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Is it crazy that I read just over 1 book/week this month and it felt slow? This January I read 6 books; in the last third of 2019, I read 10 books/month on average! I think that a reading rush at the end of the year is natural; there’s an urgency to get certain reads in before the end of the year (for me it was a selection of 2019 releases) or read a certain amount of books to reach your annual reading goal. Perhaps, come January, it’s natural to feel a little burnt out. Perhaps you’ll dial your pace back down (for me, seemingly, a steady pace of 1 book/week).

But this year I’m not so focused on how quickly or slowly I get on with my next read. My main focus/reading resolution for 2020 is to read more presently. To slow down. To soak it in. To embrace bigger books.

So, this January I read a “mere” 6 books and DNFed 2! I’m so proud of myself for DNFing. After recapping my top reads of 2019 and reminding myself of how good books can be, it was so much easier to make peace with DNFing those books.

I read and read and read with an intensity I’d never really known before. I mean, I’d always considered myself to be a person who liked books. But there’s a difference between liking books and needing them. I needed books. They weren’t a luxury good during that time in my life. They were a Class A addictive substance…

There is this idea that you either read to escape or you read to find yourself. I don’t really see the difference. We find ourselves through the process of escaping. It is not where we are, but where we want to go, and all that. “Is there no way out of the mind?” Sylvia Plath famously asked. I had been interested in this question (what it meant, what the answers might be) ever since I had come across it as a teenager in a book of quotations. If there is a way out, a way that isn’t death itself, then the exit route is through words. But rather than leave the mind entirely, words help us leave a mind, and give us the building blocks to build another one, similar but better, nearby to the old one but with firmer foundations, and very often a better view.

—Reasons to Stay Alive, Matt Haig

– I received a free copy in exchange for an honest review. This post contains affiliate links. –

To be published by Wednesday Books on 21 Jan 2020
Goodreads | Buy it

Meet Pepper, swim team captain, chronic overachiever, and all-around perfectionist. Her family may be falling apart, but their massive fast-food chain is booming―mainly thanks to Pepper, who is barely managing to juggle real life while secretly running Big League Burger’s massive Twitter account.

Enter Jack, class clown and constant thorn in Pepper’s side. When he isn’t trying to duck out of his obscenely popular twin’s shadow, he’s busy working in his family’s deli. His relationship with the business that holds his future might be love/hate, but when Big League Burger steals his grandma’s iconic grilled cheese recipe, he’ll do whatever it takes to take them down, one tweet at a time.

All’s fair in love and cheese―that is, until Pepper and Jack’s spat turns into a viral Twitter war. Little do they know, while they’re publicly duking it out with snarky memes and retweet battles, they’re also falling for each other in real life―on an anonymous chat app Jack built.

As their relationship deepens and their online shenanigans escalate―people on the internet are shipping them??―their battle gets more and more personal, until even these two rivals can’t ignore they were destined for the most unexpected, awkward, all-the-feels romance that neither of them expected.

9 books. 2470 pages. 6 fiction, 3 nonfiction. 2 fantasy, 1 thriller, 1 contemporary romance, 2 classics, 3 memoirs. 6 women. 2 people of colour.

I wrapped up 2019 reading 9 books this last month, 3 of them making it to my preliminary list of most memorable reads of 2019 (still working on it, so behind, aiya). I’d say it was a good month.

Little Women was the last book I read of the year, and I didn’t read any books the last half week of the year because I got addicted to a game called Fight List. I’m slowly catching up on putting together my month-in-review posts and my year-in-review posts, enjoying life while I’m at it.

I have way more but this was catchier ;P

I was very intentional about the books I chose to read in December since November was such a bust, and it worked out GREAT—I can’t wait to share my December reading recap, and my 2019 reading recap for that matter—so to carry the momentum, I decided to put together a preliminary TBR to guide me into 2020 with intention.

I’ve experimented with sharing TBRs in the past. On one hand, TBRs aren’t that useful since I often end up disregarding them and reach for whatever else I happen to be in the mood for instead. Additionally, my own TBR probably isn’t that useful to anyone else because we all have the books on our own never-ending TBRs to contend with. On the other hand, TBRs can be a great way to find reading buddies. So if any of these books are on your TBR as well, let me know! I’m always down for a buddy read!

Published by Random House on 06 Aug 2019
Goodreads | Buy it

Trick Mirror is an enlightening, unforgettable trip through the river of self-delusion that surges just beneath the surface of our lives. This is a book about the incentives that shape us, and about how hard it is to see ourselves clearly in a culture that revolves around the self. In each essay, Jia writes about the cultural prisms that have shaped her: the rise of the nightmare social internet; the American scammer as millennial hero; the literary heroine’s journey from brave to blank to bitter; the mandate that everything, including our bodies, should always be getting more efficient and beautiful until we die.