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Today's book haul! I didn't notice it until I was already home, but TFTDATE is actually signed! It needs some repair but still a great find :]

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Looking for sports romances has made me notice a gap in the market...

Now I lowkey wanna write a volleyball romance 👀

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I wasn't planning on reading that much the rest of this year because of thesis and everything but I learned about HRCYED and I can't turn down an unrealistic challenge

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Read Sunrise on the Reaping in less than 12 hours and I have no clue how to rate it 💀

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Oops I meant to post this before my Romantic Comedy review but I made a minizine with tiny reviews of my reads from the past few months! It was a lot of fun and I always love digging through my magazines and newspaper pages for words :]

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I grabbed this out of a LFL by my school around September and never got around to it until this spring, when I was hoping to finish it so I could have just that little extra packing space! There are many, many universes in which I DNFd this, but in this one I pushed on.

Romantic Comedy is a romance between a weekly sketch comedy show writer and a globally famous musician set between 2018, 2020 and 2023. Going into it I knew a lot of people weren't in love with the book but I wanted to give it a try :] Anyways, enjoy my review!

The Positives

The first third of the book is pretty solid, honestly other than the couple's split at the end it would have been a great one-shot (or I guess one would say novella). I really liked the character setup and the dynamic is enjoyable to read for the most part!

Secondly, the ending (last ~35 pages) is cute! The last-minute family illness was a great plot point since I found it brought Noah down to a level where he did feel real and attainable.

The Negatives (Buckle Up)

Honestly the things I thought I would find awkward (in-universe comedy sketches and Pandemic Setting) weren't that bad, but the structuring was abysmal. If I knew there was 70 pages of nothing but emails, I would not have read it. Not only did the structure throw me off (I was quite fond of the play-by-play sections in the first third, plus I don't even like reading my own emails so to trudge through emails that aren't even directed at me was a TASK) but the content within did not justify the structure in any way.

My Problems With The Emails:

I didn't understand why the characters didn't reconnect at all in the two years between sections and I don't think a random email during the pandemic is necessary when Noah clearly was still interested in her despite their rocky parting. If they would talk like no time passed at all then no time needed to pass.

The content of the emails felt like such a lazy method of providing character details because the characters drop so much exposition on each other that I would have much preferred come up in conversation or naturally through narration. The daily schedules they wrote of what they do during the pandemic was a particularly insulting example of this because it was literally just a list. It felt like those character exercises where you have to write something from the perspective of your characters in order to establish their voice- perhaps this was how the author developed these characters and then did not edit them to be added naturally into the larger plot?

Given the bulk of email paragraphs (and yes I do acknowledge that all books are bulks of paragraphs; these emails are a different beast) I wish there was SOMETHING to break them up. Prose sections in between emails! Memes! Links to Wordle! Art the characters made! Anything at all to not make this section so drastically different from the format of the rest of the book- plus it would make the emails feel more real and maybe justify why this important stage of their relationship is told exclusively through one email chain.

Unless there were emails missing (which I highly doubt), there wasn't anything written within them that would lend itself to the kind of passion the characters have during the following section unless they were already infatuated before the emails. All I could wonder was how lonely Noah had to be that Sally's emails were the most interesting thing he had access to!

My other major negative with this book was the random manner in which two of the three conflicts arose. I mentioned the third in the positives, but the two fights between Sally and Noah felt like they came out of nowhere and did not feel like realistic flaws for the relationship. I understand that Sally's outbursts came from her insecurity and there is an attempt to acknowledge it by the end, however they didn't feel like problems for the couple to work through together so much as something Sally needed to accept before pursuing the relationship.

Overall

While I enjoyed the first and third sections of this book and mostly enjoyed the characters, the middle section was so jarring in terms of the email format that I was completely taken out of the story. I found that these emails forced information about the characters onto the reader in an unnatural manner and were not a satisfying way for the characters to spark a romance. It was nearly a DNF, but the ending turned things around enough to warrant a final rating of 2.25 stars.

