2026 Book Reviews
January
The Anthropocene Reviewed | John Green | Audiobook | January 2026
I listened to John Green’s The Anthropocene Reviewed during the Christmas season of my first year of divorce, driving from school pickup to dance, from an independent bookstore to Ocean State Job Lot, from work to Claire’s at the Providence Place Mall to pick up a mood ring and a tutu with matching wings. I listened to it while wrapping gifts in brown paper at my kitchen counter.
John Green’s voice was a gentle companion for the season—amiable, warm, informative, and thought-provoking. In this book of essays, he shares reviews of a wide range of things, from Diet Dr. Pepper to the ginkgo tree to scratch and sniff stickers to the smallpox vaccine. All of these things come from the Athropocene—the current era that we are living in, the era of humans on earth.
Green’s reviews read less like blanket recommendations and more like memoir. He is not so much reviewing Diet Dr. Pepper itself as he is examining his relationship with it. He authored the book during the pandemic, which blankets the book in an emo/longing/earnest tone, but I also am coming to understand that John Green himself is blanketed in an emo/longing/earnest tone, and I’m here for it.
Each review is three things in one: a mini history lesson, teaching me about why fans of a football club in Liverpool sing a song from the musical Carousel, or how a group of small boys discovered a set of ancient cave paintings in rural France, or what happened when cosmonaut Alexei Lenonov’s spacesuit expanded during a spacewalk, making it impossible for him to reenter the small door to the space station. Each review is also a window into Green’s life, be it a story from his youth, a trip he went on with his wife, or a fear that he carries in his bones everyday. And each review is also an invitation to wonder about what subjects I would choose to include in my own book of reviews of the Anthropocene.
Green ends his reviews with a star rating on a scale of one to five. He introduces it as a silly and arbitrary exercise at first, because how could we possibly distill something as broad “sunsets” into a star rating? But the practice becomes increasingly meaningful throughout the book as his initial reluctance melts away and he finally allows himself to award a five star rating. I could feel his confidence and earnestness growing as he gave himself permission to adore and appreciate the things that matter, even a sycamore tree.
It’s both a vulnerable and bold thing to write a review. To state for others to see, “This is what I think about this thing” and to imply that others should think that way about it, too. That’s why I’m reluctant to write reviews. But this book made me think about that differently. A review doesn’t have to be a confident, hot take told to others—it can be meaning-making for oneself. It can be an opportunity to reflect on your relationship to a thing, to remember stories that tie you personally to that thing, and explore metaphors around its significance to you. In this way, Green shows that reviews can be less of a prescription and more of an invitation. His authority comes from paying close attention to his subject. And that is, after all, his conclusion in the book: that the meaning of life is that we are here to pay attention.
This year, I plan to review the books I read. I plan to write short “reviews” (essays) on the things that I’m paying attention to—as a way of getting to know myself, as meaning-making, and as a way of building my confidence in sharing my point of view. The time for being neutral and hidden and masked is over. I am here to pay attention, and I want to share what I am attending to.
The Anthropocene Reviewed was my invitation. And I’d like to RSVP “yes.”
I give The Anthropocene Reviewed: 4.5 ⭐️
Grief is for People | Sloane Crosley | Hardcover | January 2026
I picked up a copy of Sloane Crosley’s Grief is for People at a used bookstore in Coventry, RI. The store was newly opened, and, as it was my first visit, I wanted to find something to purchase and support a budding independent bookstore (this one is called Binds and Blooms). Plus, I wanted to snag a bookmark for my collection.
It was the recognizable cover that jumped out at me from the shelf. The publishers were really pushing this one. I’d been seeing it all over, all last year—the solid, peach background with a pile of unwieldy purple letters spelling out the title, collapsing in the lower right corner of the book. It’s a weird cover. And grief, too, is weird.
