✦ a digital literary archive ✦
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The year 2026 marks the ten year anniversary of my blog. Back in 2016, I started this blog as an extension of my Bookstagram account of the same name, where I could share more in depth posts related to book recommendations and any of my other interests. A lot has changed in the digital sphere…
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2025 has been an interesting reading year for me. Though I’ve read less in terms of quantity, I have thoroughly enjoyed the vast majority of the books that I did pick up. Here’s an overview of what I read during the second half of the year. Salvage the Bones by Jesmyn Ward I finally read…
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“I’m still trying to find the words.” Those were my initial thoughts after finishing Jesmyn Ward’s Salvage the Bones, my first novel by the author. I went into Salvage with a critical eye as the book was highly lauded, and it was also set to chronicle an experience I knew all too well. By the…
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The book review is one of my favorite forms writing. I’ve been writing reviews on this blog for about five years now (and writing/sharing other forms of book reviews and reactions since I began my Bookstagram over ten years ago), and I still love experiencing the satisfaction of publishing a book review. With so many…
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I finally read Tracy Deonn’s contemporary fantasy smash hit, Legendborn. And it was everything and more. About the Book After her mother dies in an accident, sixteen-year-old Bree Matthews wants nothing to do with her family memories or childhood home. A residential program for bright high schoolers at UNC–Chapel Hill seems like the perfect escape—until…
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November 8, 2014. That’s when I posted my first photo of a stack of books on Instagram under the username @cityofdeja and joined a book-centered community aptly named ‘Bookstagram.’ In 2014, I was reading anything and everything labeled “young adult” and consuming BookTube video reviews on those very YA novels. Fast forward to 2024, and…
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This past January, I returned to the sport of figure skating after a five year hiatus. For context, I was a recreational figure skater from the ages of 11 to about 16, and then periodically went to the rink before officially stopping at the age of 19. That is until January 2024, at the age…
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Earlier this year, I attended the midnight release for House of Flame and Shadow, the third installment in Sarah J. Maas’s Crescent City series. I dragged along two friends (one of which was in the middle of book two, House of Sky and Breath, and one who hadn’t read the series at all), and we…
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I spent the past two weekends reveling in literary spaces. First, I went down to Austin, Texas for the Austin African American Book Festival. Then, I made my way even further south to visit family in New Orleans, Louisiana and stopped at a few independent bookstores along the way. Here’s a peek into my literary…
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Essay collections, surrealist fiction, and disappointing series enders are just a few of the things that have made up my 2024 reading thus far. Happy June! Month six means that it’s time for a mid-year reading check-in. For starters, if you’re a listener of my podcast, Diary of an Ex-English Major, then you may know…
City of Deja 