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gielliane

@thenursereader

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very late, but I do love this trend!!! here’s to the books that made me, me 🫡

a little bit happy, a little bit sad, kind of happy, a lot more sad, and now feeling happier, but thank goodness for books

This was fun and a disappointment to see some books (a certain fantasy series and others) that were so influential in my life but are actually harmful and problematic books. I am so grateful there’s more inclusive books out there now!!!

Childhood/Elementary (scholastic book fairs thankful for you)
- Madeline by Ludwig Bemelmans
- Ella Enchanted by Gail Carson Levine
- Where The Sidewalk Ends by Shel Silverstein
- All the I SPY books
- Magic Tree House books
- Winx Club
- W.I.T.C.H. Graphic Novels

Middle Grade/Preteen (my local library at the time, thankful for you)
- Inkheart by Cornelia Funke
- Percy Jackson and The Olympians by Rick Riordan
- The Rose The Grew From Concrete by Tupac Shakur
- The Chronicles of Narnia by C.S. Lewis
- Holes by Louis Sachar
- Wicked Lovely by Melissa Marr

High School/Teenhood (the makings of local sad girl)
- Perks of Being a Wallflower by Stephen Chbosky
- Into the Wild by Jon Krakauer
- Sula by Toni Morrison
- Tuesdays with Morrie by Mitch Albom
- Kite Runner by Khaled Hosseini

College (there was no time for leisure reading)
- Nursing School Textbooks 💀

Quarter-Life Crisis (local sad girl was really really sad when she lost her mom)
- They Can’t Kill Us Until They Kill Us by Hanif Abdurraqib
- How We Fight For Our Lives by Saeed Jones
- What We Lose by Zinzi Clemmons
- Obit by Victoria Chang
- Crying in H Mart by Michelle Zauner
- Writers & Lovers by Lily King by @thenursereader

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50

2 years ago

realized i forgot about august wrap up lol but here are the september books and the books i’m going into october with ~

Loved:
BEGINNING MIDDLE END
SILENCED VOICES
WE WILL BE JAGUARS
RING SHOUT

Liked:
EVERY VERSION OF YOU
LIGHTNING IN HER HANDS

Just ok:
GRAPE JUICE

september books | september wrap up

DNF:
• TERRESTRIAL : i really loved the sound of this but i just wasn’t getting into it. I love Garza’s writing, but this one just felt disjointed

Will continue in october:

• finally reading EXIT PARTY and so far, so intrigued (thank you @prhaudio for the audio!)
• while i have been enjoying THE DISAPPEARERS on audio, i’m kind of in the mood to read it in print. But i’m also just not really a big fan of hardcovers and they cost around $30 now?! I don’t even remember the last time i bought a hardcover book lol by @thenursereader

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1

a day ago

“All I had to do, or so I thought, was to answer a simple question: How do I reinvent it, the story, our lives?”

BEGINNING MIDDLE END by Valeria Luiselli is not a plot-driven book despite its title. It reads almost like a journal. It’s experimental and introspective in its writing and more of a slice-of-life book that requires its reader to let the narrative take hold and unfold as our narrator is on this existential journey with her daughter as well as with the reader.

Destination? In the context of the book, it’s Catania, Sicily. But it goes beyond a physical place. It’s certainly a place for the tender-hearted, the mothers, the daughters, the mothers of mothers looking to understand themselves in relation to:

•new beginnings (narrator attempting to start again after her recent divorce)
•to slow endings (narrator helping her mom stave off memory loss due to dementia)
•to the messy middle part of life (narrator learning how to navigate life for her bright-eyed daughter now more inquisitive about history, memory, fiction, life’s spectrum of curiosities)

A journey of the past, present, and future and how our own memories and imagination changes our perception of all three.

I’m not sure if it’s because i’m in this season of life where i am witnessing how much my daughter has grown already and years from now will be asking me similar questions and after reading this book it left me wondering how will I answer those questions myself.

Will I be able to guide her through the varying seasons of life? How much protection does she need? When she asks about my mom, how do I begin to explain my mother’s magnanimity towards life despite knowing it would be cut short? How much will I actually remember about my mother when that time comes?

I listened to the audiobook and it was such an immersive and atmospheric experience complete with soundscapes of the ocean, volcano, fires, and winds. I was always looking forward to it on my long commute, an absolute pleasure to listen to. Read @eabsreads post gushing about the audiobook too!

#BeginningMiddleEnd #ValeriaLuiselli #Fiction #NationalBookAwardLonglist by @thenursereader

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9 days ago

the audiobooks lately (listened through @librofm of course 🫶)

🔥 Reservoir Bitches by Dahlia De La Cerda (translated by Heather Cleary and Julia Sanches)

a collection of interconnected stories highlighting thirteen unapologetic Mexican women as they try to survive in our society that’s riddled with gender-based violence and fragile masculinity. Where sometimes you do have to fight, kill, lie, and cheat to survive because the men are awful in this book. And out here too.