I’m no stranger to grief. I evaded it for my first 27 years (a solid, fortunate stretch) before I lost my vital, beloved grandma (my mom’s mom), who collapsed suddenly in her front hallway and left an empty throne as the matriarch of our family. After that, it was my paternal grandpa, a silly, tall sweetheart of a man who used to hold my hand in church and tell me the same nonsensical jokes over and over in his deep voice over the phone. The last time I saw him, he was curled in a ball in a hospital bed, begging my dad to bring him home.
These were losses, but it turns out they were merely grief appetizers, a taste of what was to come.
Because then came the real deal—where grief showed up at my door and demanded a permanent room of its own in my house, in my heart. My mom died when I was 31 and nowhere near ready to be without my favorite person. The grief that has consumed me since losing her—for nine years and counting—in anything but linear, logical, and manageable.
Sloane Crosley’s memoir is a rumble with grief—throughout the book, she attempts to wrestle with it, reason with it, make sense of it, negotiate with it, chase it, and disappear it. She tracks her grief around three losses: first, a collection of family jewelry stolen from her apartment, then, just a month later, her best friend Russell who died by suicide, and finally, just months later, the loss of normalcy and connection during the Covid 19 pandemic. To Crosley, these three losses are inextricably tied up in each other. If she could just solve the mystery and find the jewelry, perhaps that will bring Russell back, she hopes. She sits on a stoop across from the restaurant where they last had a meal together and holds imaginary conversations with Russell, hoping to make sense of his sudden disappearance. And then, the pandemic shuts everything down. How often does a grieving person see their internal desolation reflected around them? Usually, one must mourn while the world continues to spin around us. But not so for Crosley. Her internal state is reflected in the desolate, grim NYC streets all around her.
I’ve read so many books on grief, searching for something to help me make sense of this dark being who lives in my house, who carved out a hole in the floor of my kitchen that I am meant to walk around and pretend that life is livable and normal when there is a HUGE FUCKING HOLE IN THE FLOOR OF MY KITCHEN. This is the book that comes the closest to capturing my experience with grief. “At night,” Crosley writes, “the hole in my heart was like a wind tunnel that whistled straight through until dawn.” Her grief is fierce, tender, and, at times, unhinged. Her narrative is wild, and the chronology is random, bouncing around in time. It makes perfect sense to me. This is the only way grief can be.
She shares it all—the nonsensical thoughts, the ugly desires, the anger, the questions, the longing that never ceases (“But I still miss you like you wouldn’t believe. The years have done nothing to dull the missing.”) Crosley chases her grief into a sketchy NYC building, bribing an underground diamond dealer in order to reclaim her amber necklace—not because the necklace itself is so precious to her, but because maybe, just maybe, if she gets it back, the grief of losing Russell will subside. It doesn’t.
She turns into “funeralzilla,” objecting to every detail of the memorial service planned for him, wanting to make it into exactly something he would have liked. “It took a small army to get it through my skull that people needed to mourn, and not just Russell’s five favorite people. A few more than that. They needed to sit in an auditorium and listen to speeches and poems, and some of those poems might be Auden. This is not actually about Russell. More to the point, it’s not about me. I am not the sole protector of this man.”
(This is the one thing that made me uncomfortable about this book: Russell is not my mother. He is a public figure, a well-known player in the publishing industry. This maybe explains why the publishers were pushing this book so hard—it’s not just a universal exploration of loss, it’s also inside gossip on one of their own, written by his best friend, a fellow industry insider. The book promises a possible explanation as to why he took his own life. I don’t believe that Crosley exploited that—the book feels so raw and genuine, like pages ripped from her diary, a conversation with her own psyche and not a play for the attention of the masses. But I worried that readers might be voyeuristic. I myself googled Russell while reading.)
It’s the personal, embarrassing, bizarre aspects of grief that I connected with in this book. Crosley imagines talking to Russell: “I tell him about how I’d tried thinking of him as one dead snowflake in the blizzard that had blanketed the earth, a blizzard that had now begun to fall on the city too. I told him how I’d tried to mix his death in with the others to make it hurt less. Or hurt differently. Like feeding a dog its medicine in peanut butter. Except I was the dog.”
