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Book reviews from a sentimental introspective reader 📚
19
items I am just someone trying to build an interconnected web of knowledge, honoring my daily reading rituals, and remaining soft, curious, and a student of life. My reading life is a practice of showing up. I read to stay tender in a cruel world, to find ...
Sections
4
★★★★★ | The Paradigm Shift (Masterpiece)
★★★★☆ | The Deeply Resonant (Excellent)
★★★☆☆ | The Pleasant Journey (Solid / Good)
★☆☆☆☆ | The Disconnect (Did Not Resonate)
★★★★★ | The Paradigm Shift (Masterpiece)
Transcendent. This book actively shifted my perspective, altered how I view the world, or perfectly articulated something I previously could not name. It earns a permanent spot on my shelf.
I have a habit of walking home from a day so good it aches and asking myself, quietly, will I ever feel this again. I have done it my whole life. This is the first book that answered me instead of comforting me.
He keeps returning to a wave that spe...
The Art of Living: Mindfulness & Growth
Kahlil Gibran’s The Prophet is less of a book and more of a steady transmission from a soul that has clearly sat with the fire and come out whole. It is a collection of poetic essays that tackle the heavy, massive themes of existence: love, work, joy...
The Prophet
Aimee Nezhukumatathil’s World of Wonders is a rare kind of book that feels like a deep exhale. It is a collection of essays that uses the natural world, everything from the axolotl to the monsoon, to map out the geography of a life. Each creature she...
World of Wonders: In Praise of Fireflies & More
I once wrote that the best days leave an ache, that on the walk home the day is already turning to memory before I am ready to let it go. I did not understand why I was built that way until this book explained it to me sideways.
Blue, Nelson reminds...
Bluets
Being a sentimental person is one of the honors of my life, and this is sentiment at its highest level, the kind that costs something to write.
The book alternates, almost page for page, between her family and her backyard. Her mother’s death, her g...
Late Migrations: Natural History of Love & Loss
★★★★☆ | The Deeply Resonant (Excellent)
Beautifully executed. It inspired deep reflection or filled pages in my journal. It missed the 5-star mark only by that indefinable, transcendent spark.
Reading her essays feels like being handed the keys to how she sees, and how she sees is the whole reason to read her.
There’s the one about wandering off as a child and how getting lost in the woods shaped her, the ones on Whitman and Poe and Words...
Upstream: Selected Essays
Let me say this plainly, because I think my shelf makes people assume things about me: laughing still makes you a cool girl, and swallowing a twisty thriller in two days still makes you a serious reader. I will not be taking questions.
A woman shoot...
The Silent Patient
I collect silver that looks like it wandered out of a fairy forest, twigs and branches and shapes that feel half real. This book is that instinct turned into a novel, and then it quietly breaks your heart with it.
It is set in an endless house full ...
Piranesi
She uses seashells to talk about the different seasons of a woman’s life and it’s so quiet and so wise.
Each shell becomes a stage, solitude, marriage, the middle years, the way relationships change shape, the way you have to keep returning to yours...
Gift from the Sea: 70th Anniversary Edition
Small and fast and it loosened a knot I’d been carrying about making things.
The core idea, that nothing is truly original and that this is freeing rather than depressing, genuinely changed how I think about creativity. You’re allowed to be influenc...
Steal Like an Artist: 10 Things About Creativity
★★★☆☆ | The Pleasant Journey (Solid / Good)
The baseline of a successful book. It accomplished exactly what it set out to do. 3 stars is a compliment. It means the author did their job.
I know people who’d swear this is a five and I understand exactly why, it just didn’t reach me the way I wanted it to.
The message about following your personal legend, about the whole universe conspiring to help you when you chase what you’re meant...
The Alchemist: A Modern Classic Fable
The premise pulled me straight in, this idea of fallow seasons in life as something to move through rather than rush to fix.
When you’re depleted or grieving or just retreating, you’re wintering, and the book argues you should honour that instead of...
Wintering: Power of Rest and Retreat
Told in these tiny fragments about a marriage cracking and then slowly trying to mend, and the form is genuinely clever.
Some of the fragments are so sharp they actually sting, little observations about art and motherhood and betrayal dropped in wit...
Dept. of Speculation (Vintage Contemporaries)
Fun and readable and it nails a very particular flavour of modern dating dread, the ghosting, the apps, the slow disappearing act.
Honestly though the storyline about her dad and his memory slipping got to me far more than the central romance did. T...
Ghosts: A novel
Every word here is pulling weight, and Keegan can say almost nothing and mean everything, so let me be careful about how I put this, because I am about to be mildly unpopular.
A coal merchant in a small Irish town, at Christmas, notices something wr...
Small Things Like These (Oprah's Book Club)
I once wrote that some of my best days leave an ache, because on the walk home the day is already becoming a memory and I am not ready to let it go. This entire small book is that feeling stretched across one English summer.
A veteran comes to a vil...
A Month in the Country (Penguin Essentials)
This was a good book with an incredible heart, but the reading experience felt like a long, slow climb. Robin Wall Kimmerer brings such warmth and deep respect to her blend of botany and Indigenous wisdom. There are moments of quiet beauty throughout...
Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom & Science
★☆☆☆☆ | The Disconnect (Did Not Resonate)
Fundamentally flawed, grating, or out of alignment with my values. If I didn’t abandon it, I only finished to see how bad it would get.
The second book I have quit for almost the same reason, which is starting to feel less like coincidence and more like a genre I have to admit is not for me: attractive, damaged people in New York performing their pain at one another from a careful, g...
Cleopatra and Frankenstein
I feel everything to the deepest part of my core. It is the whole way I am built. So maybe I was never going to survive a narrator who decides, on purpose and with a full pharmacy, to feel nothing at all.
Let me be fair, because I do not think this ...
My Year of Rest and Relaxation: A Novel