She writes with such a distinct voice that immediately demands your attention. The narration was so well done and it brought these women to life. Really enjoyed all the stories and the very last one was just devastating.

🚪PARADISO 17 by Hannah Lillith Assadi

A story of exile and its lasting effects even in death. Sufien is forced to leave Palestine, his only home, during 1948’s Nakba and he’s been lost ever since despite all the ways he’s made a life for himself.

All the makings of a book I would love, but it just didn’t do it for me. There’s beautiful passages and lines in this book, but as a book it didn’t feel whole. Maybe if I read it in print I’d feel differently?

🌊WAIST DEEP by Linea Maja Ernst (translated by Nicolette Sherilyn Hellberg)

A group of friends from university (now 30-somethings) spend a week in a Danish cabin in the woods —some longing for their youth and harboring a long-time crush, some living in domesticity, some reinventing themselves, and some entering partnerships. What unfolds is a messy, but very honest portrait of growing up and growing apart.

A just vibes kind of book. Felt like listening to friends catch up.

audiobooks | literary fiction | mini reviews

🔥 Reservoir Bitches by Dahlia De La Cerda (translated by Heather Cleary and Julia Sanches)

“I came looking for live music to dance to but, just my luck, what I found instead was this brutal desert that devours women, carves them up, disappears them, swallows them whole. See nothing, say nothing.”

🚪PARADISO 17 by Hannah Lillith Assadi

“There is the body of history ever atop of us, and the body of memory rustling within us. Between the two, we are crushed.”

🌊WAIST DEEP by Linea Maja Ernst (transl by @thenursereader

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9

a month ago

“The misfortune is that although everyone must come to [death], each experiences the adventure in solitude. We never left Maman during those last days... and yet we were profoundly separated from her.”

Simone de Beauvoir learns her mother is dying and decides to be at bedside for her mother’s painful final days despite their detached relationship.

Her mother is a devout Catholic, but with her fear of death so fierce she lets her faith waver. What her doctor deemed to be her final days turned into her final weeks.

“Religion could do no more for my mother than the hope of posthumous success could do for me. Whether you think of it as heavenly or as earthly, if you love life immortality is no consolation for death.”

Simone de Beauvoir acutely examines her fraught and complicated relationship with her full-blooded, fiery mother whose conflicts within herself often showed through unkind behavior towards Simone and her sister. Her writing is distant, but tender in moments and honest and jarring in her observations about death, mortality, and the dehumanization of dying (prolonging death and suffering).

To be at arm’s length from your mother for so long, but come to know her body in its last moments, every crevice, every scar, every part of her that is now failing her transforms an at once difficult relationship to a, maybe, just an amenable one so that she may go gentle into the night.

#WomenInTranslation #SimonedeBeauvoir #AVeryEasyDeath #Memoir by @thenursereader

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1

a month ago

felt like i was in a fog for most of june and july and the heat came taking the little energy i had, but hey i read some good books!

and my brother and I turned another year older in june, indulged in summer’s annual love island drama (enjoyed uk more than us) and WC games, enjoyed lots of visits to see sea friends at the aquarium, and watched baby girl learn to sit and enjoy real food! by @thenursereader

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5

2 months ago

“From the outside a woman cradling a newborn looks peaceful. A new mother is not peaceful but in a jittery state of high alert. We declare her serene so we can leave her to it. So we can behold the glittering surface, remark on its beauty, and walk away.”

Soldier Sailor is told from a mom’s, Soldier’s, point of view as she recounts her difficult postpartum journey and exhausting early days and years of motherhood to her now four-year old son, Sailor.

This novels reads almost like a frantic confessional. Kilroy’s writing is sharp, honest, and raw. She dives into cognitive dissonance of being a mother, the 24/7 demanding quiet work that is expected, the loss of a mother’s past self, the strain it puts on relationships, and the different kind of support a mother needs.

In Kilroy’s writing, there is rage and there is resentment, but also some dark humor. You feel it throughout the audiobook’s narration which i enjoyed. These emotions are often not associated with motherhood because it destroys this romanticized view of mothers. Who are these well-kept moms with a constant smile on their face anyways? I don’t know what that’s like.

Reading this though has helped me validate this constant back and forth i have with myself. Am i good enough for this? Am i doing this right? Am i not cut out for this? This is hard right? Is it just me?

What Soldier realizes then is that both can be true: you love this human being with everything you have, but get bogged down by doing the work of mothering that is often overlooked and under appreciated.

