📚 Winter Reads:
The 20 books I've read between January - March
Winter is tough because of how dark it gets by 4pm. But I found reading to relax me and distract from seasonal depression. I even started a pop-culture/pop-reads Instagram as a mood-board to cheer myself up. It’s a great community and I’ve discovered books I never thought I’d read + I can share my great attempt at writing. FYI: know the warning ⚠️ icon means these are sensitive books with heavy topics that some folks may feel uncomfortable reading. Each book is linked directly to the Goodreads profile and in addition to this, I’ll be sharing quotes that stood out to me instead of reviews. So before I turn into the type of person who shares their life story before the recipe, let's dive in following the list below:
Bunny ⚠️ 3/5 ⭐️
by Mona Awad
“The real world, lady. It’s out there. Do you even know that? You’re going to have to get back to it sometime.”
Cherry ⚠️ -3/5 ⭐️
by Nico Walker
“Sometimes I wonder if life was wasted on me.”
Couplets: A Love Story- 4/5 ⭐️
by Maggie Millner
“You can’t be lonely, after all, if you’re not inside yourself.”
The Book of X- 5/5 ⭐️
by Sarah Rose Etter
“He holds tighter, tighter, and then the loneliness gets small, smaller, smallest until it is a pinprick, an inverse star, a dust.”
Acts of Service - 4/5 ⭐️
by Lillian Fishman
“A life knows that it needs a shape and, taking cues from films and lives it has glimpsed, chooses a core around which to bend itself. A life recognizes the theater in which its keeper appears most real.”
Big Swiss ⚠️ - 5/5 ⭐️
by Jen Beagin
“Yes, people age horribly. They suffer strokes. Their bodies and brains fall apart. But the male ego? Firmly intact until the bitter end.”
We Had to Remove This Post - 4/5 ⭐️
by Hanna Bervoets
“People act like it’s a perfectly normal question, but how normal is a question when you’re expecting the answer to be gruesome?”
Boy Parts ⚠️ - 3/5 ⭐️
by Eliza Clark
“There’s a soft part of your brain. A place where you’re still just a child. Once someone’s poked the soft spot, the dent doesn’t go away. Like sticking your fingers in wet concrete.”
Girlhood - 4/5 ⭐️
by Melissa Febos*
“My poor body. My precious body. How had I let her be treated this way? My body was me. To hate my own body was to suffer from an autoimmune disease of the mind.”
Bad Cree - 5/5 ⭐️
by Jessica Johns
“But sometimes, laughter is less about what's funny and more about letting someone know you understand, that you're in on the joke together.”
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Paradais ⚠️ - 3/5 ⭐️
by Fernanda Melchor
“The scariest were the ones who slept like little angels as soon as their heads touched the mat, those were careful sons of bitches.”
Motherthing - 3/5 ⭐️
by Ainslie Hogarth
“You've endured the suffering that makes mystics; that fills them with gems of transcendent wisdom.”
Tender is the Flesh ⚠️ - 3/5 ⭐️
by Agustina Bazterrica
“No one can call them humans because that would mean giving them an identity. They call them product, or meat, or food. Except for him; he would prefer not to have to call them by any name.”
Story of the Eye ⚠️ ⚠️ ⚠️ - 2/5 ⭐️
by Georges Bataille, Joachim Neugroschel
“We did not lack modesty—on the contrary—but something urgently drove us to defy modesty together as immodestly as possible.”
Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow - 5/5 ⭐️
by Gabrielle Zevin
“But it is worth noting that to be good at something is not quite the same as loving it.”
Milk Blood Heat - 5/5 ⭐️
by Dantiel W. Moniz
“I sat among them, enraptured by their stories, realizing for the first time that every one of us was a link stretching back, mother to daughter to mother, in an unbroken chain from the center of time, connected by milk and blood.”
The Vegetarian ⚠️ - 3/5 ⭐️
by Han Kang, Deborah Smith
“Before my wife turned vegetarian, I'd always thought of her as completely unremarkable in every way”
Carrie Soto is Back - 5/5 ⭐️
by Taylor Jenkins Reid
“My ambition has long felt oppressive. It is not a joy—it is a master that I must answer to, a smoke that descends into my life, making it hard to breathe. It is only my discipline, my willingness to push myself harder, that has been my way through.”
Mona - 3/5 ⭐️
by Pola Oloixarac
“There was a niche sort of glamour to it, like being a rare specimen of an endangered species—as though her mysterious DNA were a tiara encrusted with rare pearls, and the universities each a massive ark navigating the Great Flood of the United States, heroically fulfilling their mission to save two of each beast.”
This is your Brain on Food | Health book- 5/5 ⭐️
by Uma Naidoo
“She switched her breakfast chocolate croissant out for a plain Greek yogurt topped with berries, cinnamon, and a drop of honey. She followed my recipe for making a creamy salad dressing using kefir and added this to a healthy green salad with beans, dandelion greens, and radish for lunch.”
See ya in the Spring