memoirofasparklemuffin

[memoirofasparklemuffin]

DEEP END

↳ by ali hazelwood

“From the very start, you had all the power. From the very start, I was in the palm of your hand.”

i see the vision i swear i do, but im just so not a romance girlie. all the other girlies were swearing up and down about ali hazelwood so i tried it and im sorry this just does not do it for meee. number one reason is that i hateee that lukas is just like a shell of a tiktok book boyfriend and not like, a real person. im sorry like sick books where couples are obsessed with each other to the point of hatred. i saw a few positive reviews saying that they looked up aand down for flaws in lukas' character and couldnt find anything and like. yeah, thats why i didnt like ittt.

but aside from that im also just not a fan of the way this was represented as like a bdsm bible and yet it had a lot of the same boring comphet ideas of bdsm. i personally am on such the opposite spectrum of these kinks, so while i can appreciate that the smut WAS so well written, it was also just soo not for me.

ALSO was not a fan of the whole making pen a mean girl thing at the end. like it made the whole story feel so middle school.

[memoirofasparklemuffin]

THE BEST OF ME

↳ by david sedaris

mid as hell

i cant tell if this was all humor that i didnt get or if it just wasnt funny (im the funniest person in the world so im choosing the second because.) all the reviews ive read about david sedaris in the past said his humor was sooo good and like babe no it really wasnt (or maybe it was just too old for me but who knows)

the essays were definitely better than the short stories, and i will give him credit to the way he actually wove the essays together throughout the book. but yeah, im a little bit convinced that the artsy celebs that swear by him are lying to themselves. boy put down that david sedaris and get yourself some joan didion.

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TOMORROW AND TOMORROW AND TOMORROW

↳ by gabrielle zevin

“To allow yourself to play with another person is no small risk. It means allowing yourself to be open, to be exposed, to be hurt. It is the human equivalent of the dog rolling on its back—I know you won’t hurt me, even though you can. It is the dog putting its mouth around your hand and never biting down. To play requires trust and love.”

this book is so weird to me cause like on a surface level this book was fucking perfect but i literally had to force myself to finish it. like i loved the writing style and the characters and the themes but i could NOT get into it, even up until the end. maybe the pacing just wasnt for me, but honestly i think i was just too busy to actually focus on a book 😭 maybe i need to try it again in a few years but it was just not living up to the hype for me

[memoirofasparklemuffin]

DOWN THE DRAIN

↳ by julia fox

typically i would put a quote here but i didnt highlight a single sentence of this book so like. yeah

shes an icon and she is the moment but she is an AWFUL memoir writer im sorry. literally this feel like 300 pages of badly written fanfiction. there was no reflection happening and every move she made was completely unjustified, her decisions were brushed over and there was literally no impressive writing happening. it just felt like, a book of things happening but shes hot so the things are hot!! (except the things arent even hot theyre literally boring) like how do you write a book where you only have sex and do drugs and its just BORING to read. idk shes a great artist but i dont think writing is a strong suit cause this was Not so julia

ALSO im sorry but i do not believe that the sex with those lame ass men was actually that good idc how high you were during it, it was NOT "explosive" julia, he looks like a turtle

[memoirofasparklemuffin]

THE PICTURE OF DORIAN GRAY

↳ by oscar wilde

okay so to be fully honest i fucked up so bad with this and i accidentally downloaded a revised copy and i literally spent the whole book being like 'damn THIS is what gay people everywhere are going feral for?? mid af' and then i Realized and it was really too late by that point. so yeah this lowkey sucked but it wasnt oscar wilde fault, it was the stupid revised version's fault, but im counting this as a read anyways except im fully planning on a real dorian gray read later in the year, it just didnt happen right now </3

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DARK PLACES

↳ by gillian flynn

“I have a meanness inside me, real as an organ. Slit me at my belly and it might slide out, meaty and dark, drop on the floor so you could stomp on it.”