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I realized I havent done any lengthy book reviews in a while (i actually have something else in place of them from the past few months cooking) but my current read will most certainly have one for the same reason i wrote a review of Beach Read

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new searches, same project:

Kinderhook, New York population + cars for old people + cousin chart + Madlibs Wikipedia

I love the type of research writers do where it's just the most random combination of searches imaginable.

For me, it's currently the Wikipedia List Of Years + indoor funeral image search + PS2 launch titles

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I love the type of research writers do where it's just the most random combination of searches imaginable.

For me, it's currently the Wikipedia List Of Years + indoor funeral image search + PS2 launch titles

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on petrichor

i told you that i thought there was something fundamentally wrong with me during the walk back to your dorm after dnd some october night. obviously you don’t just tell someone that but you had asked me my favorite things about campus the week before and i couldn’t resist the urge to tear myself open in front of you before things got too serious. your eyes gave off the impression that you could hold the weight of a lonely person and so naturally i wanted to test the water. i wanted to give you the opportunity to find a new weird girl to drink hard cider with who wouldn’t crack into one million porcelain shards that splash into the puddles on the pavement and glisten in the moonlight at the slightest move of a finger. i don’t remember what you said back exactly and it couldn’t have fixed me even then but to this day i feel so sorry when it rains and i breathe in the smell of that wet, inviting earth.

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I made a journal page for my reads from January! This has been a winter of many reads, I also finished four in December :0

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Very excited to play Halloween Chicken, where I have to decide whether I can finish my spooky read in the next few days before October's over or if I should dnf it now and start something else

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I heard a lot of Booktubers I like talking about Convenience Store Woman so I picked it up from my library and finished it in just 3 days! It turned out to be a really interesting companion to Annie Bot which I posted about earlier in the week, since the main characters in both have similar but opposite desires. This is another one that makes you think about humanity in a new way and how much pressure there is to have a "normal" adult life.

I find it so fascinating how little worldbuilding needed to be done since Keiko is so uniquely intertwined with the convenience store. Everything we needed to know about her is laid out in the first 20 pages and after that it's just a really efficient character study.

Like some of the protagonists I've talked about before, I really like Keiko's way of thinking and I really related to a lot of her confusion with societal norms and how she lost all sense of logic after leaving the store

One of the only things I didn't like was how Shiraha was used. I found a lot of his dialog REALLY repetitive and yet it was received differently each time which I didn't understand. Really I only thought he was interesting in how he was able to codeswitch and cover for Keiko when her sister visited, playing into the normalcy that he otherwise hates just to spare her a lecture.

I saw some reviews saying the ending was unsatisfying since there was no real arc but I honestly disagree, I think it was a moment of Keiko becoming sure of her purpose and what brings her joy rather than what others think she should do. Anything else would honestly just betray the whole point of her character.

Rather than so much focus on the stone age metaphor I would have liked more time spent on why Keiko works so perfectly in the environment of the store! My favorite parts were the ending scenes with her hopelessness and subsequent rediscovery of meaning when she was away from the store and I much preferred how performance was used in this setting than in the number of conversations about marriage and parenthood.

Overall, I think this is a great read for people who like weird main characters and given it is quite short the repetitiveness of the marriage plot can be easily forgiven :]

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Usually if I've read under 25% I'll just delete it from my book list, between 25-75% I'm moving it to want to read and tagging it DNF and anything I read more than 75% I'll just finish so I can at least review (and complain) about it

Readers of tumblr, how far into a book do you usually read before you decide a DNF?

How much of a book do you have to read before you review a book as DNF?

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Readers of tumblr, how far into a book do you usually read before you decide a DNF?

How much of a book do you have to read before you review a book as DNF?

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This week I was on break from school, and i used that time to absolutely devour Annie Bot by Sierra Greer. Told from the perspective of a sentient sex robot, this explores explores what it means to love and what being human really means.

Please enjoy my 4.2 star review including my favorite elements and what I really wish was done better!

