar age. Our club has ebbed and flowed depending on family, life, and career demands in various iterations for close to 15 years. I was actually introduced to Ann Patchett through this book club as The Patron Saint of Liars was one of our early selections. I’ve long wanted to suggest Bel Canto as a book club selection as it seems the kind of book best read in a group for discussion. Lucky me, the stars aligned making this possible!
  
  Bel Canto is Ann Patchett’s breakout novel—her 4th, published in 2001. It won the the Orange Prize (now called the Women’s Prize) and PEN/Faulkner award, is among The New York Times' list of the 100 Best Books of the 21st Century, and has been adapted as both a film and an opera (unique!) Inspired by real events, Bel Canto is about a group of politically prestigious people from all over the world gathered for a birthday party in an unnamed South American country where a famous opera singer is to perform who are taken hostage by a young and idealistic terrorist group. Unexpectedly cut off from the outside world for months, music is their common language.
  
  While I can’t say Bel Canto is my favorite Ann Patchett (Commonwealth may hold that spot if forced to choose) I am glad to have read it and I do think it was a good book to read in community.

• Lost Lambs by Madeline Cash. I’ve seen a good bit of buzz for this debut novel and now having read it I can say it’s well deserved! A satirical family saga that manages to be witty and irreverent while incorporating big timely topics like loneliness, personal meaning, and the dissolution of family, alongside elements ripped from current headlines like shadowy billionaire cabals, human trafficking, online conspiracies, and terrorists. While this all might make the book sound heavy or overly dark it’s far from it! Cash smartly packages these topics into an incredibly readable and wildly entertaining absurdist narrative—I loved it!

Listening

• An Academic Affair by Jodi McAlister. We can’t let Valentine’s Day pass by without a romance read, right?! This is a delightfully bookish, smart, and charming contemporary romance about two rival English professors who agree to fake a romantic relationship in order to secure jobs in the arduous world of academia.

• Just in time for America’s Semiquincentennial (I just added the term to my dictionary so autocorrect won’t bother me for the rest of the year) of FictionMatters Substack has launched This American Lit, “a yearlong reading project devoted to examining the texts and narratives that continue to shape, define, and challenge the idea of America.” Reading + history + American identity—say less! Every other month Sara is guiding our reading through U.S. history with a thoughtfully crafted, choose-your-own-adventure style syllabus, beginning with Unit 1: Foundations, First Contacts, and a City Upon a Hill (Beginnings - 1750ish). Here’s what I’ve been reading for Unit 1:

  • These Truths: A History of the United States by Jill Lepore, Chapters 1 and 2. Sara suggested a few different comprehensive history texts to read alongside each unit and I selected These Truths as I recently read and appreciated Lepore’s We the People: A History of the U.S. Constitution.

  • The Wordy Shipmates by Sarah Vowell. A surprisingly humorous and insightful look at the history and legacy of 17th-centural Puritans in the Massachusetts Bay Colony. The audiobook is engagingly narrated by Vowell and features an ensemble cast of notable actors including Peter Dinklage, Bill Hader, Catherine Keener, Dermot Mulroney, John Oliver, and John Slattery.

  • The Crucible by Arthur Miller. While The Crucible seems a frequent flyer on high school curricula, I had never read/seen it so this seemed like a great opportunity to do so. Written in 1953, The Crucible is a fictionalized story inspired by real events of the Salem witch trials which serves as an allegory for McCarthyism. I listened to, and would recommend, the 2006 production from L.A. Theatre Works/BBC radio featuring a full cast of notable performers.

• The Briar Club by Kate Quinn. My first Kate Quinn! I picked this up on a personal recommendation and it very unexpectedly complimented my reading of The Crucible. In The Briar Club a group of disparate women find community living in a D.C. boarding house during the McCarthy era. While the story is driven by its characters the plot swirls around a murder mystery and does a good job of incorporating the political and cultural paranoia created by McCarthyism. I found this an engaging read set against an interesting, often overlooked, but relevant historical backdrop. I hybrid read this and the audio kept me company while cleaning out my closet—perhaps my actual least favorite activity of all time.

Watching

• Oh, Hi! (Netflix). I really liked this! It deftly hugs the line between dark comedy and horror with a weird, smart dash of romance.

• Eternity (Apple TV). Just fine.

• Platonic, Season 1 (Apple TV). This is like an elevated sitcom in a great way—I like it. We just started season 2.

• Heated Rivalry (HBO Max). Last week I confessed I just wasn’t that into Heated Rivalry after watching 4 episodes. I was planning to DNF, at the time thinking the season was 8 episodes; I discovered it is actually 6. I could finish 2 hours of programming in a single sitting so I decided to go for it. Those final 2 episodes definitely had more depth and development than the first half of the series, something I really craved. Looking back, I think this series is best enjoyed as a whole and seems intentionally designed to binge in as few sittings as possible.

Eating & Drinking

• Slow Cooker Nashville Hot Chicken Sandwiches with Ranch Potato Wedges made for an easy, crowd-pleasing Monday night meal that stretched into Tuesday leftovers. We found the chicken a touch sweet as written. I’ll make this again, but will try halving the amount of sugar called for. I suspect this will allow for more spicy with a just a little sweet, which we would prefer. I also halved the salt.

• One Pan Chicken Sausage and Orzo was also a new to us recipe that I will be making again. It comes together quickly and easily, offering a surprising amount of flavor with just a handful of main ingredients. I served it with roasted asparagus.

• Upon request I made a batch of Breakfast Sandwiches for the week

• And French Toast Casserole for the weekend as I had some bread, eggs, and milk just waiting to be made into something delicious.

Links + Loves

• The 2026 Women’s Prize for Non-Fiction longlist has been announced (Women’s Prize Trust)

• We’re getting a new Barbara Kingsolver in October! (AP)

• Pour one out for mass market paperbacks: So Long to Cheap Books You Could Fit in Your Pocket (NYT)

• How books perform on dating apps takes a look at the role of books in the dating economy. (The Guardian)

• ‘There’s only one bed’, ‘fake dating’ and ‘opposites attract’: how tropes took over romance. (The Guardian)

• Fiona Davis to Pen First-Ever American Girl Novel for Adults (People) Samantha is getting a sequel.

• This piece on serious leisure speaks to me and my reading practice. (The Conversation)

• Are “Review-Driven” Books Still Feasible? Kathleen Schmidt of Publishing Confidential explores the current book review landscape as it relates to marketing.

• Amy Sherman-Palladino To Helm Adaptation Of Jennifer Weiner Bestseller ‘The Griffin Sisters’ Greatest Hits’ (Deadline) This sounds promising!

  
  
  What are you reading, listening to, eating, watching, liking, and/or linking this week? Let’s chat!
  
  

  Leave a comment

  
  

That Bookish Life is a weekly newsletter publishing on Saturdays. If you enjoy my rambles please consider subscribing, sharing, liking, or recommending to a friend.

I sometimes share affiliate links. If you make a purchase I may earn a small commission at no cost to you. Thank you for supporting my work in this way.

If you’d like to keep up with me between newsletters I’m on IG @that_bookish_life. You can also find me on Goodreads and Storygraph.

Until next time!

Share That Bookish Life

Now, I didn’t truly desire to become uninformed, but rather less informed. I was feeling fed up steeping in the constant churn of the information-entertainment hybrid we now call news served up alongside an unending stream of takes and punditry cosplay. My eyes were wide open about just what we were about to endure with a second Trump term and I wanted off the ride.

I no longer trusted algorithms controlled by billionaires.

I no longer wished to be a passive consumer.

I needed to take control of my news and information consumption and create better boundaries.

What I did not recognize at the time, but likely should have, was this was the beginning of my breakup with algorithmically driven social media.

I’ve long had a conflicted relationship with the modern iterations of social media platforms, but at the time I didn’t realize quite how dire and tenuous the relationship had become.

Less than a month later, two weeks after Trump entered office again, I logged out of Instagram to bake sourdough and just never found my way back. I quickly felt the benefits of stepping away and now, it’s as though I’ve developed something of an allergy. Any time I visit the platform, as I do sporadically for specific purposes, I’m immediately overwhelmed, annoyed. Even if I find myself interested in scrolling it ends quickly as I’m served up ads and suggested content rather than seeing things from people I follow.

According to Meta’s own metrics only 7% of users’ time is now spent interacting with friends on Instagram (17% on Facebook).1 While these stats are surprisingly low, even to me, it really shouldn’t be considering how challenging the platforms have made it to interact intentionally with your chosen community. It’s much more beneficial to them to extract our time and attention in other ways.

I now find myself a year into my self-styled exile from algorithmic social media, something of a digital detox veteran, as my friend Kissairis recently labeled me. Each year it seems more and more of us are becoming disillusioned with apps and looking for ways to claw back our time, attention, and perceptions about the world. I think it’s fair to say analog living is something of a trend right now, though I only know about it because it’s being discussed and performed online—the irony. But the sentiment is there!

Trends come and go, though I hope our interest in a better relationship with tech and algorithms is here to stay—I know mine is—even if in something more of a counter-cultural capacity, which is where I think social media ex-pats are destined to reside.

While I don’t have instructions for how everyone can set better intentions and boundaries with social media, I do have experience to share with shifting my news consumption care of my uninformed year.

Previously, much of my news was consumed via social media from traditional news outlets and journalists. One of the problems of social media is we have little control over what we’re exposed to while we scroll. The news is regularly horrifying and it’s really not healthy for us to casually consume it all day long sandwiched between influencers hawking #sponcon and some random Reel the app has decided I need to see. Even if we unfollow news accounts we still see a mashup of things organically because of what we’re served and what is shared—it’s just the nature of the beast.

The lack of ability to decide my own consumption experience is a major reason I stepped away from algorithmically driven social media (it’s also why I left Facebook years ago). I want to decide what I’m seeing and when.

I want to make it clear, I’m not avoiding current events. I think being an informed citizen is not only responsible, but a requirement for properly participating in democratic governance. But being informed does not require our steeping in news/hot takes/punditry/the random thoughts of everyone and anyone on the internet 24/7.

Here’s how I’m currently consuming my news:

Newsletters

I start my morning with a few newsletters

• Axios Columbus. I like this for a quick roundup of important local stories and community flavor written by local journalists. Publishing Monday-Friday.

• Axios AM. It’s ok, serves its purpose of quick hit news. I think it leans too heavily on business and tech reporting. Daily.

• Letters from an American. Historian Heather Cox Richardson’s Substack newsletter. She writes near daily about current events and history, often putting current events into the context of history.

Podcasts

Later in the morning I switch to podcasts

• Up First from NPR. Reporting and analysis of the three biggest news headlines of the day in ~10 minutes. I listen daily.

• Pod Save America. Biased, but factual political coverage. Episodes drop Sunday, Tuesday, and Thursday.

• The Ezra Klein Show. Not strictly news and current events, but heavily focused that way, plus interesting interviews and so many great book recommendations. New episodes 1-2x per week dropping Tuesday and/or Friday.