im sooo glad that i liked this, i wouldve been so disappointed if i hadnt but oh my god it fucked. loved how it never felt like flynn was just relying on shock value to make the story dark, like it is was just fucked up in the best way. the story IS hella gross and i was warned like crazy to not read it unless i was in a good mental state but it didnt ever really upset me so i think im in the clear, but i also didnt ever read it in the dark just to be safe. it did NOT feel near as cohesive as gone girl and honestly the ending wasnt as satisying either, not only do i think it couldve used a couple more chapters to really tie everything together, but i also think all the side plots couldve been tied together better. the lead up to the mid ending was good enough to excuse it tho. like a solid four stars cause it sucked me in, but also like it wasnt THE book either. but the writing killed and i finished it soo fast which is always The sign of a good book for me.

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MY BODY

↳ by emily ratajkowski

“My body had gotten me this far, hadn’t it?"

despite the being probably my highlighted book in a while, i actually really struggled trying to find a single quote that even summed up a little bit of what this book made me feel. i settled on this one (from her essay about her pregnancy and labor) because it really does feel like that's the thesis of the book. i typically think celeb memoirs read really boring--bad writing and stories that are NOT relatable--but honestly so much of this was relatable for me. she uses the modeling industry more as a grand metaphor for all the sexism that all women experience, but also i really liked the essays that focused more on the industry itself bc its fascinating to me. i also rarely cry during books but i cried soo much during this. anyways, it also had me writing essays about pretty privilege super late last night and i wouldnt even be surprised if i end up rereading this in the next few months. five stars.

“I was nineteen. I loved driving down the coastline with the windows down, playing music. I loved the way my skin smelled after rolling in the sand when I drank too much sangria on the beach with my friends. I was eager to meet the kinds of smart, cool people I thought I’d find in LA if I was able to make enough money to move there; excited about the adult world and where I’d fit into it and what I might do. Do you remember what it was like to be nineteen?” (thinking about this part constantly btw)

[memoirofasparklemuffin]

♡ 2025 reads

↳ good girl, bad blood by holly jackson

↳ my body by emily ratajkowski ✨

↳ dark places by gillian flynn

↳ the picture of dorian gray by ocsar wilde

↳ down the drain by julia fox

↳ tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow by gabrielle zevin

↳ the best of me by david sedaris

↳ race monogamy and other lies they told you by agustín fuentes

↳ deep end by ali hazelwood

[memoirofasparklemuffin]

GOOD GIRL, BAD BLOOD

↳ by holly jackson

"Maybe I don't have to be good, or other people's versions of good. And maybe I don't have to be likeable. Fuck likeable."

loved this, it was a great start for the year cause i genuinely WANTED to keep reading it, and i stayed up til like three am a couple nights. i def dont love the whole podcast thing just cause its so icky to me 😭 like babe i get WHY but also it so capital c Capitalism to me and i just know that if i knew pip irl i wouldnt like her, like babe these are real peoples lives 😭 alsooo pip-ravi age gap makes me severely uncomfortable, but i think thats Just me cause i never hear anyone else say that BUT i did that they why the romance storyline was just woven in, and didnt feel like it overshadowed pips character arc at all (which btw her character arc in this fucks) anyways for some reason the ending scene actually made me kinda sick (but i do think that couldve just been my bc) and then i finished the book really late in the dark all freaked about how basic human empathy for a child could lead to being killed so then i watched about an hour and a half of 5sos livestreams from 2020 <3

[memoirofasparklemuffin]

JANUARY TBR

♡ vicious

♡ good girl, gone bad

♡ the picture of dorian gray

♡ all the young men

♡ jillian

♡ dark places

♡ the bad beginning

♡ the ballad of songbirds and snakes

[memoirofasparklemuffin]

