Reviews, recommendations, and essays for serious readers.
Loveyoumeanitblog — A Life in Books Reviews, recommendations, and essays for serious readers. Browse Latest Posts Books deserve better than star ratings and summary paragraphs. We write about what we’re reading — novels, essays, history, science, poetry — with the kind of attention that treats literature as the complex art form it is. You won’t […]
The shirt is almost aggressively unremarkable. On a dark background, centered, in very small lowercase letters, it says: meh. With a period. No animal. No rainbow. No ironic wolf. Just the word, the period, and a lot of dark fabric around it. The period is doing more work than the word. The word shrugs; the […]
There is a yellow triangle on this shirt. Inside it, a hand is crossed out. Above it, in the flat, unbothered lettering of a warning sign, are the words NOT FRIENDLY DO NOT TOUCH. The whole thing is a piece of graphic design doing what graphic design does best: pretending a feeling is a policy. […]
On a Tuesday in October, I found myself staring at a shirt that says LET’S ROOT FOR EACH OTHER AND WATCH EACH OTHER GROW. The words wrap around four smiling root vegetables—a carrot, a radish, a beet, and an onion—their roots visible in soil. They look like they’re at a party I wasn’t invited to. […]
On the shirt, a small tan chihuahua stands in red boxing gloves in front of a brick wall. Above it, in cream lettering, I GOT THAT DOG. Below it, IN ME. Behind the chihuahua, much larger, is a black wolf-shaped shadow. The shadow is not a second dog. It is the chihuahua’s own shadow, drawn […]
There is a chair in my bedroom that has not been sat on since 2022. It is not a decorative chair. It is not an accent chair. It is a laundry chair, which is a different piece of furniture entirely: a chair that has been demoted from seating to sorting, from furniture to limbo, from […]
The ball is already at the bottom. Above it, in white block capitals: I HAD POTENTIAL. A dashed circle waits at the top of a curved ramp, keeping a place for the version of the ball that was going to amount to something. This is an unusually economical way to disappoint a guidance counselor. The […]
There is a candle on my bookshelf that has never been lit. It sits in a heavy amber jar with a wooden wick and a label that says something like Fireside Fig or Hinoki Smoke—I can’t remember, because I refuse to look directly at it. Looking directly at it would require acknowledging that I bought […]