Newsletters

Later in the day I switch back to newsletters

• Axios PM. Same deal as AM, just later in the day.

• WTF Just Happened Today? Logs, organizes, and summarizes the biggest news of the day while linking to a selection of news outlets for further reading.

• Tangle. Reporting on the biggest political news of the day, with a deep dive into the top story and offering context for how the topic is being reported across the political spectrum. I really value being able to see what right-leaning media outlets are reporting at a glance. Monday-Thursday.

• Garbage Day. Their tagline is “we doomscroll so you don’t have to” and… that sums it up. Reporting on internet culture and trends. Publishes 2x per week.

I dip in and out of other news sources and podcasts, but this is everything I consume routinely.

I feel much better consuming exclusively written (or spoken, I suppose, when it comes to podcasts) news at times of my choosing. Because I’m intentionally seeking out news when I go to read it (rather than it landing before my eyes as selected by an algorithm) I’m in a better headspace, prepared for that exposure.

When I read news, I like to think about it like I’m composting rather than consuming; I read, noting what I need to know, filtering what's important, and disregarding the rest.

I don’t need to read every single bit of news, I don’t need constant coverage of every developing story, I don’t need a bunch of clickbait, or worse, outrage bait, or opinion pieces, or to stumble upon uninformed internet randos, or worse, bots sent by bad actors to sow chaos and division, arguing in the comments.

I like a balance in what I’m consuming; quick hits of important news, longer, more in-depth articles where it makes sense, thoughtful analysis from trusted sources.

It’s now very, very easy to consume news, but it’s harder to consume news in a productive and intentional way. Finding the right resources and routines has been beneficial to me in avoiding information overload and protecting my general well being.

Chaos and overwhelm are tools of autocrats everywhere, setting boundaries and thoughtfully consuming feels like a small, but important act of resistance.

Tell me:

• Have you made any changes when it comes to news consumption?

• Do you have any goals this year regarding boundaries and your relationship with social media?

• Do you have any similar newsletters or resources you’d like to recommend?

  
  

  Leave a comment

  
  

Reading

• Nobody Knows You’re Here by Bryn Greenwood. Greenwood wrote the challenging and controversial All the Ugly and Wonderful Things (2016) and The Reckless Oath We Made (2019), which got far less attention and I actually preferred. I would categorize both of these books as gritty, upmarket fiction. According to Greenwood herself, her newest book, Nobody Knows You’re Here, which published in September, is a departure from her previous novels, a psychological suspense thriller. I’m not a huge thriller reader, but I liked Greenwood’s previous books enough to pick this one up. Nobody Knows You’re Here is a book about a young twenty-something woman who is jobless, struggling financially, and facing the very real possibility of homelessness, when she finds herself held in captivity, forced to act as a nanny for children kidnapped by a shadowy criminal organization. This is a book about human trafficking and I think it does a good job of showing how trafficking can take many forms, look differently than is often portrayed, and why there are layers of complexity, both individual and systemic, surrounding this serious topic. The narrative itself is… not good, in my opinion. The pacing and general dynamics were just off in a very disappointing way that did not make for a good reading experience. I did notice that while Greenwood’s previous two books were published with imprints of the “Big 5” (Macmillan and Penguin) this was published with Podium Press, a hybrid indie. All things considered I do wonder why and how Greenwood, a bestselling author, ended up at Podium and whether she had the same level of editorial support.

• The Runaway King by Jennifer A. Nielsen. Book 2 in the Ascendance series, this was our most recent family read aloud. Action packed, suspenseful, full of political intrigue, perfect for the 10-14 crowd while still entertaining for readers 14+. We just started on book 3.

• The Land in Winter by Andrew Miller. I can’t entirely remember what motivated me to add this Booker Prize shortlister to my TBR stack though I do recall it quietly making the “best of” rounds at the end of the year. Though as a seasonally influenced mood reader I was happy to have this book sitting in my stack while experiencing my own land in winter. A quiet, atmospheric story about everyday minutiae centering neighbors in a rural English village in the winter of 1962, a historic season of snow which left many rural villages cut off for much of the season. The couples are both youngish, newly married, and expecting their first child, though of different backgrounds and life experiences, caught between looking back at a past which has shaped their lives and the world more broadly, and a changing future yet unknown. Some books are read for plot, characters, or even theme, others are read for the writing; I think Land in Winter is a read to experience the writing kind of novel.

Listening

• On Fire for God: Fear, Shame, Poverty, and the Making of the Christian Right - a Personal History by Josiah Hesse. An interesting, if messy, blend of memoir and sociopolitical analysis about Evangelical Christianity and the religious right and Hesse’s rather traumatic experience being raised in the church in small town Iowa.

• Meet the Newmans by Jennifer Niven. One of the buzziest books of the year so far. For two decades the Newmans have held court as America’s Favorite Family starring in a primetime television show about their life—the vibe is Leave It to Beaver meets the public-private blurring of I Love Lucy—but now it’s 1964 and the times they are a changin’. Not only is the world changing around the Newmans making their squeaky clean, American as Apple Pie brand less relevant, but their family is changing as their 2 kids age into adulthood and a desire to live their own authentic lives. An ill-timed accident leaves Dinah, the matriarch typically relegated to the kitchen, suddenly needing to step into a very important role to keep the show running. I found this an entertaining and fairly thoughtful exploration of the intersection of complex family dynamics, evolving gender roles, and a changing world. It doesn’t dive deep, but it’s a fun package and excellent listen with Marin Ireland narrating.

• Strangers: A Memoir of Marriage by Belle Burden. This book is making the rounds. I had no idea who Belle Burden was before reading, but I’m nothing if not compelled by a salacious memoir. Burden is a NYC socialite and Vanderbilt descendant whose life was upended in 2020, not only by COVID, but by her husband of 20 years blindsiding her by abruptly leaving their marriage and family amidst an affair. Her accounting is raw and well rendered and for all that Burden is not like us, her suffering and experience is not hemmed in by social class. A dishy memoir that believes in the power of intimate storytelling I couldn’t stop listening to.

• Vigil by George Saunders. A spirit is tasked with helping an unrepentant, climate change denying, high profile oil tycoon transition from this world to the next. This has real A Christmas Carol vibes, but with the story being just as much about Marley as it is Scrooge. Some books ask questions, others answer them. Vigil is asking questions and those questions are deep existential ones about repentance, absolution, the meaning of life, selfhood, humanity, comfort, perspective, and truth. I think going into this book it’s helpful to know that in addition to being a very smart writer, Saunders is weird, thoughtful, contemplative, and also a Buddhist. The audiobook is a well produced, true full cast narration. I think this book would make for excellent discussion. After reading I enjoyed listening to The Book Riot Podcast’s discussion of the book and Ezra Klein’s discussion with George Saunders.2

• Having just reread Wuthering Heights I especially enjoyed this Zero to Well-Read episode discussing the book.

Watching

• Traitors, Season 3 (Peacock). Boston Rob has entered the chat so you know the game has reached a new level. Watching this show is giving me a similar feeling to watching early seasons of Survivor in that it’s incredibly interesting to watch the strategic game play evolve. I’m becoming quite concerned that we only have one season left to watch. Like, why did someone not start this show like 10 years ago? It’s just inconsiderate 🤣

• Fallout, Season 2 (Prime). I love this show. It’s very weird and exactly my kind of sci-fi. I liked that we got to see more of the Fallout world in season 2.

• Queer Eye, Season 10 (Netflix). Sad to see this series end and with only 5 episodes 😢

• Heated Rivalry, half of Season 1 (HBO Max). 🚨 Dissenting Opinion Alert 🚨 I truly mean it when I say I regret to inform you I started watching Heated Rivalry and I don’t love it 😬 Look, I’m late to the party because sports romance isn’t my cup of tea, but I’m nothing if not open to having my tastes challenged and I was won over by the massive amounts of hype surrounding this show. While I truly do love a book adaptation is getting so much attention, especially one featuring a queer love story, I really didn’t find it compelling. It’s very horny (this is not a dig) and in my estimation there’s not enough happening outside of those steamy scenes, at least not enough to overcome my general disinterest in the typical sports romance dynamics 🤷‍♀️ I’ve watched half the series (4 episodes) and could walk away now, never knowing how things end, and be entirely ok—very atypical for me. I think the level of hype may have backfired in this situation, but please tell me if it is worth pressing on.

Eating & Drinking

• There was a football game on Sunday. There’s a football game every Sunday for many months of the year, but this one is properly celebrated with snacks; ipso facto, this football game really is super. My husband smoked chicken wings and I made buffalo chicken dip (I don’t have a source for my recipe as it was given to me by a friend many years ago, but this one is very close), Baked Ham and Cheese Sliders, and Fried Dill Pickle Dip—this is very good with all sorts of things dipped in it, but we especially liked pretzel thins, carrots, and bell peppers. We were surprised to find the breadcrumbs are fun, but really not needed at all.

• This Instant Pot Sweet Potato Tortilla Soup comes together very quickly. I like to add a can of drained, rinsed black beans and a cup of frozen corn at the end. I never make the suggested tortilla strips, but I’m sure they would be very tasty and could be completed in the time the soup cooks, we just crush up some tortilla chips.

• Ground Beef Stroganoff, also from the Instant Pot, with steamed broccoli on the side.

• Red Velvet Cheesecake Brownies for a Valentine’s Day Treat

Links + Loves

• Though I enjoyed much of my assigned reading in school (I have, and will forever remain, a book nerd) I did have a particular egregious encounter with Moby-Dick in 10th grade Advanced English. For this reason I’m able to sympathize with the plight of readers who have been harmed by their student reading experiences. Still, I can’t help but be fascinated by and agree with The Marathon Moby-Dick Reading Is a Radical Act. (The Atlantic) In fact, I think the argument can be made a non-marathon reading of Moby-Dick is a radical, or at least counter-cultural, act at this point in time. And yes, I’m aware this is a title I will have to revisit at some point in my reading life; alas, I am not yet prepared to face this reality. Moby-Dick is my Moby Dick.

• The general consensus in Reader circles seems to be there was no “Book of the Year” in 2025. I don’t know whether I’m qualified to crown anything or anyone (though perhaps I should be) but I think if there were a book of 2025, Virginia Evans’ The Correspondent should seriously be considered. The Correspondent is a debut novel which first published in April 2025 with little fanfare and seemingly mostly thanks to word-of-mouth and indie bookseller hand-selling made it to the New York Times Bestseller list in September, climbing to the number 1 spot in December when the book was sold out everywhere. We love to see a book taking on a life of its own, climbing the charts and TBRs everywhere on its own merit. The Correspondent is the kind of book everyone seems to enjoy, a title I would feel comfortable recommending to a wide range of readers; if that’s not a book of the year I don’t know what is. Not only is it delightfully bookish, I think it resonates in this particular moment for particular reasons. This Slate piece digs into why The Correspondent Is an Epistolary Novel for the Social Media Age.