THE WOMAN IN ME

↳ by britney spears

"The woman in me was pushed down for a long time. They wanted me to be wild onstage, the way they told me to be, and to be a robot the rest of the time. I felt like I was being deprived of those good secrets of life--those fundamental supposed sins of indulgence and adventure that make us human. They wanted to take away that specialness and keep everything as rote as possible. It was death to my creativity as an artist."

i try pretty hard not to be parasocial about celebrities but i cried multiple times while reading this. im also not even the biggest britney fan (shes more of a my-mom-and-i-are-comprising-on-the-car-radio artist) but i was hooked on this. in terms of the writing itself, nothing she wrote was too amazing imo, shes clearly an amazing artist but obviously i wasnt expecting this to read like an established authors writing. but the story was clearly written with a lot of heart and it shows. i read this very fast (at least fast for me) and finished it in about two days and i think theres a lot that im sorta brushing over just because i read it so really quickly, but i appreciated that she wrote about EVERYTHING, not just the conservatorship or her kids or her love life (which is mostly what i was expecting her to write about) and included stuff about her family and her friends and which albums she felt connected to

[memoirofasparklemuffin]

2025 reading goals ⋆˙⟡

✧ read 30 books ✧ read two new classics ✧ read five nonfiction books ✧ finish reading all eve babitz books ✧ read three books over 500 pages ✧ read five books that i would never typically choose ✧ read one translated work ✧ read one memoir ✧ read five books from this list ✧ finish annotating the beautiful and damned

[memoirofasparklemuffin]

THIS DELICIOUS DEATH

↳ by kayla cottingham

i think someone other than me couldve enjoyed this but it just wasnt it for me. looking at it objectively it seems super fun and it had great representation but it was SO ya (which i havent really vibed with in years), lots of reviews said it was funny but to me it had a very middle school sense of humor that wasnt for me. the romance was cuteee but i wish it wouldve had more time to develop but the bisexual crisis throughout the book was ahsdkfhas. anyways yeah this was cute and fun but im not sure ill ever think about it again

[memoirofasparklemuffin]

GONE GIRL

↳ by gillian flynn

“There's a difference between really loving someone and loving the idea of her.”

absolutely obsessed with this book. i think it'll be a really long time before i stop thinking about it cause asjhdfkahsd. going into this i didnt know about the (really old) discourse about it and like, while i definitely dont think this is a 'feminist manifesto' or anything, i DO think amy is much more 3-dimensional than most female characters (and much more than i expected her to be). and okay yeah i think she should be allowed to do those things so. i think the plot twists were truly five star-worthy, and i hated all the characters but in the best way possible. and i know most people hate the ending but actually i think the ending is the most perfectly fucked up ending ever

[memoirofasparklemuffin]

gone girl is proving to be a nice novel except i don’t like anyone and every so often i get the ick but im somehow completely obsessed with it

[memoirofasparklemuffin]

THE SEVEN HUSBANDS OF EVELYN HUGO

↳ by taylor jenkins reid

"Here's the thing about Hollywood. It's both a place and a feeling. If you run there, you can run toward Southern California, where the sun always shines and the grimy buildings and dirty sidewalks are replaced by palm trees and orange groves. But you also run toward the way life is portrayed in the movies."

loved!!! i def went into this knowing absolutely nothing about the plot or characters. i mostly had picked it up because i loved djats so much earlier this year, but this book also came at such a strange time for me, because i was having a minor crisis about bisexuality and how people treat it and then--AND THEN!!! tons of people can vouch for just how insane i got every time evelyn brought up her bisexuality because it was just (FINALLY!!) such an honest representation of bisexuality and it captured all those feelings in a way that i dont see very often in media (even lgbt focused media). also i read this while experiencing tonsss of biphobia and "dont ignore half of me so you can fit me into a box" just AWAKENED something inside me. but i will say its probably not a true five star read for me, just cause i felt like there wasnt too many times that i was truly hooked by the prose (which is really a big part for me) but like i did like it!!

[memoirofasparklemuffin]

i miss reading (there were endless times this week that i could’ve read during)