I’m sure there’s great contemporary literature and modern romance out there, but why do the covers all have flat, vector-shaped people? They look like paper craft dolls. It looks juvenile on the cover when the story is borderline eroticism.

Lookin at you, Emily Henry!

When I buy a book and don’t like it, the DNF shame gets combined with buyers remorse. But now I DNF books all the time because I borrow them from the library. Life’s too short to read bad books. Put it back and borrow a new one.

Treadwell’s Books near the British Museum if you want to find occult books

My first book hangover was from The Series of Unfortunate Events. I didn’t want it to end.

There’s also a hollowness that comes from knowing it’s not the original author. Even if other writers can mimic it, it’s not the same.

Oh boy. I create TBR’s based on mood and season. It’s an organized mess. My physical TBR on my bookshelf is just a ~4 book lineup of what I plan to read next. I often ignore it and chose a totally different book from another shelf.

My digital TBR on Libby is organized into separate “season” tags. What season a book goes into is less about the actual setting of the book and more on the general vibe I get from the synopsis. Here are my descriptions of each season:

• Summer: parched surrealism, desert punk, windows open, sun going down.
• Spring: vernal, floral, light & airy, blooming reads
• Autumn: spooky, moody, earthy reads
• Winter: harsh, silent, hibernating, drifts.

I also have a generic TBR tag of books that don’t fit into the seasonal tags. Whenever I’m in a reading slump I just browse the current season. I also read about 3 books at a time: a non-fiction, a fun carefree fiction, and a more serious fiction. Currently that’s Entangled Life by Merlin Sheldrake (non-fiction), The Sun and it’s Shade by Piper CJ (fun fantasy), and The End of October by Lawrence Wright (a fictional pandemic novel).

I can’t speak on books specifically, but I work in a US office that’s had a lot of paper quality issues in our publishing department that sound similar. We can’t get the quality paper we need in the amount of stock we’re needing it for. And if the paper is in stock, it’s either above our budget or there’s another company with higher priority that’s getting first dibs on it. What we are able to publish doesn’t look as good as it used to from all the compromises. Friends in Canada have similar complaints on their paper and wood products.

Might be a universal paper industry thing at the moment.

I had to read this book in high school. I’ll never read it ever again. It hit way too close to home (always moving, money issues, family making uneducated choices), and despite only reading it once at 13, the stories have stuck with me for over a decade. As an adult, thinking about this book makes me upset and disappointed on her behalf because I understand a lot more of the causes and consequences of her family’s lifestyle.

If you want a movie recommendation, The Florida Project had a similar vibe.

I follow you on TikTok and always love your gouache paintings! Keep it up 💜