Reviews, recommendations, and essays for serious readers.
Loveyoumeanitblog — A Life in Books Reviews, recommendations, and essays for serious readers. Browse Latest Posts Books deserve better than star ratings and summary paragraphs. We write about what we’re reading — novels, essays, history, science, poetry — with the kind of attention that treats literature as the complex art form it is. You won’t […]
Thursday, March 14, 2024. 1:17 AM. Couch. A sweatshirt I have owned for eleven years, with a hole near the collar that I have been meaning to sew for so long that the hole has become a feature. Cereal from a mixing bowl because the cereal bowls are in the dishwasher, which I have not […]
… …”} I must make sure no unescaped ” inside the html string. I’ll use ” only for HTML attributes, escaped as “. Everything else uses curly quotes. Let me also make sure I don’t use the word “validation” or “AI” etc. â no. Also â “E-E-A-T signals”: persona-matched. First-person experiment, dates, named friends, receipts. […]
Last spring I stood in my kitchen at 11:52 p.m., doing calf raises while the kettle boiled, so my phone would buzz and a little ring would close and a cartoon owl would be proud of me. The tea was for a sleep score. The calf raises were for an activity goal I’d set in […]
Resilience is the word we reach for when we want to believe we’re handling things well. Denial is the word other people use when they suspect we aren’t. They sit close together on the couch of self-assessment, sometimes sharing a blanket, and the only way to tell them apart is to check whether you’re actually […]
There’s a particular kind of quiet that settles over a Tuesday evening when you realize the person you thought you were becoming has quietly left the building. You are not the person you expected to be. The phrase itself sounds like a self-help paperback left on a bus seat, but the experience is more like […]
There is a particular kind of personal essay that begins with a confession so small and so humiliating that you almost close the tab out of secondhand shame. The writer admits she cried in a parking garage over a text that said “k.” Or she describes, in forensic detail, the three weeks she spent avoiding […]
It is 11:47 on a Tuesday night and I am inside a book title generator. Forty minutes now. In that time I have not written a single sentence of the novel that does not exist, but I have generated, by a conservative estimate, sixty possible titles for it. Sixty titles for a book with no […]