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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.