The Reader

Watch Over Me: A Surprisingly Good Read

A Book Review on Mila Gray’s Watch Over Me

“Maybe if I were another kind of girl, the kind of girl who doesn’t learn from her mistakes, I’d stop right here, turn around, and wait for him to catch up to me. Then when he did, I’d tilt my head back and let him kiss me. If the world were a different kind of world, the kind you see onscreen, where love is made to look real, the maybe there’d even be a happily-ever-after.
But I’m not that girl. And it’s not that world.”
Mila Gray, Watch Over Me

Browsing through the book store a while back, I was in a bit of a reading rut. I was looking for a simple read, something with a little bit of romance, and something with a happy ending. When I came across this book, it seemed to have everything that I wanted and I wasn’t disappointed. If you’ve read my other book reviews, you’ll see that this is the first book I’ve read in a while that I’ve actually really enjoyed.

Me and the Book I Wish I Hadn’t Read

A Book Review of Nick Tosches book Me and the Devil. Spoilers

“If I could not bear the truth, I could at least close my eyes in the comfort of a lie.”
Nick Tosches, Me and the Devil

I started reading Me and the Devil by Nick Tosches back in January and it took me to nearly the end of February to finish reading it. The story was dull, disappointing, and a little disturbing. It felt a lot less like a work of fiction and much more like a man trying to live out his wild fantasies through his writing and somehow forcing the rest of us to read the inner workings of his mind. There is really no wonder why this book was in the bargain bin at my local bargain books.

My February Reading List

Where There Is a Good Book, There Is an Equally Bad One

I used to try to decide which was the worst month of the year. In the winter I would choose February. I had it figured out that the reason God made February short a few days was because he knew that by the time people came to the end of it they would die if they had to stand one more blasted day.
Katherine Paterson, Jacob Have I loved

Admittedly, February was an incredibly busy month for me. I had work, stand up comedy, rehearsals for a play I performed in at the end of the month, and I was dog sitting. That being said, I only completed reading two books in the month of February. I’m a little disappointed but it also doesn’t reflect the nearly ten chapters I wrote in my book this month or the several chapters in stories that I read on websites such as Wattpad. That being said, here’s my monthly reading list:

This Is Where It (Should Have) Ended

A Book Review on Marieke Nijkamp’s This Is Where It Ends (Spoilers)

Photo by Sharon McCutcheon on Pexels.com

The only things that give us purpose are the stories that tie us together.
Marieke Nijkamp, This Is Where It Ends

To say this book was disappointing is an understatement. I had heard a lot of good reviews about This Is Where It Ends and it was always front and center in the bookstore. I knew going in that it was about a school shooting. I knew that it was about a heavy topic that is very relevant in today’s society where active shooters in public places is rising drastically. I had a lot of high hopes for this book, hoping that it would make a relevant statement and that it would bring out strong feelings of emotions and empathy. However, that’s not what happened. In fact, the story felt like a cheap imitation of a terrible event that is not fair or true to the people who actually had to go through something like this.

My January Reading List

From Best to Worst to Really Bad

Lots of people go mad in January. Not as many as in May, of course. Nor June. But January is your third most common month for madness.
Joy Fowler, Sarah Canary

As you may or may not know from my post “The Roaring Twenties Reader”, I am on a mission to read as many books as I can this year. The goal that I set for myself is forty, but I’m hoping to surpass that. In the month of January, I read four (and a half) books which I’m pretty happy about.

That being said, the following is a ranking of those books from best to worst with a brief overview. Enjoy

He Said; He Proclaimed; He Stuttered; He breathed

The unnecessary add-ons in a story and the necessary truth every writer should know about Dialogue Tags

Any word you have to hunt for in a thesaurus is the wrong word. There are no exceptions to this rule.
Stephen King

This post is all about dialogue tags. Don’t know what they are? You may be using them far more often than you think. Even worse, you may be using them in a completely unnecessary way.

I read ‘You’ so you don’t have to.

A Book Review on the novel You by Caroline Kepnes

The problem with books is that they end.
Caroline Kepnes, You

You by Caroline Kepnes is simply fascinating. The story is led by a strong male lead, Joe Goldberg, and follows his obsession with the female lead, Guinevere Beck. A book that would normally be comparable to a predictable Lifetime movie brings it’s own charm and new perspective by telling the story from a different point of view than we are used to seeing. Novels about stalking and obsession are normally told from the female’s perspective, the girl blinded by the man’s charm until finally they see their admiration for them is actually something terrifyingly more. You switches the entire dynamic by telling the story from the guy’s perspective, allowing the reader to almost sympathize with the obvious sociopath that is Joe Goldberg. Thus is the beauty of You.

Writer’s Block and Tips on How to Get Past It

Writing about writer’s block is better than not writing at all.
Charles Bukowski, The Last Night of the Earth

All writer’s have been there at least once – probably at least a dozen times – before. That pesky thing that we call “writer’s block” creeps in during the middle of a manuscript and as hard as we try, we just can’t put pen to paper. Nothing good comes to the forefront and we can go days, weeks, even months without making any progress.

I’ve had my fair share of writer’s block during my writing career. I’ve written three novels and I’m currently working on my fourth. A couple of these novels only took a couple of months to write while some took years. I would occasionally go months without writing, feeling like I had no idea where I wanted to go with the story. Though I still suffer from writer’s block every now and then, I’ve come up with some ways to tackle it and ensure that it doesn’t take much longer than necessary to finish writing a manuscript. Here are some of my tips:

The Importance of Being Dynamic

Thoughts on Character Development

When writing a novel, a writer should create living people; people, not characters. A character is a caricature.
Ernest Hemingway, Death in the Afternoon

At the beginning of a new year, people often talk about all of the changes they are going to make and how this year is going to be different from previous years. Often resolutions fall short and goals aren’t reached, but we still have a full year of learning, failures, and growth. That’s life.

As I look back on the past five years, I’ve changed so much from who I was. I’ve become more confident, more bold, more outgoing, and more loving. Life changes you, sometimes for the better and sometimes for the worse. Most importantly, as people, we do change. If we remain stagnant, then what is the point?

Are YOU starting the New Year off Right?

My first book of the New Year and my thoughts so far on Caroline Kepnes’ You.

It’s the first of the year. New Year’s Resolutions have been made and now it’s time to keep those resolutions. If you read my post The Roaring Twenties Reader then you know that I made it a goal to read 40 books this year. I feel like this is a rather reasonable goal, especially considering I expect a lot to happen this year. I just finished up my Master’s degree so I’m looking at moving forward into a new career and hopefully a new apartment as well.