At the beginning of this year, I shook off my old yoga mat. It’d been sitting in a corner for months, dusty with disuse behind my gym bags and some clothes I’d been meaning to donate. Unfurling it, I noticed it had gained a perceptible curvature after being packed away for so long. That stiffness…
Two years ago, I was a ball of nerves. I paced my home office in pajamas, eyes flicking to the digital clock on my desktop. Each second that passed brought me closer to one o’clock, closer to the first official post on my new blog. A nauseating concoction of fear and excitement congealed in my…
The first time I became aware of John Green, I was choking back loud, messy sobs in my room at two in the morning. I was eighteen, it was 2012, and I’d just stayed up engrossed in his breakout hit The Fault in Our Stars. I don’t remember how a copy ended up in my…
The relationship between creativity and talent is a rocky one. For years I’ve heard variations of, “Do I need talent to be a good writer?” with “writer” easily substituted by other creative professions like painter, sculptor, and musician. At first, I was the one asking the question, an insecure teen wondering if I’d ever make…
When I first created the Book of the Month Club, I only had two rules: No books I’d read before and no classics. Since I started the blog to expand my reading horizons, the first rule was easy enough to follow. The second rule, though, became more difficult to adhere to as time went on.…
Like many popular drinks, tea caters to a wide spectrum of tastes. Those venturing into the world of tea for the first time tend to pick teas that are sweet or teas that do well with the addition of milk, sugar, or honey. It’s similar to a fresh-faced 21-year-old going to the bar and ordering…
For me, October is a month of contradictions. On the one hand, I bask in the cooler weather and return of the rain, enjoying how each day my afternoon walks offer a changing tableau of color. On the other, even as I collect fallen leaves in my coat pockets and drink hot chocolate at the…
Half the joy of a hobby is finding community. No matter what kind of hobby you pick up, there’s always going to be a group of folks that’s just as excited about it as you are. It could be something as popular and group-oriented as playing Magic: The Gathering or as solitary as coin collecting–…
Literary categories are famously hard to define. I’ve gone on before about who decides what’s considered “literary fiction” vs. “genre fiction”, and whether the distinction is important. Plenty of books we’ve read in our Book of the Month Club straddle the lines between sci-fi, fantasy, and “speculative fiction”, with none falling easily into one bracket…
Technology has evolved exponentially over the course of human history, with most advances aimed toward taking labor off the shoulders of skilled workers. The printing press shortened the time it took to print a book and created output so robust it brought a surge of literacy along with it. The internal combustion engine streamlined transportation,…
Tea Reads 