✦ a digital literary archive ✦
Books
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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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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
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As the third and final installment in Olivie Blake’s Atlas trilogy, The Atlas Complex had a tall order to fill as the conclusion to a thematically intricate and character-driven series. And while this conclusion was just as compulsively readable as its predecessors, the meat of the story tasted familiar in a way that was slightly…
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Happy New Year, everyone! It’s a new year, which means it’s time to tackle my favorite reads of 2023. My 2023 reading year was successful in terms of quality, which I’m happy about. I did read less than I did in years past, but I savored a lot of what I read, which made up
City of Deja 