• This week in Wuthering Heights news:

  • Sales of Brontë’s Wuthering Heights skyrocket ahead of film adaptation (The Guardian)

  • Vogue argues The Best Wuthering Heights Adaptations Are All About Creative Ways to Haunt Your Ex

  • And while I generally agree the internet is indeed rotting our brains, I think Glamour's No, Wuthering Heights Is Not a Hard Book to Read is actually a terrible take. Wuthering Heights is more easily readable on the page than many other classics, including, let’s just say for the sake of argument, Moby-Dick, it’s notoriously misunderstood because it’s actually quite complex and layered. Part of why WH is such an enduring classic is it begs to be read through different lenses and is ripe for interpretation. So, no, it’s not a hard book to read, but it can be a challenging story to fully unlock.

• Ohio is… Ohio, but we did birth Toni Morrison and we are using America’s 250th birthday as inspiration for a year long celebration of Morrison and her contribution to American literature beginning on February 18th, her birthday and Toni Morrison Day in Ohio, with a live-streamed conversation between writers Namwali Serpell and Hanif Abdurraqib, inspired by Serpell’s new book “On Morrison.” If you’re in or near Ohio there are in-person events happening all around the state, but people everywhere can participate in the monthly virtual book club which will be reading all 11 of Morrison’s novels in the order they are set beginning with A Mercy in March.

• ‘Hamnet’ Producer Liza Marshall Secures Rights to Author Maggie O’Farrell’s Next Novel ‘Land’ (Variety) Land is set to publish this June.

• The Future of Books We Absolutely Do Not Want is Already Here. (Book Riot)

• Best Romance Books of the Century So Far according to Book Riot.

• The inaugural James Patterson and Bookshop.org Prize longlist has been announced. This is a new literary prize celebrating debut authors nominated and selected by independent booksellers. Finalists to be announced March 16th. (Bookshop.org)

What are you reading, listening to, eating, watching, liking, and/or linking this week? Let’s chat!

Leave a comment

That Bookish Life is a weekly newsletter publishing on Saturdays. If you enjoy my rambles please consider subscribing, sharing, liking, or recommending to a friend.

I sometimes share affiliate links. If you make a purchase I may earn a small commission at no cost to you. Thank you for supporting my work in this way.

If you’d like to keep up with me between newsletters I’m on IG @that_bookish_life. You can also find me on Goodreads and Storygraph.

Until next time!

Share That Bookish Life

January was indeed a weird reading month for me. We started the month wrapping up winter break and getting back to a regular post-holiday season routine and everything was upended again by a major snowstorm at the end of the month leading to another week of school disruption. When the kids are off school my routine and productivity always takes a hit. On top of that I ended my reading month with two long books back-to-back: The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny (670 pages) and The Strength of the Few (725 pages). Plus, catching up on podcasts post-holiday (which meant less audiobook listening time) and the chaos of current events, which meant more news reading. All this to say, it was a weird month, I read fewer books, and it’s really no mystery why.

I already feel as though I’m back to a more normal routine and reading cadence for February, and the good news is I enjoyed quite a lot of my January reads.

Read on for everything I read in January, some stats, and this month’s highlights!

I read 13 books in January. Here’s a little breakdown of my reading month:

• 11 library/Libby borrows

• 1 gifted (Buckeye)

• 1 owned (The Vanderbeekers of 141st Street)

• 2 backlist titles (15%)

• 4 non-fiction (31%)

• 6 audio, 3 hybrid reads (print + audio), 3 print, 1 ebook

January Favorites

Tell me:

• What did you enjoy reading in January?

  
  

  Leave a comment

  
  
  

Reading

• The Strength of the Few (Hierarchy #2) by James Islington. This is book 2 in a planned 4 book fantasy series set in a world where the mental and physical energy of people can be extracted for power. I feel like I can’t talk about any details without ruining the first book for those who haven’t read it. I’ll just say I found this a good read and a decent follow up to the first book, though it did suffer from something of a second book syndrome, in my opinion. A lot of the exciting world, character, and plot building happened in the first book. The second book is quite different and I missed some of those elements I really enjoyed from the first book. Still, I think it’s a good series (at least so far) and I’m interested to see what comes next!

• The Emergency by George Packer. An allegory in the tradition of Orwell about a family navigating societal collapse. Set in an unknown time and place known only as “the empire”, Dr. Hugo Rustin is chief surgeon at the hospital when “the Emergency” hits, upending society and all its familiar structures and customs. Finding himself out of place and out of work, Dr. Rustin, along with his teen daughter and their family dog, travels from the city where he lives into the countryside on a self-styled humanitarian mission to offer help to someone in need of medical care. The journey and encounters they experience along the way will have far reaching consequences. A compelling narrative set in an unfamiliar world with eerily familiar echoes to our own, The Emergency offers a unique opportunity to view our own emergency with fresh perspective.

• Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë. I first read Wuthering Heights as a teen for one of my high school English classes. Going in, like so many others, I expected some sort of star-crossed romance. I very quickly discovered and delighted in Wuthering Heights subverting those simple expectations! In fact, I had such a great experience reading WH for that class I’ve long counted it among my very favorite classics. I’ve been reveling in the discourse about the upcoming Emerald Fennell film adaptation, and the last several years I’ve enjoyed kicking off the year with a classic, so it felt like the perfect time for a re-read!

  
  

  I enjoyed my second read just as much as the first, with the added benefit of approaching it with fresh eyes, a familiarity with the plot, 20+ years of life experience, and many more books read. I love a re-read for this reason—the book may be the same, but each read brings a new experience as we are no longer the same reader.
  
  I, for one, am very much looking forward to seeing the new film adaptation. The trailer is giving dark, weird, unhinged, text rich vibes and I’d say that captures WH really well.

  Related:

  ‘It still has the ability to shock’: Why ‘masterpiece’ Wuthering Heights is so misunderstood (BBC)

  The best Wuthering Heights adaptation.

Listening

• Mailman: My Wild Ride Delivering the Mail in Appalachia and Finally Finding Home by Stephen Starring Grant. Laid off from his white collar consulting job during the COVID pandemic, Grant, on something of a whim, gets a job as a rural letter carrier in his hometown in the Blue Ridge Mountains of Eastern Virginia. With superb storytelling style, Grant recounts his experience which includes hijinks, true peril, and thoughtful philosophical ruminations on our republic and the nature of service. He also includes some interesting history of the U.S. Postal Service while offering a glimpse into a ubiquitous but often overlooked area of civil service. I loved this on audio!

• The Ezra Klein Show: Is Your Social Life Missing Something? This Is For You. I generally appreciated this conversation about community and the rituals of gathering, but I was surprised and delighted by the totally organic discussion which arose about Kiran Desai’s The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny, which I just read!

• I also enjoyed this quick convo from the It’s Been a Minute podcast: Yes, romance & fantasy novels are political.

• And going behind the mic with audiobook narrator and author Julia Whelan on Culture Study Podcast: How an Audiobook Gets Made.

Watching

• Palm Royale, Season 2 (Apple+). This show is far from a must watch, in fact, when I’m not watching I’m not even sure I need to return to it, but when I am watching it sure is entertaining! Campy, and soapy, and totally over the top, I actually don’t care much, if at all, about the plot, but the cast is stellar, including Carol Burnett, and Vicki Lawrence joins for a small part this season! Set in 1969/70 Palm Beach, the visuals and costumes are a treat.

• Traitors, Season 2 (Peacock). Season 2 > Season 1. The show did indeed evolve a bit and its better for it, IMO.

Eating & Drinking

• More Vegetable Soup because this week called for a hearty bowl of brightly colored vegetables amidst all the gray.

• Ground Beef Enchiladas

• Baked Sweet and Sour Chicken with Rice and Broccoli

• More Banana Bread

Links + Loves

• Amazon has a real stranglehold on the self-pub market, so I’m thrilled to see Bookshop.org announce a new partnership which will allow some self-pub authors an avenue to sell their ebooks through Bookshop.org, which, in addition to being an Amazon alternative, was created to help support brick-and-mortar indie bookstores. (Publishers Weekly)

• WashPo Shutters Books Section Amid Widespread Layoffs (Publishers Weekly) The Post is laying off about 1/3 of its staff—gotta pay for that Trump bribe somehow, it’s certainly not going to be with box office returns. Hey, it’s tough out there for the billionaires as they learn to navigate the new fascist regime! Give ‘em some grace! Anyhoo, beloved, long-time WaPo book critic Ron Charles is on Substack and has penned a response worth reading.

• Speaking of Bozo, are you an Audible subscriber? If so, it’s time to switch to Libro.fm. In addition to monthly membership options (1 or 2 audiobook credits per month—use this link with code SWITCH to get 2 free credits with new memberships) Libro.fm recently launched an annual subscription which gets you a year of credits (12) up front to parse out however you want (member credits never expire), plus the usual member perks: 30% off all additional audiobook purchases and exclusive sales, and they’re currently offering a bonus credit for new subscribers. All this plus the satisfaction of knowing your dollars are supporting independent bookstores (you can even choose your preferred indie!) via an employee-owned, Certified B Corp that does not use profits to launch penis rockets or pay off American autocrats.

• Minneapolis Booksellers Resisting ICE Go Viral, See Sales Spike (Publishers Weekly) We love to see it.

• Black Booksellers Recommend 23 Books To Read During Black History Month and Beyond (Parade)

• The 2026 PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction longlist has been announced. (PEN/Faulker)

• The 2026 Libby Book Award finalists have been announced. (Libby Life) This award sort of has Goodreads Choice energy, but a better version with selections made and voted on by librarians and library workers across the country.

• Something nobody had on their 2026 bingo card: a sequel to Audrey Niffenegger’s The Time Traveler’s Wife will be publishing this October. (Kirkus)

• The success of Heated Rivalry has book agents trolling fanfic sites for their next hit. (Vulture)

• Can “Bookstreaming” Save the Literacy Crisis? (Cosmopolitan) A look at a social media trend I can get behind!

What are you reading, listening to, eating, watching, liking, and/or linking this week? Let’s chat!

Leave a comment

That Bookish Life is a weekly newsletter publishing on Saturdays. If you enjoy my rambles please consider subscribing, sharing, liking, or recommending to a friend.

I sometimes share affiliate links. If you make a purchase I may earn a small commission at no cost to you. Thank you for supporting my work in this way.

If you’d like to keep up with me between newsletters I’m on IG @that_bookish_life. You can also find me on Goodreads and Storygraph.

Until next time!

Share That Bookish Life

We are running a marathon—and not just your standard 26.2 mile marathon; we are running a triathlon, an Ironman. And in order to successfully do so we must learn to juggle all the things and identify the best use of our finite resources of time, attention, and money. So, we are writing about our silly little books and we are calling our representatives, we are planning and cooking meals for our families, and we are donating to organizations who are feeding people in occupied Minneapolis, we are taking our daily mental health walks and we are examining our complicity and complacency within systems of oppression.

