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 […]
It is a Tuesday in late September, and I am on my couch doing maintenance on my inner circle. The maintenance consists of opening Instagram, tapping the menu, tapping Close Friends, and scrolling a list of names with the focus of a woman defusing something. I remove a person I have not spoken to since […]
Four root vegetables are smiling. A carrot, a radish, a beet, an onion, each with its roots visible in soil, arranged in a loose ring. Around them, in letters that wrap the whole group, the shirt reads: LET’S ROOT FOR EACH OTHER AND WATCH EACH OTHER GROW. The pun is doing two jobs at once—root […]
The shirt says I GOT THAT DOG in cream letters, then IN ME below, and between the two lines a small tan chihuahua stands in red boxing gloves against a brick wall. Behind the chihuahua, a much larger black wolf-shaped shadow rises up the bricks. The wolf is not a second dog. It is the […]
On a dark shirt, the letters C and T sit on either side of a cat silhouette. Below them, in light lettering, the word Daddy. That is the whole design. No leash, no kibble, no paw print. Just a cat held between two letters like a secret being spelled out, and a title underneath that […]
On a Tuesday in October, the shirt arrived in my browser as a rectangle of text: THANKFUL GRATEFUL BLESSED, stacked in three lines, with wheat stalks rising on either side. The wheat is the tell. It is not a harvest cornucopia or a cartoon turkey; it is the crop itself, upright and orderly, the kind […]
There is a dashed circle at the top left of the ramp, and a solid ball at the bottom right, and the words I HAD POTENTIAL printed in white capitals above both of them. The ramp curves down between the two, a smooth white arc on what I take to be a dark ground. The […]
The LinkedIn Post About Failure and the Job I Left Out of It There is a genre of LinkedIn post that begins with a confession and ends with a promotion. The confession is always specific enough to feel brave and vague enough to be safe: I was let go. I was burned out. I made […]