Annie is such a compelling protagonist! You can really see her development throughout the story as she learns more aspects of life and as she reacts to Doug's actions. I was particularly fascinated by her logic in decision-making and how she reads others, as someone who is neurodivergent I really saw my own thinking in her and that made me feel so connected to her from the very start.

The zenith plot was really interesting! I was really hoping for some followthrough on the random guy that Annie believed to be one of the zeniths, and the Kenny plot thread was fascinating in relation to Annie's sense of identity and desire to be human-again, would have liked some conclusion with that since it was really cool.

I really like how human nature is explored, not only by Annie becoming more complex and learning the secret 'rules' of being a person but also how she conflicts with Delta, who is decidedly less 'real' than her. I found this to be the best part of the second half in particular, especially as we see Doug open up more. It's so interesting seeing her want to be independent the most once Doug wants her again, or to quote the last chapter, “Now that he’s pulling her more tightly into orbit, she feels her own resistance, feeble but real.”

Unfortunately, I found the story to be mostly redundant past Annie's escape to Lake Champlain. As I mentioned already, a lot of the plotlines past this point are forgotten (not to mention how Delta is literally killed and never acknowledged despite her crucial narrative role). I think Annie running away makes a good end to her search for independence, but I don't think she had to do it a second time after spending months getting Doug to like her again for it to be effective. Honestly I just found the stakes to be so low after she ran away since her disobedience was such a big character moment and it wasn't really built upon any more in the chapter that followed. (I thought for a moment that after being brought back to Doug that she was given a lobotomy by the new technician and the story would turn into some sort of independence-is-inevitable plot a la The Good Place season 2 which would have been interesting and probably also involve the zeniths but unfortunately it did not happen)

Given that the second half doesn't see much more development for Annie, I was also a bit underwhelmed by Doug's arc during this period. I found it so difficult to read about Doug's inability to handle a true partnership in conjunction with Annie growing more emotionally intelligent then have it be quite literally abandoned in the ending. He relinquishes his power, his ownership over her, but rather than this being treated as any kind of major change in his role it just gives Annie the opportunity to give him false hope and sneak away without him knowing.

Honestly I might have thought this was a five star read if only some of the events were rearranged- say Annie does plan a camping trip to one Lake Champlain in the early middle (maybe in hopes of secretly asking Jacobson about programming or something) and say this is when Doug starts letting her wander. She gets that taste of freedom but is denied, or perhaps she gets to go visit him for an emergency checkup or something. Maybe this trip is when he finds about about her cheating, therapy arc ensues. I think having them go on walks would be more interesting if Annie was already gaining some independence, and i can definitely see how it would be more painful for her to be denied that freedom while Doug is mad at her after he learns what she did with her autonomy before (even though she was absolutely manipulated in that closet and I don't know why Annie is given so much blame). If Delta was still around, I think if Doug was bringing her outside like he did then Annie would yearn even more for that independence. Doug giving up more for her little by little (like in the last chapter) would make it more effective for her to run away with Delta in the end and I think it would really magnify how bittersweet some of her exchanges with him are. Something like “…I created you. You’re an extension of me. The way you betrayed me has to be an outgrowth of me somehow.” would be a lot more powerful in reference to how Doug lets her wander and begins to trust her but she ends up finding her own freedom in running away- meanwhile I don't think it has as much weight when he is placing this weight on the cheating meanwhile she committed an even greater act of disobedience in going to Lake Champlain!

Despite all of this, Annie Bot is a great read with an incredibly compelling protagonist and fascinating views on loyalty and personhood. I found the first half to be fantastic meanwhile the second half has a lot of loose ends and fumbles the pacing a little. After the Lake Champlain incident, I think a lot of events were rushed or confusing, and I just wish it was a bit more concise so I could give it a full 5 stars like I wanted to throughout the first half!

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Today's mini-haul! Both I got secondhand, about 10 dollars total :D

I've already read TBDATE and loved it but it was a library copy so I wanted my own copy and this one was in such good condition!