We are caring for ourselves, our families, and communities, sharing resources, organizing, and looking for opportunities to engage in the fight ahead because that’s the only way forward.

Alas, The Horrors persist, yet so do we.

In the words of the great Margaret Atwood: don’t let the bastards grind you down.

Let’s talk February new book releases, shall we? Because the shortest month of the year is shaping up to be an excellent release month! Especially that last release day 👀

Read on for all the books on my radar releasing next month!

February 3

• Clutch by Emily Nemens. Follows a group of five friends as they navigate the biggest challenges of their lives, asking: When you’re hanging on by your fingernails, how can you extend a hand to the ones you love? Twenty years into their shared friendship, the stakes are higher than ever, and they must help one another reconcile professional ambition with personal tumult. Clutch is a big, beautiful, and deeply absorbing novel that asks how much space and heart we can give to our friends and our families, and what space we can save for ourselves.

• Family Drama by Rebecca Fallon. A vibrant debut and powerful meditation on family, motherhood, and the cost of holding on to your dreams, reminiscent of Ann Napolitano.

• Mass Mothering by Sarah Bruni. Poignant and profoundly humane, Mass Mothering is told through layered voices, written fragments, and recorded testimonies. It is a luminous story of the mutuality of grief, the aftershocks of violence in a globalized era, and the world-bending force of a mother’s love.

February 10

• This Is Not About Us by Allegra Goodman. A kaleidoscopic portrait of a modern American family—steadfast, complicated, begrudging, and loving—from the bestselling author of Isola.

• Warning Signs by Tracy Sierra. The heart-stopping second novel from the author of Nightwatching, in which a father-son ski weekend becomes a desperate fight for survival.

• The Renovation by Kenan Orhan. A woman discovers that her bathroom has been remodeled into a prison cell—where she is an unlikely inmate—in this surreal novel of exile, grief, memory, and migration.

February 17

• So Old, So Young by Grant Ginder. From Grant Ginder, the bestselling author of The People We Hate at the Wedding, comes a generation-defining novel that is part love story, part tragic comedy. Five parties over the course of twenty years bring six college friends together, exploring the ways we run from and cling to our friends in love, life, and death.

• Evil Genius by Claire Oshetsky. An exuberant, brutally hilarious novel about a young woman’s insatiable quest to carve her own path—even if she needs to step over a few dead bodies along the way.

• Bloodfire Baby by Jennifer Murphy. A maternal gothic tale of new motherhood and the torment of a centuries-old haunting.

February 24

• The Reservation by Rebecca Kauffman. For fans of The Bear, Elizabeth Strout, and Jennifer Egan, The Reservation explores the loves and labors of an ensemble of more than a dozen restaurant workers as they strive to get a perfect meal to the table.

• Nowhere Burning by Catriona Ward. A harrowing tale of survival that places the dark fairy tale of Peter Pan and the ruthless dangers of Lord of the Flies into the unforgiving maw of the Colorado Rockies.

• Brawler by Lauren Groff. A stunning, fierce collection from a master of the short story and one of the most important writers of our time.

• Kin by Tayari Jones. A magnificent new novel from the bestselling, award-winning author of An American Marriage—Tayari Jones has written an unforgettable novel that sparkles with wit and intelligence and deep feeling about two lifelong friends whose worlds converge after many years apart in the face of a devastating tragedy.

• More Than Enough by Anna Quindlen. A woman confronts the surprising results of an ancestry test and begins to question the meaning of family and friendship in this wise, tender novel teeming with life.

• A Good Animal by Sara Maurer. A heart-wrenching coming-of-age debut novel by a stunning new voice in fiction, for readers of Barbara Kingsolver and Ann Patchett. Tense, lyrical, and deeply felt, Sara Maurer's unforgettable debut breathtakingly captures the ache of first love, the beauty and brutality of rural life, and how one decision can echo through generations and shape who we become.

• The Ghost Women by Jennifer Murphy. A mysterious art academy in the woods, a deck of ancient tarot cards, a centuries-old secret.

Tell me:

• Which February releases are on your radar?

• What are you planning to read in February? (Front or backlist!)
  
  

  Leave a comment

Reading

• The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny by Kiran Desai. Finalist for the Booker and Kirkus Prizes, a top 10 book of the year according to The New York Times, and one of Obama’s favorite books of the year; The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny is getting a good bit of attention and it is well deserved. Set between 1996 and 2002, Sonia and Sunny have left India to pursue jobs and education in the U.S. Both are lonely and displaced in their own way, so their families attempt to arrange a marriage. Sonia and Sunny is a love story, yes, but it is not a romance, and it is the story of their families as much as it is theirs. This sweeping novel orbits love, loneliness, art, and perception, exploring race and class, migration and belonging, the displacement and disorientation of being a citizen of the world. It’s about culture, being caught between tradition and progress; it’s about families and expectation, the weight of being part of a new generation forced to forge their own path in an unknown world; and how our identities, sense of self, and perception of our place in the world are shaped by it all. It’s smart and beautifully written and also such an treat to read as long as you enjoy a long, sweeping story you can sink into and be carried away.

Listening

• I’m currently hybrid reading The Strength of the Few (book 2 in James Islington’s Hierarchy series) so I’m a little thin on books this week, but I did want to share a podcast episode I listened to a couple weeks ago and previously neglected to mention: Zero to Well-Read’s episode on Little Women! I enjoyed this discussion so much! And let’s not forget I recently recommended Little Women as an excellent book with which to kick off your reading year!

Watching

• The Morning Show, Season 4 (HBO Max). In my opinion this show has been on a decline since season one and it was never exceptional to begin with, but this season was totally ridiculous. Unfocused, unserious; it was like a bad network drama way past its prime. I already saw it was renewed for season 5, but I don’t know that I can bring myself to watch it.

• Traitors, Season 1 (Peacock). Yes, we’re late to the party. We tried Traitors a while back and after a couple episodes it just didn’t stick. Now that we’ve run through all of our tried-and-true reality show favorites we needed something new. We just finished season 1 and the show grew on me. There’s a lot I like about it, a few things I don’t love. I’m interested to see how/if the game evolves as the seasons continue.

Eating & Drinking

Winter was wintering this week in Columbus! Cozy, warming meals were the theme this week.

• Tomato Soup and Grilled Cheese Panini. I like to add just a splash of the optional sherry called for in the recipe.

• Slow Cooker Shredded Beef Tacos which we ate both as tacos and bowls over cilantro-lime rice

• Shepherd’s/Cottage Pie made with some leftover mashed potatoes that I stashed in the freezer using my cubes. With the mashed potatoes already taken care of this dish came together very quickly!

• Funfetti Pancakes—a birthday tradition IHO my youngest’s 13th birthday! I don’t have a source for my actual recipe, but this one is very close.

• And brownies were necessary

Links + Loves

• January’s Best Reviewed Fiction (Lit Hub)

• Ariel Lawhorn’s The Frozen River has been optioned for film adaptation. (Deadline) This is one of the books I said would be perfect for January reading. (Don’t despair, it will be just as good in February!)

• NYC Mayor Mamdani promoted reading and the city’s public library system as he urged New Yorkers to stay home and stay off the roads for safety amidst last weekend’s snow storm saying, “the snow is coming down heavily across our city. And I can think of no better excuse for New Yorkers to stay home, take a long nap, or take advantage of our public library’s offer of free access to 'Heated Rivalry' on e-book or audiobook for anyone with a library card.” Afterwards NYPL saw more than 1000% increase in downloads of Heated Rivalry which they made available with no wait through Valentine’s Day. (NBC New York)

• Not to be ignored, Columbus Metropolitan Library is again making national news, this time because of a sweet note left by a young patron. (Newsweek)

• 2026 ALA Youth Media Award Winners have been announced. (American Libraries Magazine)

• A Tale of Three Bestsellers Lists is an interesting read about the opacity of the NYT Bestsellers list. (Publishing Confidential Substack)

• Lit Hub is publishing letters from writers out of occupied Minnesota. The pieces are moving, beginning with poet Donny Gibson’s Can You Hear Us, America?

• S/O the federal occupation of Minnesota, here are a few useful resources to bookmark:

  • If every American did 3 of these 5 things, ICE would be stopped in its tracks.

  • How To Help if You Are Outside Minnesota

  • Stand With Minnesota

  • If you’re buying books, consider purchasing from Minneapolis-St. Paul indies.

What are you reading, listening to, eating, watching, liking, and/or linking this week? Let’s chat!

Leave a comment

That Bookish Life is a weekly newsletter publishing on Saturdays. If you enjoy my rambles please consider subscribing, sharing, liking, or recommending to a friend.

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Until next time!

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While I enjoy winding down my year consuming everyone else’s wrap-ups in December, I myself don’t like to review my year of reading until it’s actually complete. Once complete, it takes me a while to work through the overwhelm of how exactly to reflect upon reading literal hundreds of books and then motivate to actually DO it.

This is to say: I may be a bit late to the party, but I think the start time was a little early. It feels right to spend the entire first month of the year reflecting on the previous 12 while also thinking about the year ahead. January is a transition month for me.

In 2025, I read a whopping 283 books.

According to Storygraph, this equals 57,349 pages and 1,199.63 listening hours1.

In 2024, I read 276 books and thought I could not possibly read more than that (I also said that the year before that, and the year before that, and the year before that…) and then I did.

In 2025, I read 2% more books than I did in 2024. (My total also increased 2% between 2023 and 2024… perhaps there’s a trend there 🤔 I’ll keep an eye on it!)

At this point my reading behaviors are pretty set. My theory for how I manage to read just a little more each year is perhaps my reading speed or efficiency increases just a bit each year? (Perhaps by 2%?!)

New to my reading practice last year was a custom spreadsheet to track my reading. I’m a data nerd and while Storygraph is great, having my own tracker allowed me to track specific things of interest to me—specifically, publisher, a more accurate accounting of reading format, and the retail cost vs. actual amount spent.

Let’s get into the stats 🤓

Format

Of the 283 books I read in 2025, Storygraph tells me my reading format was about 60% reading with my eyes (print/ebook) and 40% reading with my ears (audio).

This is quite consistent year to year. What it doesn’t account for is hybrid reading, which is how I refer to the books that I hop back and forth between audio and visual formats2. This is something I began tracking in my 2025 reading spreadsheet.

In 2025:

• About 40% of my reading was on audio

• About 40% was print/ebook

• Roughly 20% was hybrid reading

• This suggests my reading is closer to 50/50 audio vs. visual

Genre

About 25% of my reading was fiction, 75% non-fiction. This is pretty consistent for me year-to-year and feels like a good balance.

About 23% of my reading was backlist (I define this as books published more than a year before I read them) and 77% frontlist (books published within the last 12 months). I am forever trying to read more backlist.

My top 5 most frequently read genres were literary, contemporary, romance, historical, and memoir. Close to half of those romances were from my holiday romance reading binge in December.