When my mom was in the hospital in her final days, we brought things from home: picture frames that we set up on her windowsill, her favorite throw blanket, her own pillow from her own bed, which she would never sleep in again. I sat with her all day and returned to my childhood home to sleep each night. On one of those nights, I dreamed that everything in her hospital room turned into mozzarella cheese. I looked around and started grabbing things, stuffing them all in my mouth. I wanted to consume it all. I wanted every piece of her to become a part of me. I wanted to hold my grief tight to me. I didn’t want to move through it or get over it. I wanted to carry it as closely as possible. Nine years later, I still do.
Sloane Crosley understands that. I loved this book.
I give Grief is for People: 5 🌟’s
Strangers: A Memoir of Marriage | Belle Burden | Kindle | January 2026
In the pandemic of 2020, I fell down a rabbit hole of reading. I went from finishing 5 or so books per year to 85.
I attribute this to two factors.
First, I got a kindle. After resisting it for some time, insisting that I’m one of those people who likes to feel the pages in my hands, I gave it a go. And my reading skyrocketed. I was able to borrow books from the library at the click of a button, stacking up my hold list with a lineup of juicy reads. I had an infant in my arms that year, and being able to read with just one pointer finger to advance the pages meant that I took in far more than I would have in analog mode. And when I was awake at all hours, I could grab my kindle and read in the dark without turning any lights on. (I was awake at all hours a lot).
The other factor was my reading selections. I finally gave up reading books as though they were vegetables—choosing titles that I should like or enjoy. Instead, I read what interested me with abandon. I started reading exclusively contemporary romance, love stories of every shape and size and representation that all gloriously ended with the happy couple together. This was especially important as I held a baby in my arms during a global pandemic—I didn’t want to have to worry about the characters. I liked the steady, predictable format of it all, knowing that it would all work out. In a year of unprecedented uncertainty, it was a small comfort.
My delight in contemporary romance ran rampant for the next four years. I voraciously read one after another, multiple books in one week. I prided myself that, if you told me a location, a profession, or a challenge, I could make a personalized recommendation for a book connected to your prompts. The genre was exploding, and I had read them all!
But when my marriage ended in 2025, I lost my taste for contemporary romance. It was like a switch was flipped. What was a delicious escape turned sour in my mouth. Even my favorite authors’ new releases were a slog. So I’ve moved on.
Now, I am fascinated by books about the end of marriage. I am studying it. So when I saw Belle Burden’s new memoir, Strangers: A Memoir of Marriage, I smashed the button to add it to my library hold list.
Belle’s story begins in March of 2020, when she was quarantined with her husband and three children at their home in Martha’s Vineyard. As she washed the dishes after dinner, she received a voicemail from an unfamiliar number. It was a man saying, “I’m sorry to tell you this, but your husband is having an affair with my wife.” Her husband owned it right away, and assured her that it had only been going on for three weeks and meant nothing. He begged for her forgiveness and promised they would work through it. But the next morning, he came into her bedroom wearing a coat and holding a suitcase. “I’ve decided I want a divorce,” he said. “I’m leaving. You can have the house and the apartment. You can have custody of the kids. I don’t want it. I don’t want any of it.”
She had thought they had a happy marriage. He offered no explanation, and there were no warning signs. This book is an attempt for her to understand what happened, to trace the threads of their story and shape it into something that made some sort of sense.
Burden retells their meeting at an elite law firm in New York City, the dynamics of each of their own parents, the birth of their kids and choices they made around careers, finances, and family building. It is a measured look at divorce—she is critical of his behavior, but also of her own. Throughout the book, she transitions into italics, asking all of the questions swirling in her mind. (“The way he is moving and talking is so different. I don’t recognize his body, his voice. Is he having a breakdown? Is he in love? Is he just delighted to be free of me, of us?”) She will never get answers to these questions. He never offers an explanation. Even now.
