I miss the lower stakes writing of blogs. I miss when it was the primary way I engaged with the online world.

Remember RSS readers? Remember comments, when they were all just people? Before our ability to find things was controlled by opaque algorithms and before doomscrolling was a thing? Of course there are things not so good about that time online - but as someone who effectively grew up as a writer there, I find myself missing it quite a lot.

Anyway, before I overthink this, I am going to try to write here a bit more often. And the only way I can do that, I think, is if I remember that newsletters are just blogs and inboxes are just RSS feeds.

Trying to reestablish a reading life

A low stakes beginning to my re-emergence in this space! I love to read, and I used to voraciously read across every genre (except romance and horror - more on that in a moment). I read a mix of ebooks, paper, and audio.

In the last few years, I have noticed my reading habits change. A big part of it has been my attention, like everyone. I’ve tried various blocks on social media, time limits, and the like - and I’ve left Facebook and Tiktok altogether. But nothing was really working.

Recently I changed my focus settings on my phone to be continual - that is, the various time-sucking apps are now ALWAYS prohibited unless I expressly turn the focus setting for a particular app off. I can only do it in five minute increments so I have to “reload” if I want to go past five minutes. This, along with cold turkey stopping the handful of games I had been playing (which I had started playing a few years ago both for something to do with my youngest and as a way to stay off social media) has finally healed my brain a little bit.

The other thing that helped is recommitting to paper books. I can read ebooks for certain things but it continues to bother me how much less I remember from reading them, and how I lose the spatial memory (like, remembering where in a book or where on a page a particular paragraph is) as well as the tactile experience (what each book’s paper and cover feels like). I’m also reading a lot less on audio - I get a lot of advance listener copies from LibroFM and what ended up happening is I would download and start to read a book that either I was never that excited about to begin with, or was the kind of book I’d prefer to read on paper but was listening to because it was free that way. In each case it made for a worse reading experience (to be clear - not because I don’t love many audiobooks, but because of these particular conditions).

Finally, I had started reading a lot of romance in the last few years, in part because I found a few authors who were truly lovely, and in part because I thought it would help me because of my attention span. While I will continue to read every single book Katherine Center and Annabel Moynihan ever write, and I’m glad to have found a few incredibly talented historical romance writers, on the whole the formula aspect of certain other contemporary romances got to be too much for me. I still love this genre, I just know my tastes better now which is helping me be more selective in finding the right books for me.

What I’ve read this year

So what have I been reading in 2026? A lot! I’m not sharing the titles I did not like, nor the ones I DNFed, because I’m not about to yuck someone else’s yum. Just sharing opinions below, not plot synopses. But here’s what I’ve read since January (these are all US Bookshop links but they are not affiliate links, I’m not making money off of this):

• Wild Dark Shore by Charlotte McConaghy - I listened to this on audio. I would have enjoyed this much more as a paper book, full cast audio with overly dramatic multiPOV narration is annoying to me. This was the book, actually, that made me realize I needed to stop listening to audio just because it’s sometimes easier to access. It is beautifully written, a great premise, both character-driven and plotty.

• Small Things Like These by Claire Keegan - I forget where I learned about this book but I’m so glad I did. It has beautiful interiority, offers a meditative slice of life of 1985 Ireland while also having high stakes. I wish I knew other people who read this book, actually, because I have lots of thoughts about gender that I would love to discuss with someone!

• The Correspondent by Virginia Evans - A Christmas gift from my sister. I know, everyone is reading it. Turns out they should be! I was pleasantly surprised by this one, because I really have not enjoyed the handful of older women protagonist books I have read in the last few years - they’ve felt very one dimensional. But this one wasn’t. Sweet, almost cozy but not quite, and hopeful about aging and being able to change. There are people in my life who could use this book but will not read it.

• The Bodyguard by Katherine Center - A library ebook. This was the romance that started it off for me several years ago - recommended on a podcast and exposed me to great writing and character development and some very, very funny moments. This is a re-read because I wanted to remember what it was about it that launched me on that journey. The FMC has issues around being unlovable that hook right into my own, which was why this story was such catnip to me.

• Whale Fall by Daniel Krause - Random paperback purchase while thrifting with my son in Monterey CA (which is where the novel takes place). Wild premise, great science, writing was the clipped masculine style I tend to hate. Kind of a guy's guy book. Glad I stuck with it because even though it's not in my usual wheelhouse it was quite good, both to see what the author did with it and to expose myself to a wider variety of perspectives.

• The Plot by Jean Hanff Korelitz - a surprise of a book. I bought it because it was buzzy and I thought I'd read it to recommend it to my spouse (reading for my spouse and son are two frequently motivating factors in my own reading life, because I desperately want us to read things together to be able to talk about them). I don't tend to like unlikable characters, or when their bad decisions are obvious, or when I can see the ending coming way before the main character. And this book had all of those things. Yet it was the exception that proved the rule - interesting, fast paced, and the main character became more sympathetic over time. I have not read The Sequel yet but I plan to.

• Love Lettering by Kate Clayborn - A library ebook. This author was recommended on a podcast. Gorgeous writing, a real sense of place. A more literary sort of romance and I’d like to read more from this author. The only thing that kind of sat weird at the back of my head is that the interiority and dialogue did not quite match the protagonist to me. But the protagonist’s arc was wonderful and I enjoyed the friends and side characters a lot.

• The Wilderness by Angela Flournoy - I don't even know what to say except that this was a special book. Gorgeous, quiet somehow, even though not everything that happens is quiet. Another book with an incredible sense of place. Women that you cannot help but fall in love with, and see some of your most special women friends in. If you are someone nervous to try literary fiction you should read this to have your mind changed.

• The Everlasting by Alix Harrow - I love Harrow’s novels and this was no exception. I wish it hadn’t had sprayed edges - they stuck together and in one case tore a page. The looping style helped pull me along as a reader. There is one scene that broke me as a parent; if you’ve read it you’ll know the one. I enjoyed the writing, the way certain gendered tropes were flipped, and how the author took what felt to me like an unsolvable problem and solved it.

• I Have Some Questions for You by Rebecca Makkai - I bought this paperback while on a trip a few weeks ago. It had been recommended to me a year or two before while on a different work trip - Makkai had spoken at the same lecture series I was to speak at (Vanderbilt I think?) and one of the admin could not believe I had not heard of this book given my research. Now I get it. Especially struck by how well Makkai describes the awfulness of high school in the 90s, the casualness of sexual harassment and assault at the time.

• James by Percival Everett - I have had this on my bedside table for far too long. I think I was afraid it would hurt my heart too much to read it. Plus, I’ve never read Huckleberry Finn and I thought I’d miss too much for not having read it. A friend disabused me of this so I finally picked it up. And of course it did break my heart, and I didn’t have to have read Huck Finn, and it was also beautiful and smart and thoughtful in the way all Everett novels are.

You’ll notice none of these books are about menstrual cycles or anthropology or very much related to my professional life at all. I do read a fair bit of non-fiction related to my work but most of it is scholarly monographs - and in most cases I don’t read them straight through. So I didn’t include them.

Here’s to writing more - and for the next newsletter to be a great deal shorter!