Yes, it’s absolutely rewarding, but it’s tiring. It never means the love is any less. As Soldier finds her way out of the exhausting fog of the early years, she comes out knowing this permanent bond is for a lifetime. by @thenursereader

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2 months ago

somebody come pick me up my last three reads destroyed me

And of course, i recommend them all. All beautifully written with so much care and honesty despite life’s grim realities

📚 the books:

👯‍♀️ KIN by Tayari Jones - annie! i am still thinking about you my girl. Made me think about strong bonds between sisters/women, chosen/found family with the hand you’re dealt, a loss is a loss whether you lose a mother through abandonment or death, that truly at the end of the day women and motherly figures are what keeps us afloat.

Tayari Jones is an immersive storyteller and i loved it on audio especially when the letters between Niecy and Annie were read out loud.

“You gave me the care that people save for kin.”

“When you lose your mama, there’s no such thing as a long time ago.”

🌳 MOTHER MARY COME TO ME by Arundhati Roy - complicated mother-daughter relationship, yes you can absolutely love the woman who brought you to this world and resent her all in the same breath. I also really enjoyed seeing how Roy became a writer.

I read this both in print and audio. Loved the audiobook because Roy narrates it herself.

“Seeing her through lenses that were not entirely coloured by my own experience of her made me value her for the woman she was. It made me a writer. A novelist. Because that ’s what novelists are – labyrinths. And now this labyrinth must make sense of its labyrinthine self without her.”

🕊️THERE THERE by Tommy Orange - loved how this hook is structured and how the characters come together in the end albeit, devastatingly. There are Native people all around us simply trying to find a place to be, a place to share their inherited grief, a place to call home, a place that was always theirs.

I also read this in both print and audio and in this case i preferred it on print. There’s so many characters in this book it was hard to keep up while listening.

“Being Indian has never been about returning to the land. The land is everywhere or nowhere.”

“And don’t make the mistake of calling us resilient. To not have been destroyed, to not have given up, to have survived, is no badge of honor. Would you c by @thenursereader

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3 months ago

may! + turned 31 years on friday!

i’ve been fighting some gnarly demons since monday brought upon by a stomach bug that finally saw its end friday night on my birthday lol but! husband threw yet another surprise lunch/early dinner for me yesterday filled with people i loveeee. Stomach bug be damned.

now that I’m myself again, here’s the May favorites: Good People, I’m Laughing Because I’m Crying, and Enlighten Me.

I had to read Strangers because I’m nosy and wondered why there was so much love and praise for this book. Overall yes her husband was trash. But there were some red flags leading up to their marriage that maybe she could have decided…not to marry him? A very rich white woman was given the platform. She wrote a book. The book was fine. Nothing new to it! by @thenursereader

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20

4 months ago

what reading looks like on most days by @thenursereader

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9

5 months ago

I’ve only known this day as celebrating you and missing you and now I get to be part of it too.

How bittersweet this feeling is. This part of life is even more challenging without you. But I have felt so much love from people around me, my husband, and from this sweet little thing that I get to call my daughter and it keeps me going. And i only hope the woman you are to me is how my daughter will see me one day

if you are a mom or a mother figure to someone in some way you are celebrated and appreciated everyday, you’re the heart of society 🤍

📚the books:

THE MAGICAL LANGUAGE OF OTHERS
WHAT WE LOSE
WHAT WE CARRY
DEAR MEMORY
OBIT
A WOMAN’S STORY
GRIEF IS LOVE
A LIVING REMEDY
MOM & ME & MOM
CRYING IN H MART
DANCING AT THE PITY PARTY
TASTE LIKE WAR
SEEING GHOSTS
LIKE A MOTHER
ESSENTIAL LABOR
MATRESCENCE
WHERE REASONS END
THINGS IN NATURE MERELY GROW
MEMORIAL DRIVE
CLEO DANG WOULD RATHER BE DEAD
THE WHITE HOT
COLD ENOUGH FOR SNOW
MOTHERSHIFT
A VERY EASY DEATH
STILL BORN
MONSTRILIO
BLUE LIGHT HOURS by @thenursereader

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5 months ago

April!

so cliche to say but this was the month i started to feel more confident going out with baby by myself and getting to do my favorite things together (mostly coffee, library, bookstore, and park dates). Adapting to this new identity is still a work in progress, but I’m starting to truly feel like and see myself as a mom. If that makes sense??? Lol

✨ favorites:
🌙 Lunar Boy (space, the moon, and it’s queer—cute af!!!!)
📮The Correspondent (bring back letter writing)
💐Cleo Dang Would Rather Be Dead (as a new mom, i was not ready to be emotionally wrecked by this book!!)

April Wrap Up | Monthly Recap by @thenursereader

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9

5 months ago