Alongside all of the italic questions is an invisible one: Why did she write a memoir about this? Why did she choose to share this with the world? She charts the blowback that she received after publishing a piece of her story in the NY Times Modern Love column—to many people, her writing about it is almost worse than him leaving her. How could you do this to your children? people asked. It is so disgustingly gendered. Her husband left three teenage kids. How could HE do that to the children and get away with it, running his hedge fund, making millions, and acting as though Burden was the one who was unreasonable and unhinged?
It was a tough read. At times, I felt dizzy and nauseous. I raced through the pages so I could finish it and move on with my life. This is not a contemporary romance with a happy ending. It is a real, messy story about real, messy life. It is so hard to trust in this world. So hard to hear that even a 21 year marriage where all seems well can fall to pieces in less than 24 hours. It is hard to trust men.
But at the same time, I loved it. I love it more and more as I let the story settle within me.
I am trying to answer for myself why she chose to write this. In part, it is an investigation in the hopes of finding the answer as to why he made this choice. It is also to write her way through a traumatic experience, to heal through self-authorship. It is also to end generational cycles of women covering up for men, cleaning up their messes. She makes this mess visible. She will not be polite and deferential. She will not hide this mess. It is to find the strength of her own voice. It is to model for her children that telling your own story is important.
[The writing is not nearly as beautiful or skillful as Grief is for People, and the metaphor of the Osprey nest at the Martha’s Vineyard house is a bit belabored. It reads a bit like “This happened. And then this happened. And then this happened.” The beauty is not the writing. It is in the story. Also, what a fascinating read after Elissa Altman’s Permission. Permission to tell this story is, wow.]
I give Strangers: 4 🌟’s
Consider Yourself Kissed | Jessica Stanley | Hardcover | January 2026
I picked up my copy of Consider Yourself Kissed at Island Books in Middletown last summer, on my first date in 16 years.
When Mark and I matched and realized that we both had the day before July 4th off, we agreed to meet up for an afternoon in Newport. I told him: “I am on a quest to visit every independent bookstore in the state of Rhode Island, and you could help me visit the last one on my list.” He said, “I love a quest.”
When we walked into the tiny shop, I breathed in the smell of fresh pages. I thought I was a little cheeky when I picked out this title, which I’d been hearing about as a new release. Consider Yourself Kissed seemed appropriate for getting back out there. I tucked the bright yellow cover under my arm and we went out to lunch.
The date was not a success, but I do have this book as a souvenir of being brave enough to step into my own next chapter. And I finally got around to reading it this January.
After reading contemporary romance for so many years, it’s a funny feeling to dive into a book when I don’t know where it’s going or how it will end. This is the story of Coralie, an Australian publicist who finds herself in the UK as part of an overseas transfer following inappropriate behavior on the part of her male boss (and as the woman, she, of course, absorbed the impact).
Coralie meets a divorced Dad, Adam, and the story follows her experience as they move in together, become a family with his daughter, Zora, and have two children of their own. Coralie’s career takes a backseat to Adam’s, and she struggles to care for the children, the house, Adam, and herself. We learn about her background with an abusive father. She must once again confront her abusive boss when he visits the UK office. Neither of them are held accountable or confronted in any way. It is a sad story of being steamrolled by men. The swift tied-up-in-a-bow ending, when Adam finally proposes after years of delaying marriage due to his growing career, left me with no hope that their dynamic would truly change. Perhaps it’s my cynicism right now, or my own weariness with men and unequal relationships, but this book left me feeling bummed.
“In the back garden of the house on Graham Road,” Stanley writes near the end of the book, “a funny thing had happened to a tree. It was, or had been, a birch. Over time, ivy had grown around it, bending the tree within. Now the ivy was as thick as her forearm, and the tree inside it was crushed. Could two living beings entwine without one of them having to die?”
I am wondering the same thing, but I am not hopeful about the answer. I am more interested in being unencumbered by ivy right now, alone with my books and my solo visits to delicious independent bookstores (since last summer, more have sprouted in RI)!
I give Consider Yourself Kissed 3⭐️’s.
