Reading Journal 2025: Q1
These are all the books I read from January to March.
I quit using Goodreads a while back. I never particularly enjoyed the user experience, though the website at least served its purpose as a half-decent place to keep record of all the books I read during the year. Nevertheless, fuck Bezos and all that, I wanted a better place to keep a proper reading journal. I know Fable exists, but it’s an app-only experience and I am just so damn sick of downloading apps just to do basic shit, so here we are. My reading journal is now a part of my Patreon. I’d like to have a physical journal, but writing by hand aggravates my carpal tunnel. Typing doesn’t, and I also recently got a Thinkbook and really enjoy typing on it.
Anyway, I’ll just shut up now and tell you about all the books I read from January to March.
Books I Read:
In Praise of Older Women by Stephen Vizinczey - I started this book at the end of December while I was getting my iron infusion at the hospital. It took me a while to finish because I was still pretty anemic in January. I didn’t exactly enjoy this book. Every chapter is the horny protagonist hooking up with a different cougar, and I got sick of his game pretty quickly. Most of the women he hooks up with aren’t even into him at first, but he always manages to weasel his way into her bed. Nonetheless, it was still an interesting read in the sense of human sexuality and isolation. I found the protagonist’s observations interesting, but I still hated him with a passion. It also didn’t feel like I was reading a novel. It just felt like a series of conquest essays, like “Here’s the single mom I boned, and here’s the sad trophy wife I boned, and here’s the hot young woman I boned before realizing that I don’t like young women so I’m gonna just keep boning milfs, actually.” I don’t regret reading it. Lots of my writing focuses on human sexuality, so I’ll take what I can get. If the protagonist of this book kept on hitting on me at the coffee shop, though, I’d tell him to fuck right off. - ★★
Your Voice in My Head by Emma Forrest - This one was a memoir that I quite enjoyed, wherein the writer (a British woman living in New York) tries to rebuild her life after a suicide attempt and ends up dating a famous celebrity (Colin Farrell). This one deals with a lot of heavy subject matter and is kinda like Girl, Interrupted but less funny. I still really enjoyed it, though, but I’m an angsty girl at heart, so like, it was meant to be. I’ll be reading more of Forrest’s work for sure. - ★★★★
The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath - The Emma Forrest book really got me jumping on that depression train, so I figured I’d give The Bell Jar a reread. I’d read it once before when I was 18 and didn’t really like it, but I was pretty emotionally immature back then and still shedding my “good Christian girl” scales. I couldn’t understand how Esther Greenwood was so able to put herself in the situations she does. This book hit much differently to my 38 year-old brain. Esther’s just so normal, and I totally see now the way she just let herself kind of coast through life and end up in a psychiatric ward in the 1950s. Like damn. Anyway, rereading The Bell Jar got me back in the mindset of my WIP’s protagonist, and so I just had to keep reading more depressing shit. - ★★★★
Wintergirls by Laurie Halse Anderson - I’d read Speak in my teens and it definitely is one of those books that really stuck with me. In my early 20s I read The Impossible Knife of Memory, but that was the last time I ever read an Anderson book. I picked up a copy from a local used book sale last October, and it was finally time to read it, I figured, since the teenage daughter in my WIP has an eating disorder. One thing I love about Laurie Halse Anderson is that slow burn of her work. She captures the teenage girl voice in such a captivating way. This one was amazing. Better than Speak? I dunno. Maybe I should reread that one too. - ★★★★★
Believe Me by J.P. Delaney - I don’t read thrillers that often. I used to read them obsessively after the Gone Girl craze, but nothing I’ve read has ever compared, other than Sharp Objects. Now I just read them for a palate cleanser, a simple and fun way to breathe before moving on to a heavier book. I found this one at Dollarama. The premise sounded great. I liked the first half of the book. The writing was sharp and sexy and there were some amazingly-written dark romance undertones in there that got me all hot and bothered, but the plot really got derailed once the narrator turned unreliable. It didn’t get much better after that. - ★★
Breakfast of Champions by Kurt Vonnegut - I’ll come clean and admit that I haven’t read many “classic” books in my lifetime. I always wanted to read stuff that was set in modern times, which really was a detriment to me as a reader. Nevertheless, it’s never too late to catch up. So yeah, I loved everything about this book. I love the humour and the wit and the difficult subject matter. It says so much about the time it was written and it says even more about the way we all are now as a society. The one really got me back into writing my WIP, because my voice can sometimes trail into that train-of-thought kind of vibe that Vonnegut’s prose does in this novel. It made me realize how much of a charm there is in writing like a human being instead of a perfectionist machine. - ★★★★★
Books I’m Still Reading:
Passages by Gail Sheehy - This one is about the typical challenges that one faces in various decades of their life. It’s separated by men and women. It was published in the 70s, so some of the crisis scenarios don’t quite sync up the same way they would for modern folk, but it’s still relevant reading. I keep this one in the kitchen to read when I’m cooking dinner.
My Secret Garden by Nancy Friday - This one’s full of women’s sexual fantasies, and I got it because Contrapoints referenced it in her video about the Twilight series. I keep it beside my bed because of reasons.
My Observations
6 books in 3 months isn’t bad, considering my track record. I’m honestly still figuring out how to carve out the proper time to read since having kids, which was 10 fucking years ago, insane to think. I’ll go through dry spells where I read nothing and then I’ll have a spree where I can read multiple books in just a week or two. I’ve found that I struggle with drive and energy, which I suppose is normal for a part-time working mother of two. I don’t know. All the other mom readers I know seem to plow through books and juggle writing and cleaning and general life duties like it’s nothing, and I always feel tired and exhausted and like I never have free time. I suppose it’s just the internet lying to me. Or me just thinking that I’m no good at doing anything. Probably a question best left unanswered.
I gave up watching YouTube for Lent this year and really got a lot of reading in because of it. I’ve also made a more conscious effort to spend less time scrolling and I feel happier in general, so I’m hoping that I can keep up my current reading routine. I feel more like my old teenage self than I ever have, and I think that’s a good thing. I have more time to just think and mull things over, spend more time grounded in some sense of reality. I’m just way more content and less angry than I used to be. I don’t want to go back.