Publishers

Something new I started tracking this year were the publishers/imprints of the books I read. I was interested to see whether any publishers stood out as favorites. Turns out… not really. I read a pretty wide variety of books across a range of genres and as a result I read a mix of publishers/imprints. Add to that, some publishers have such a large market share with their broad catalogs I’m not sure this data really has much to say about my reading. What was interesting to see was that I logged books from more than 75 different publishers/imprints in 2025.

My top 6 most frequently logged publishers/imprints are listed above. They’re all “Big 5” publishers or imprints thereof, in fact, 4/6 are Penguin Random House imprints.

Source

I have been a reader my entire life and most of my books are borrowed from the library3. In fact, for much of my reading life nearly ALL of the books I read were borrowed from the library. It wasn’t until recent years, due largely to increased space allowance and getting access to review copies provided by publishers, that I began acquiring books I didn’t have to return.

As you can see, I’m still a heavy library user! I have always, always been aware of how lucky I am to have access to such an incredible local library system with Columbus Metropolitan Library. I am the reader I am because of CML!

In 2025:

• 79% of my reading was courtesy of my local library either through physical book borrowing or digital checkouts via Libby.

• 17% of my reading was gifted review copies courtesy of publishers.4

• 4% of my reading came from my own shelves with books I have purchased.

Cost

As I said above, I am heavily reliant on my library to be the reader I am. Not only would I be drowning in books if I owned every book I read each year, but I literally could not afford to read the way I do without the support of my library.

A few years ago, I was tickled when my library system began tracking savings thanks to library borrows at the bottom of checkout receipts—so fun! But, because I don’t just checkout physical books but also digital books—both audio and ebooks—via the Libby app courtesy of my library, I knew the amount reflecting my savings based on physical checkouts alone was just one chapter of the story. Wanting to track this more accurately was a big part of the motivation to move to my own tracking spreadsheet. Thanks to that, I now have a more complete picture of what the retail cost of a year of reading would be vs. what I actually spend!

In 2025:

• The estimated retail cost of my reading was $7,098.30.5

• The actual amount spent out of pocket was $89

Let’s dive into this savings a bit deeper.

If the estimated retail cost of my 2025 reading was $7,098.30 and I actually spent $89 out of pocket, my total estimated savings was $7009.30. That savings breaks down as follows:

• $5,574.13 thanks to library/Libby borrows

• $1,231.23 thanks to gifted review copies from publishers

• $203.94 thanks to predominately purchasing used copies of books

  • I only purchased one new release book last year at full retail price: a personalized signed copy of Emily Henry’s Great Big Beautiful Life.

  • If you remove that purchase from my total, I spent $59 on 13 books—all of which were purchased used.6

  • This averages out to a cost of about $4.54 per book.

Standouts & Shoutouts

I find it challenging to choose favorites always and especially when it comes to books. I think this is part personality, but also, I read and enjoy such a number and range of books it’s next to impossible to point to a few and call them favorites.

My solution is to frame my selections as Standouts and Shoutouts for the year.

Standouts are the books with which I had my best reading experiences of the year. These are not necessarily The Best Books of the year, though I’d argue some are. They’re not even necessarily books published in 2025, though some are. These are the books, when I look back on the hundreds of books I read, which have really stayed with me, the stories I continue to recommend, the books I want living on my personal shelves so I can keep them with me forever.

Shoutouts are books I really enjoyed that I think deserve more attention than they received. Some of these are more under the radar than others; what they all have in common is I think they are deserving of more readers.

Without further ado…

2025 Reading Fiction Standouts

(in no particular order)

• The Dearly Beloved by Cara Wall

• The Heart of Winter by Jonathan Evison

• Leaving by Roxana Robinson

• Shy Creatures by Clare Chambers

• Hamnet by Maggie O’Farrell

• Homeseeking by Karissa Chen

• Lonesome Dove by Larry McMurtry

• Flashlight by Susan Choi

• Crossing to Safety by Wallace Stegner

• The Everlasting by Alix E. Harrow

• Woodworking by Emily St. James

• Some Bright Nowhere by Ann Packer

These titles represent a variety of genres and release years. What they all have in common is I was surprised and delighted by just how much I enjoyed reading them. They all exceeded or subverted my expectations in some way, offering me an exceptional reading experience.

2025 Reading Fiction Shoutouts

(in no particular order)

• Devil is Fine by John Vercher

• Red Clay by Charles B. Fancher

• The Strange Case of Jane O. by Karen Thompson Walker

• Zeal by Morgan Jerkins

• L.A. Women by Ella Berman

• Crown by Evanthia Bromiley

• The Imagined Life by Andrew Porter

• Bug Hollow by Michelle Huneven

• Great Black Hope by Rob Franklin

• Atomic Hearts by Megan Cummins

• House of Beth by Kerry Cullen

• Disappoint Me by Nicola Dinan

• Among Friends by Hal Ebbott

• Life, and Death, and Giants by Ron Rindo

• Doll Parts by Penny Zang

• One Yellow Eye by Leigh Radford

• Natch by Darrell Kinsey

• Like Family by Erin O. White

• Dominion by Addie E. Citchens

• The Devil Three Times by Rickey Fayne

Looking Ahead to 2026 Reading

• My forever goal is always for reading to be a pleasurable experience; to read widely, often, and diversely.

• Continue reading in community. Read-alongs, book clubs, prize lists; I’ve discovered what works for me and continue to find reading in community a fulfilling part of my reading practice.

• Read more backlist books. I think this is a fairly common goal and I get it! I’ve always valued backlist reading. It’s no surprise some of my favorite reading experiences each year are with backlist books. Resisting the sirens’ call of trending new releases is always the challenge.

I literally copied and pasted these goals from my 2024 Reading Wrap-up. My overarching goals tend to stay the same year-to-year. They’re intentionally broad and offer more of a framework or compass for what I want my reading life to look like: a focus on enjoyment, community in a way that feels fulfilling to me, and finding my way to good reads more organically, free of marketing and algorithmic noise.

Tell me:

• What are some of your favorite reads from 2025?

• Do you reflect on or wrap-up your reading year in any way?

• What are your reading goals for 2026?

• Anything, let’s chat!
  
  

Leave a comment

I’m doing things a little differently this week in that this newsletter is part one of two! I’m currently deep into writing a post about my 2025 reading year—reflections, stats, favorite reads, under the radar gems, etc.—and because it’s getting kind of long, and also because it’s not quiiiite finished yet, I’ve decided my 2025 reading wrap-up is worthy of it’s own post. Look for that to hit your inboxes in the next few days!

Currently, we are hosting a gaggle of girls for dinner, ice skating, and a sleepover in honor of my youngest’s 13th(?!) birthday, whilst also shuttling my oldest around for Friday night pep band at the high school—today was the first time I actually registered relief we are perhaps weeks away from him driving himself places—and preparing for Winter Storm Fern to hit. Central Ohio is supposed to get heaps of snow, it seems a foot is well within the realm of possibility. While we are no strangers to snow and winter weather these amounts are uncommon for Columbus. We already stopped for groceries and my library holds—the essentials!—and I have every intention of settling in with a good book and a cozy blanket for the duration of this storm.

So for now, here’s my weekly wrap up with everything I’ve been reading, listening to, eating, watching, linking, and loving lately. My reading is a bit thin this week because I’ve been hybrid reading The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny, which I’m actually enjoying so much, but it’s more than 650 pages long so it’s taking me a minute to read. I’m nearly finished so expect a review next week!

Tell me:

• What are you reading this week?

• How’s the weather looking in your area this weekend?
  

Leave a comment

Reading

• Lightbreakers by Aja Gabel. Noah, a physicist, accepts the offer of an eccentric billionaire to work on a secret project which promises to “unravel the secrets of time and consciousness” allowing subjects to reexperience past memories—essentially time travel. Noah is especially interested in the project as he wishes to tap into memories of a previous life when he and his first wife were happy together, before they unexpectedly lost their toddler daughter to a rare heart defect. Following Noah to the clandestine, secure research lab in the Texas desert is his second wife, Maya, an artist. This literary sci-fi novel explores time, loss, grief, love, and the push and pull of past and present through an interesting blend of science and art. This was a mixed reading experience for me. I deeply appreciate the premise and themes explored, but my interest in the characters and their stories ebbed and flowed throughout.

Listening

• Mother Mary Comes to Me by Arundhati Roy. I saw/heard about this book on enough year end “best of” lists that I was convinced to read it. A memoir from Booker Prize-winning novelist Roy about her life, which can’t be told without telling the story of her mother, Mary, an educator and women’s rights activist, who made great strides for women in India while being resentful of, and often verbally abusive to, her own daughter. Roy reckons with the complexities of their relationship with plenty of perspective and beautiful prose. I enjoyed this on audio with Roy narrating.

Watching

• Stranger Things, Season 5 (Netflix). Finished season 5. I have very mixed opinions about this season overall. I liked where we ended up and and the season definitely built up steam in the second half, but wow… the fact that the “kids” are all now in their 20s and 30s and adult actors and child actors are just not the same is a real problem. Not to mention making us wait more than 3 years caused unreasonable expectations. I really think this show was much better early on when they weren’t turning every episode into a short film 🙄

• The Running Man (Paramount+). A watchable adaptation of Stephen King’s novel. A little action-y for my taste, though not a big surprise given the content.

• The Rip (Netflix). Absurd, though apparently inspired by a true story? Watchable, largely thanks to Ben Affleck, Matt Damon, and Kyle Chandler starring.

Eating & Drinking

• Instant Pot Santa Fe Rice and Beans is a super easy, family pleasing pantry meal that takes just a few minutes to throw together.

• Creamy Tortellini Soup is a must-make for soup season. Definitely make the No-Knead Cheese Bread to go with.

• I tried a new Sourdough Pizza recipe and it turned out quite well. It’s a little fussier than the sourdough dough I usually make, but not by much and the end product might just be worth it. I’ll definitely give it another go. I also tried a new no-cook pizza sauce recipe which turned out really well and requires little effort.

• A batch of Overnight Sourdough Waffles for the weekend.

• And Baked Oatmeal for the week. I make it with Fairlife milk, egg whites, cut the brown sugar a bit, add 1/3 c. raisins, and a chopped apple. I like to eat it with a splash of milk and a sprinkle of chopped pecans.

Links + Loves

• I bought a handful of Stasher bags several months ago and, wow, do I love these things! Specifically, I’ve found the stand-up bags to be an excellent replacement for the plastic bags we used to use. The mega is a great replacement for gallon-size bags, and the mini replaces sandwich-size bags (although, we use sandwich containers for actual sandwiches. If you’re looking for an actual sandwich bag I’d suggest this Stasher.). There’s also a mid size that’s a useful Goldilocks between the two. I have 2 megas, 1 mid, and 3 minis and these have essentially replaced our need for disposable plastic storage bags. I love the stand-up bags specifically because the design not only allows for spacious storage, but easy cleaning, and compact storage. They seal easily and completely and have, so far, held up really well to heavy usage. They’re a bit of an up-front investment, but well worth it to cut down on single-use plastic, plus savings over time. I’m in love, I’m in love, and I don’t care who knows it!

• The National Book Critics Circle Awards finalists have been announced.

• We all know indie bookstores have the best book recs, but did you know they have the best newsletters? Book Riot has a roundup of some of the best bookstore newsletters.

• Alison Cochrun’s charming rom-com The Charm Offensive is getting a film adaptation. (Deadline)

• And The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo is getting a new series adaptation. (Variety)

• 15 Small Press Books You Don’t Want to Miss This Winter (Electric Lit)

What are you reading, listening to, eating, watching, liking, and/or linking this week? Let’s chat!

Leave a comment

That Bookish Life is a weekly newsletter publishing on Saturdays. If you enjoy my rambles please consider subscribing, sharing, liking, or recommending to a friend.

I sometimes share affiliate links. If you make a purchase I may earn a small commission at no cost to you. Thank you for supporting my work in this way.

If you’d like to keep up with me between newsletters I’m on IG @that_bookish_life. You can also find me on Goodreads and Storygraph.

Until next time!

Share That Bookish Life

I don’t know what it is about that turn of the calendar to January that gets me so excited for a fresh new year of reading ahead, but the hype is real! From reflecting on last year’s reading, to thinking through which books I want to prioritize this year, to reading all the anticipated book lists and book-to-screen adaptation articles I come across; plans are beginning to coalesce and I’ve already got new releases hitting my TBR all the way through September!

But let’s not get ahead of ourselves—let’s start with January. After a predictably slow release month in December we have a wealth of fresh new reads releasing this month.

Here’s everything on my radar releasing in January!

January 6

Meet the Newmans by Jennifer Niven. A novel about America’s favorite TV family, whose perfect façade cracks, for fans of Lessons in Chemistry and The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo.

January 13

Dandelion is Dead by Rosie Storey. Jake has fallen head over heels for Dandelion. The only problem? Dandelion is dead. When Poppy discovers unanswered messages from a charming stranger in her late sister's dating app, she makes an impulsive choice: She'll meet him, just once, on what would have been Dandelion's fortieth birthday. A modern love story about the courage it takes to live again after loss and finding hope in the most unexpected places.

Is This a Cry for Help by Emily Austin. A luminous new novel following a librarian who comes back to work after a mental breakdown only to confront book-banning crusaders in an empowering story of grief, love, and the power of libraries.

Lost Lambs by Madeline Cash. Rippling with humor, warmth, and style, Lost Lambs is a new vision of the charms and pitfalls of family dysfunction.

Scavengers by Kathleen Boland. A rollicking debut novel about a cautious daughter and her eccentric, estranged mother venturing west in search of buried treasure—and a way back to each other—before they run out of patience, money, and options.

Darkrooms by Rebecca Hannigan. Two unforgettable women investigate the disappearance of a missing girl in a small Irish town brimming with secrets—in this haunting debut from a new crime writing talent, perfect for fans of Tana French and Flynn Berry.

Detour by Jeff Rake and Rob Hart. A space shuttle flight crew discovers that the Earth they’ve returned to is not the home they left behind in the first book of this emotional, mind-bending thriller series from the creator of the hit Netflix show Manifest and the bestselling author of The Warehouse.

January 20

The Future Saints by Ashley Winstead. For fans of Daisy Jones and the Six and In Five Years—a powerful, and transportive new novel about a music executive desperately trying to bring a rock band back from the brink.

Room 706 by Ellie Levenson. A married woman is trapped with her lover in a hotel under siege: If she knew it would end this way, would it ever have begun?

No One You Know by Emma Tourtelot. For fans of Alison Espach and Claire Lombardo, a poignant and thought-provoking debut novel about the fraught bond between mothers and teen daughters, the ripple effects of a tragic event in a small town, and the search for meaning after loss.

January 27

Escape! by Stephen Fishbach. A propulsive debut novel following a has-been reality TV star and a disgraced producer who get one last shot at redemption on a show set on a remote island, only to discover that the plot twists are beyond what they ever imagined.

Paper Cut by Rachel Taff. A page-turning suspense debut about a woman infamous for escaping a cult as a teenager, who finds her future threatened when dangerous secrets come back to haunt her—perfect for fans of Jessica Knoll and The Girls.

The Seven Daughters of Dupree by Nikesha Elise Williams. From the two-time Emmy Award–winning producer and host of the Black and Published podcast comes a sweeping multi-generational epic following seven generations of Dupree women as they navigate love, loss, and the unyielding ties of family in the tradition of Homegoing and The Love Songs of W.E.B. DuBois.

Vigil by George Saunders. An electric novel from the #1 New York Times bestselling, Booker Prize–winning author of Lincoln in the Bardo, taking place at the bedside of an oil company CEO in the twilight hours of his life as he is ferried from this world into the next.

Missing Sam by Thrity Umrigar. A tense and twisty story of a woman who goes missing on a morning run and her wife's determination to both find her and clear her own name.

Tell me:

• Which January releases are on your radar?

• What are you planning to read in January? (Front or backlist!)
  
  

  Leave a comment

  
  

Reading

• Buckeye by Patrick Ryan. An impulsive kiss between strangers on V-E Day reverberates across decades in this historical family drama. Set in the (fictional) small, northwest Ohio town of Bonhomie and spanning much of the 20th century, Buckeye follows two families united by a shared secret. At once an intimate family drama and a sweeping American epic as interpersonal dynamics play out against the backdrop of wars and a changing world, Buckeye explores forgiveness, regret, the passage of time, and how pivotal moments and choices shape our lives in unexpected ways.
  
  I LOVED Buckeye! This book is totally my jam so I expected to enjoy it going in, but even I was surprised by the way this story and its characters managed to capture my heart again and again as the pages turned. I loved the complex characters and messy circumstances they navigated. I loved the small town setting just as much as seeing Columbus at midcentury—as a Buckeye myself, I can say with authority the settings are especially well rendered. The kind of book I just wanted to move into and stay forever between its pages; in fact, I slowed my reading as much as I possibly could just so I could savor my time with these characters a little bit longer.

  
  After reading I listened to an interview with Patrick Ryan on the Poured Over podcast and it was the perfect bookend to my reading experience.

Listening

• The Heartbreak Hotel by Ellen O’Clover. When Louisa finds herself at loose ends dumped by the boyfriend whose career she prioritized over her own, unable to afford rent on the gorgeous home they shared in the Colorado mountains she decides to put her education in counseling to use, convincing her landlord, Henry, to allow her to turn the space into a small, specialized bed-and-breakfast serving the brokenhearted in need of retreat. Surprised when Henry agrees to her plans, Louisa soon finds her landlord might be as much in need of her services as any of the guests. I like my romances with a little heft and I think The Heartbreak Hotel offers this. Louisa had a complicated childhood and continues to struggle with complex family dynamics; Henry is dealing with loss. I also appreciated the side characters and the concept of this mountainside retreat.

• Homeschooled: A Memoir by Stefan Merrill Block. Block recounts his traumatic experience being homeschooled for grades 4-8 before a rough reentry to public school his freshman year of high school. Block’s mother removed him from his Texas suburban school right around the time homeschooling became legalized in the state (c. 1990) for fear the public school system would stifle him in some way, but really because she was struggling with demons/traumas/undiagnosed pathologies of her own which manifested in weirdly abusive parenting. This is as much a coming-of-age story under dysfunctional parentage as it is a warning of the lack of regulation surrounding homeschooling from a first-wave pupil. A timely subject with current attacks on public schools and homeschooling trending as a favorable substitute.

Watching

• People We Meet on Vacation (Netflix). I’m nearly always team the book was better, and that’s true in this case, but I did enjoy this adaptation of one of my favorite Emily Henry novels. A fun watch.

• Stranger Things, Season 5 (Netflix.) We’re 3/4 of the way through this final season and I currently have very mixed feelings, though I’m trying to reserve real judgement until we’ve finished the entire season.

Eating & Drinking

• Chicken Alfredo made with farfalle pasta (🤷‍♀️) was requested so I tried this Instant Pot recipe alongside steamed broccoli for an easy Monday night meal. It turned out quite well. I chose to cube my chicken before cooking and I did have issues with splattering when I don’t usually. Next time I make it I may reduce the cooking time a little to allow for a short natural release to alleviate that.

• Sweet Potato Black Bean Tacos with Guacamole. I like to eat my guac with Trader Joe’s Plantain Chips.

• This Banana Bread really is the best ever. I’ve made this recipe many times over many years. I like to reduce the sugar a bit, sub half the butter for unsweetened applesauce, and I’ve used sour cream, greek yogurt, and buttermilk all with good results; I use whatever I have on hand.

• I made a double batch of these Instant Pot Egg Bites to reheat for breakfasts alongside toast.

• Lots of Trader Joe’s Winter Wake Up tea in my cup.

Links + Loves

• I just repurchased this facial scrub that I’ve used for years. I use it a couple days a week in the shower and it feels like it provides an extra deep clean while gently exfoliating without drying out my skin. Plus, I like the way it smells. Currently 20% off!

• Speaking of EmHen, this Glamour profile is worth a read and captures her MO perfectly:

  Her novels follow a winning formula: women who don’t need a man but would like one, love interests they don’t have to tame but whom they can help evolve, and plenty of millennial-coded pop culture references. These books are sold as romance, but really they’re stories about the modern experience of being a woman, where love is just one part of the story.

• The New Yorker has an excellent in depth profile as well.

• I’m not the only one excited for a new year of new releases:

  • Lit Hub’s Most Anticipated Books of 2026 is here.

  • And the NYT has The Novels Everyone Will Be Talking About in 2026.

  • The Millions’ Great Winter 2026 Preview is always worth a browse.

  • Barnes and Noble’s Most Anticipated Fiction Books of 2026

• IHO America’s 250th birthday the Library of Congress (is Trump’s criminal defense lawyer still running LoC? #’merica250) and PBS Books are teaming up to celebrate our vibrant literary heritage state by state in their series American Stories: A Reading Road Trip. I’m into it.

• Why reading helps cure an overactive nervous system, according to a neuroscientist. (HELLO!)

  Just six minutes of silent reading could lower stress levels by 68 per cent, outperforming other common techniques like listening to music or taking a walk.

  I believe it!

• Upcoming Book Adaptations in 2026 (The Hollywood Reporter)

• 7+ Court Cases About Book Bans to Watch in 2026 (Book Riot)

What are you reading, listening to, eating, watching, liking, and/or linking this week? Let’s chat!

Leave a comment

That Bookish Life is a weekly newsletter publishing on Saturdays. If you enjoy my rambles please consider subscribing, sharing, liking, or recommending to a friend.

Subscribe now

I sometimes share affiliate links. If you make a purchase I may earn a small commission at no cost to you. Thank you for supporting my work in this way.

If you’d like to keep up with me between newsletters I’m on IG @that_bookish_life. You can also find me on Goodreads and Storygraph.

Until next time!

Share That Bookish Life

I hope you had an enjoyable holiday and a restorative Betwixtmas. I’m once again consuming vegetables in a capacity other than as vehicle for cheese-based dip, so it’s safe to say we’re getting back to normal routines—including fresh newsletters for your inbox!

I last left you in late December with a handful of backlist book recommendations perfect January before taking a little end of year break to celebrate Christmas and the one week of the year we all agree is socially acceptable to lose all sense of time, place, and productivity. I didn’t go anywhere, I cooked very little, I did some puzzling, and some reading, and generally had a jolly good time. I can’t say I’m ready for that break to end, but I can grudgingly admit it feels right to get back to a more normal routine.

My 2025 reading has officially been logged and I’ve begun the process of sifting through to identify favorites, under the radar gems, and reflect on my reading year, but this does take some time considering I’m sorting thorough actual hundreds of books. That is to say, expect my 2025 reading year in review post to land in your inbox in the next couple of weeks.

In the meantime, let’s talk December reading! I spent much of the month binging holiday romances, per tradition, bookended by a few miscellaneous reads to begin and end the month, among those titles an under the radar gem, a backlist book from a literary heavyweight, and a polarizing new release I loved!

Read on for everything I read in December, some stats, and this month’s highlights!

I read 26 books in December. Here’s a little breakdown of my reading month:

• 22 library/Libby borrows

• 4 gifted

• 4 backlist titles (15%)

• 1 non-fiction (5%)

• Lots of audio and hybrid reading for December!

• 13 audio, 8 hybrid reads (print + audio), 3 print, 2 ebooks

November Favorites

Tell me:

• What did you enjoy reading in December?
  
  

  Leave a comment

  
  

Reading

I’m not fully recapping every holiday romance read during my newsletter break, but I will highlight a few favorites.

• A Little Holiday Fling by Farah Heron. An opposites-attract romance set in Toronto featuring a woman who loves Christmas showing off what the season has to offer in her city to a grinchy man in town for the holidays just as she’s poised to move to the UK to pursue her dream of owning a countryside inn. I appreciated the depth of main character development, loved the setting, and found this appropriately Christmassy.

• While It Was Snowing by Julia London. Two middle-aged strangers taking a break from their lives, one, for some quiet and space from her teenagers and extended family to create art, the other contemplating the future of his pro-golfing career following an injury, find themselves double booked at a rental house in Texas just as a snowstorm is about to descend. I appreciated the mature main characters finding romance later in life, and the zany side characters, especially Duchess, the sweet, sweater-wearing, visually-impaired, elderly dachshund.

• Christmas Fling by Lindsey Kelk. More romantic farce than romantic comedy, this is a fake dating romance where a woman agrees to pose as the mysterious (read: non-existent) girlfriend of a friend-of-a-friend after she’s mistaken as such by his family. Together they travel to his family’s home in the Scottish Highlands to spend the holiday where the plan is for her to behave so horribly they will never want to see her again. The only problem is they catch feelings along the way. This one is legitimately funny!

• Also read:

  • Snow Kissed by RaeAnne Thayne.

  • How My Neighbor Stole Christmas by Meghan Quinn.

  • My Favorite Holidate by Lauren Blakely.

  • Christmas at the Ranch by Julia McKay.

  • The Sleight Before Christmas by Kate Stewart.

  • A Merry Little Lie by Sarah Morgan.

• Some Bright Nowhere by Ann Packer. After four decades of marriage Claire is dying from the cancer she was diagnosed with 8 years ago. Facing what they know are to be the last weeks they have together, Claire has a surprising request for Eliot, her caregiver throughout her illness. Told solely from Eliot’s perspective, this simple, touching story offers a unique opportunity for contemplation of relationships and marriage, the sacrifice and selfishness they sometimes require, and what it means to love and give care. I get the impression this book is somewhat polarizing among readers; I loved it, and I love that people are provoked. It’s grappling with some deep questions people are bound to have opinions on. This would make an excellent book for group discussion.

• Terrestrial History by Joe Mungo Reed. I can’t remember how this arrived there, but this book was languishing in my book stack and it was time to read or return it to the library. I chose to read it. This is something of a weird book, a time-bending, literary sci/cli-fi, non-linear, multi-generational family saga opening in present day against a backdrop of climate disaster and the colonization of Mars—there’s a lot going on and I appreciate the mix! The story opens with a scientist being visited by a young man who claims to be from Mars traveling back in time to intervene in time to save our warming planet. The story is exploring big timely questions about science, technology, planetary peril, and the future of humanity, as well as more intimate questions of how it all impacts familial relationships, future generations, our communities, and whether there is ever real escape from the consequences of our past choices.

• Twice by Mitch Albom. Nearing the end of his life, a man accused of cheating a casino with an unbelievable blackjack bet recounts his equally unbelievable life story where he can have a single “do over”, a chance to repeat any moment at will. I didn’t feel strongly about this book one way or the other, though Albom is a skilled storyteller so the pages went down easy. Easy, engaging reading for my first book of the year.

• Harry’s Trees by Jon Cohen. I checked this out from the library last year around this time, I believe after hearing Anne Bogel of Modern Mrs. Darcy recommend it on her What Should I Read Next podcast, but never got around to reading it. Recently, , had good things to say about Harry’s Trees and put it back on my radar so I decided to prioritize it for January. Harry’s Trees is about Harry, a tree lover and paper pusher for the U.S. Forest Service, and Amanda, a nurse who lives in a cabin in the remote woods of Pennsylvania’s Endless Mountains, and her 10-year-old daughter, Oriana. Harry and Amanda have both recently and unexpectedly lost their spouses, Oriana her father, and are grieving in different ways. As their lives intersect in the woods of the Endless Mountains a cozy, ultimately hopeful tale is spun with a delightful fairytale bent. There are fascinating side characters who populate the small town including a fierce, elderly, pipe smoking librarian, and the story centers a (fictional) storybook called The Grum’s Ledger with an important moral to impart. Excellent winter into spring reading recommended for readers of Fredrik Backman, Ethan Joella, and J. Ryan Stradal who appreciate a hint of fairytale whimsy.

• The Vanderbeekers of 141st Street by Karina Yan Glaser. A family with five kids find out the week of Christmas their curmudgeonly landlord will not be renewing their lease forcing them to move from their beloved Harlem brownstone. The kids work together in the days leading up to the holiday to convince their landlord to allow them to stay. This was our family read aloud for December, we’ve read this book at least a handful of times. Excellent middle grade reading set at holiday time that doesn’t focus entirely on the holiday itself, but rather incorporates relevant themes for the season. I love the strong community vibe, the sibling relationships and ingenuity, and message of empathy. This is the first in a 7 book (finished!) series—a family favorite!

Listening

• A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens. I first read this for a class in high school as a quick, fun, before winter break sort of assignment. We watched a film adaptation afterwards. I recall enjoying it. Recently, it hit my radar Zero to Well-Read was doing A Christmas Carol episode for December and it felt like a good opportunity to revisit this short, impactful classic. Then, I had the opportunity for a free month of Audible so I used it to listen to Hugh Grant’s narration on audio. The audio version was unsurprisingly excellent and the Zero to Well-Read episode was also an excellent listen. Good choices made all around. Short, approachable, containing evergreen themes—if you’ve never read this hugely influential and impactful classic I highly recommend you make a plan to do so next holiday season!

• The Secret Christmas Library by Jenny Colgan. I didn’t include this with my above holiday romance wrap-up because it’s not a holiday romance. It’s much more a festive, atmospheric mystery with a hint of romance included. As Christmas approaches rival book hunters are hired by a recently inherited Scottish laird to examine the crumbling castle’s vast libraries in search of a book rumored to be so valuable it can save the failing estate. They stumble upon a puzzling mystery just in time to be snowed in. The setting! The bookishness! The vibes! A supremely cozy end to my seasonal reading.

• Family of Spies by Christine Kuehn. What if, one day, out of the blue, you discovered as an adult with children of your own, that your family were Nazi spies who played a critical role in the bombing of Pearl Harbor? Pretty shocking, right? Well, Christine Kuehn is going to tell you exactly what it’s like, because that’s what happened to her. Toggling back and forth between Kuehn discovering her family’s secrets, digging through primary documents and reaching out to relations to piece together the true history, and putting it all together to tell the story of how her family came to be instrumental in Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbor, Family of Spies is a riveting true story.

• Joyride by Susan Orlean. Prior to Joyride I had only read Orlean’s The Library Book, an excellent piece of narrative non-fiction. Nevertheless, I really enjoyed this memoir of her life which focuses heavily on her career as a writer. For, as she says in the book: the story of my life is the story of my stories. Even for those unfamiliar with Orlean this is an easily appreciable memoir and sure to appeal to those interested in writers, their process, how stories are told, and the importance of story telling.

• Best Offer Wins by Marisa Kashino. This character-driven psychological thriller about a millennial woman who will stop at nothing to buy her dream home in an ultra-competitive housing market is an entertaining, darkly funny, roller coaster ride! The narrative is well plotted and there’s real art in the way the main character is constructed as I was somehow simultaneously sympathetic, repulsed, and cheering her on all at the same time. The best way I can describe this book is satisfyingly unhinged. Had I read it in physical format this would be the definition of a page-turner. It’s excellent on audio with narrator Cia Court bringing the MC to life. Hulu is already working on a series adaptation starring Greta Lee.

• Zero to Well-Read: How to Read More (and Better) in 2026. Reading more is a very common New Year’s resolution. If this is your resolution, or you have other reading-related goals, or you’re just contemplating how to have a satisfying reading life in 2026 this is an excellent, nuanced, and practical conversation to listen to.

Watching

• Pluribus (Apple TV). Unsurprisingly great.

• The Lowdown (Hulu). Surprisingly great. This show is weird, and absurd, and I love everything about it.

• Survivor (Paramount+). We started rewatching some long running reality TV series during the pandemic beginning with Top Chef then Amazing Race, then we moved on to Survivor sometime in summer 2024. It’s nice to have a show to turn on during lazy weekends or free evenings without having to worry whether kids are around or pay full attention while watching 100% of the time; we save those shows for after the kids are in bed. I had never watched an episode of Survivor prior to this. It was really interesting experiencing the beginning of a series which has had such a lasting impact on television and culture. Like, on the first few seasons (it premiered in 2000) contestants really had no context for, or understanding of, how to properly strategize or form alliances! Truly fascinating to watch it all evolve over the course of 25 years!

Eating & Drinking

• I made this Slow Cooker Potato Soup over the break and it turned out super well, especially for the low effort required—definitely will be making this again soon. I served it with these 1-Hour Soft and Buttery Dinner Rolls, which actually are ready in an hour and yield an impressive product given the short timeframe and low-effort. They’re not better than my perfected Soft and Fluffy Dinner Rolls, but certainly a good option for quick turn around.

• My husband treated us to Detroit-style pizza made in the pan we gifted him for last year’s holiday, a nice reprieve on the eve of returning to real life.

• And then I introduced vegetables back to our diet with this Vegetable Soup, which I love and has become something of a tradition once the holiday break ends. I use 8 cups of homemade chicken stock and I like to add ~3 cups of chopped cabbage along with the green beans. It’s very tasty, I love that it makes a lot, and my body is thankful for the return of vitamins and minerals. I like to eat it with a Reuben sandwich, it’s just a great combo.

• This Butternut Squash and Black Bean Enchilada Skillet also comes together very quickly. I would recommend using an enchilada sauce you really like, or it may even be worth it to throw together a quick homemade sauce while the squash is cooking.

• Maple Sheet Pan Smoked Sausage with Butternut and Brussels is a frequent flyer this time of year. Another easy meal and it used up the other half of that butternut squash. I like to serve it with brown jasmine rice.

• I made a batch of this delicious granola1 for snacks and breakfasts per request.

• And a loaf of Sourdough Cinnamon Swirl Bread, also by request. I omit the raisins per family preference 😢

• I’m picky when it comes to flavored coffees, but I do enjoy a good hazelnut and once upon a time really liked Starbuck’s seasonal Maple Pecan flavor—I’m not sure whether it’s produced anymore, not for my grocery’s shelves anyway. Well, my husband picked up this Sticky Bun flavored coffee from Silver Bridge for me to try and I’m loving it! It’s nutty like that maple pecan or a good hazelnut is, but with hints of cinnamon and caramel in a subtle, complimentary way; It smells delicious while brewing and I appreciate that it’s available in whole bean—huge win all around and it’s helping ease these post-winter break mornings.

Links + Loves

• I just replaced a couple of my must-have items:

  • I’ve used these hair ties for years. They’re low-crease (they claim to be no-crease, but is anything really?) and do a good job of holding my hair, which I have a lot of, both in length and amount, and it’s finely textured, so it tends to like to slip out of things. When I workout I do a high pony/bun situation with one of these hair ties. After, I’m able to take it out, do a quick refresh, and move on with my day.

  • I use this cream on nights I’m having trouble sleeping and it always puts me right to sleep. I always bring it when we travel as I often struggle with sleeping in unfamiliar spaces.

• The Real Ones know about The Unexpected Benefits of Reading at Random. (Lit Hub)

• TV Show Book Adaptations Arriving In 2026 So Far (Deadline)

• One of those adaptations is Jasmine Guillory’s The Wedding Date for Netflix. (Kirkus Reviews) This is a cute, smart, contemporary romance that will lend itself well to adaptation, I think!

• 40% Of Americans Did Not Read a Single Book in 2025 according to the latest survey of American reading habits conducted by YouGov. (Book Riot)

• 7 Podcasts for Bookworms according to the NYT.

• The Cut’s Book Gossip tells us What Book Industry Folks Really Thought About The Year in Books.

What are you reading, listening to, eating, watching, liking, and/or linking this week? Let’s chat!

Leave a comment

That Bookish Life is a weekly newsletter publishing on Saturdays. If you enjoy my rambles please consider subscribing, sharing, liking, or recommending to a friend.

Subscribe now

I sometimes share affiliate links. If you make a purchase I may earn a small commission at no cost to you. Thank you for supporting my work in this way.

If you’d like to keep up with me between newsletters I’m on IG @that_bookish_life. You can also find me on Goodreads and Storygraph.

Until next time!

Share That Bookish Life

On the other side of that finish line comes one of my favorite weeks of the year. You know that week between Christmas and New Year when everyone loses track of all sense of time, place, or expectation of productivity? That’s the holiday I yearn for! As a little treat to myself I spend this week recovering from weeks of prescribed chaos by indulging in full on sloth mode. All I want to do is nothing unless it can be done from my couch whilst in pajamas. It’s a necessary opportunity to radically reset and recharge and I lean all the way in.

That said, this will be my final newsletter of 2025! I’ll be back in the new year with a look back at my 2025 reading, including favorites, under the radar gems not to be missed, and reflections on my reading year.

As the year winds down I’m beginning to think about January reading and how to start my reading year right. I’m not yet sure what I will be reading, but before I go I want to leave you with a few excellent suggestions for January reading in case you too are beginning to ponder how to kick off the new year.

January reading recommendations for your TBR consideration:

Tell me:

• Are you currently thriving or just surviving?

• Do you have any books you’re trying to get to before the end of the year?

• Do you yet have any January reading plans?
  

Leave a comment

Reading

My Holiday Romance Reading Binge is in full effect! Most of these are hybrid reads. I rate my holiday romances on a steam scale of 1-3 hot cocoas ☕, and holiday vibe scale of 1-3 trees 🎄.

• The Eight Heartbreaks of Hanukkah by Jean Meltzer. A Christmas Carol retelling set during Hanukkah featuring a workaholic TV producer, Evelyn, and her ex-husband who is filling in as the on-set doctor for her live-action televised production of A Christmas Carol. Each night of Hanukkah a ghostly presence (or possible concussion-induced hallucination) visits returning Evelyn to formative scenes reminding her of why she and her husband were together and revealing where their relationship went wrong. Funny, touching, and contains some real substance. Content note: late pregnancy loss. ☕/🕎🕎

• Yours For The Season by Emily Stone. My first time revisiting Emily Stone since I was frustratingly offended by her 2021 debut Always, in December. Alas, I could not resist the fake dating at a family cottage in the Scottish Highlands premise of Yours For The Season. I don’t regret my choices here, I found this readable if familiarly lacking in character and relationship development. I remain skeptical of Stone though I guess I’d be willing to pick up a future title if the synopsis strikes my fancy. ☕☕/🎄🎄

• Grace & Henry’s Holiday Movie Marathon by Matthew Norman. I’ve enjoyed Norman’s books in the past; he writes solid contemporary fiction and I’ve never understood why his titles tend to fall under the radar. I’m thrilled to see so many readers picking up this book! The titular Grace and Henry, thirty-somethings who recently lost their spouses, are thrust together by their well-meaning mothers and bond over their loss while watching holiday movies. A touching and engaging story brimming with heart and humor about friendship, family, navigating grief, and love after loss. This one will have you feeling all the feels! 🎄🎄

• A Mannequin for Christmas by Timothy Janovsky. A mannequin magically comes to life after a newly single artist who runs his great-aunt’s New Jersey vintage shop wishes for the perfect man. The mannequin names himself Aiden after binging Sex and the City, learns about being a human by watching holiday romance movies, and has until midnight on NYE to experience “true human love” lest he turn back to plastic. An unapologetically silly romp with a personal growth focus. Last year I read Janovky’s The Merriest Misters, which has a similar vibe and is more Christmas-focused, which I preferred. ☕☕/🎄

• Good Spirits by B.K. Borison. A Ghost of Christmas Past’s assignment is thrown for a loop when the antique shop owner he’s assigned to haunt is a good person of people pleasing proportions. Both are perplexed what it is they’re meant to learn only to find their fate is intertwined in unexpected ways. Light on Christmas cheer, heavy on the steam, plus a hint of mystery to keep things moving—no complaints. ☕☕☕/🎄

Listening

I’ve been enjoying all the best books of the year podcasts. So far, I think I’ve been convinced to pick up Charlotte Wood’s Stone Yard Devotional, Daniel Kehlmann’s The Director, and Arundhati Roy’s Mother Mary Comes To Me.

• FictionMatters: Best Books of 2025—this is always my favorite. I have enough reading and taste overlap with Liz and Sara that it feels as though I’m sitting with friends chatting books, even if I’m not contributing much to the conversation 😉

• The Book Review: The Ten Best Books of 2025 and Our Book Critics on Their 2025 in Reading.

• From the Front Porch: Best Books of the Year.

• Book Riot The Podcast: Our Favorite Books of 2025.

Tell me: Are you listening to any best books of the year roundups? Have you been convinced to add anything to your TBR?

Leave a comment

Watching

• The Family Stone (Disney+/Hulu).

• The Family Man (Peacock).

• While You Were Sleeping (Disney+/Hulu).

• Bad Santa (HBO Max).

• The Office, Christmas Episodes (Peacock).

Eating & Drinking

• Hanukkah Dinner! Slow cooker beef roast (brisket is traditional, but chuck roast works and no need for an overnight rest), latkes and cheese blintzes courtesy of Trader Joe’s, and Honey Glazed Carrots.

• Instant Pot Chicken Noodle Soup—plan to cook 6 mins per pound of chicken, I usually end up with a ~6 lb chicken, half of which I shred and return to the soup, the other half I freeze for a later meal; I also like to add a parsnip along with the other veggies, and a bay leaf while cooking—with Perfect Soft and Fluffy Dinner Rolls.

• I hosted friends for our annual cookie exchange. I made Cranberry Cocktail Meatballs, Cranberry Brie Bites, and Christmas Punch (which also had cranberry—consider it a theme 😜) And Soft Chewy Molasses Cookies and Double Chocolate Mint Cookies, both are my regular contributions to our exchange. Those molasses cookies in particular are a must make; an unassuming cookie with the best flavor and texture!

• Chili Mac, also from the Instant Pot, is a quick, easy, pleasing, one pot meal.

• I’ve been enjoying this Chobani Peppermint Mocha Creamer in my morning coffee. I’m usually a touch of sugar and splash of half and half kind of gal and often take issue with flavored creamers, but I’ve enjoyed the Chobani ones I have tried. This isn’t too sweet or strongly flavored, and it doesn’t have a weird aftertaste. Just a splash gives me a hint of cheer in my cup.

Links + Loves

• The Best Book Covers of 2025 according to the New York Times.

• Obama’s annual favorites list is worth a browse if just for the books. (Obama Foundation)

• Read before you watch: Page-to-Screen Adaptations Coming in 2026 (B&N)

• Test your Jane Austen knowledge with this quiz in honor of her 250th birthday anniversary earlier this week. (NYT)

• The National Book Critics Circle Awards longlists have been announced. (NBCC)

• Why Some Books Become Blockbusters Overnight explores the how and why of the buzzy book phenomenon. (The Guardian)

• The Most Popular Books In US Public Libraries in 2025 (Book Riot)

• Netflix Orders Series Adaptation Of Liz Moore’s Mystery Novel ‘The God Of The Woods’. (Deadline) I think this book has the makings of a potentially excellent adaptation.

• 9 Books from 2025 You Shouldn’t Overlook according to Publishers Weekly.

What are you reading, listening to, eating, watching, liking, and/or linking this week? Let’s chat!

Leave a comment

That Bookish Life is a weekly newsletter publishing on Saturdays. If you enjoy my rambles please consider subscribing, sharing, liking, or recommending to a friend.

Subscribe now

I sometimes share affiliate links. If you make a purchase I may earn a small commission at no cost to you. Thank you for supporting my work in this way.

If you’d like to keep up with me between newsletters I’m on IG @that_bookish_life. You can also find me on Goodreads and Storygraph.