The First 3 Books I Read in 2023

Everybody Writes (New and Improved Version) by Ann Handley

A good book on content writing that’s geared more toward business owners than professional content writers. However, even as someone with years of content writing experience, I found some useful tips and resources in this book.

Some good tips on what to do when you feel stuck:

• Set a tiny goal: Write a single line a day. You’ll probably write more than one, of course.
• Use a daily writing prompt. (The Journal Club publishes a new prompt every day at joclub.world as well as on Instagram.)
• Try Morning Pages: Three pages of stream-of-consciousness writing.
• Copywork. “Copywork” means literally copying the work of others longhand to understand style, word choice, and more. Copy the sentences of writing you love in your diary or journal as a way to feel in your own hands what great writing looks like. I do this regularly with writing that delights me or makes me laugh. Don’t overthink. Just go. Is this a technique? Or a state of mind? Maybe both.

Handley, Ann. Everybody Writes (p. 27). Wiley. Kindle Edition.

The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue by V.E. Schwab

This book follows the life of a girl who makes a deal with a demon: she gets to be immortal, but no one will ever remember her. The book jumps around between France in 1714 when she makes the deal, New York City in 2014, and various times in between. Many chapters of this book could be described as historical fiction. I usually don’t like historical fiction, but I found this book quite enjoyable — maybe because the historical parts aren’t the entire book. Much of the book takes place in 2014 NYC, where the protagonist, Addie, runs into a man who can somehow remember her.

“The Inivisible Life of Addie LaRue” reflects on choosing to enjoy life as an experience and savoring curiosity. For a good part of the last half of the book, I was worried about the ending. I didn’t see how the book could end in a way that wasn’t either extraordinarily grim or an annoyingly cliche happy ending. However, the actual ending was unexpected and perfect.

A favorite quote:

“But this is how you walk to the end of the world. This is how you live forever. Here is one day, and here is the next, and the next, and you take what you can, savor every stolen second, cling to every moment, until it’s gone.”

Petty Plot Hole Issue: My biggest complaint about this book involves a plot hole that happens over and over again. But it’s also a very petty plot hole, so I mostly managed to let it go. When people meet Addie, they forget her as soon as they’re separated. The book never precisely defines what constitutes a separation that causes the forgetting — and implies that maybe the rules aren’t exactly known because that’s how contracts with demons go — but offers the following examples:

• If someone falls asleep, they forget Addie.
• If a door closes between Addie and the person, they forget her, even if the door is only closed for a moment.
• If Addie is out of sight for an extended time, she’s forgotten. How long? It appears to take more than a moment as long as no doors close.

At various points in the novel, someone forgets Addie when they leave the room at a party or when a door closes for just a moment. These incidents are clear and critical to the plot.

Numerous times throughout the book, Addie has one-night encounters with lovers. They never remember her in the morning. Sometimes she spends nearly a whole day with someone, but she never gets more than a day because they don’t remember her in the morning.

So here’s my deal: Do these people never use the bathroom? Does Addie never use the bathroom? A trip to the bathroom is enough to make people forget her, so how is she spending 12 to 18 hours with people before they forget her? Is she going into the bathroom with people she just met? As I said, it’s so petty, and the book is still great. But I just kept thinking about it while I read.

It Ends With Us by Colleen Hoover

Apparently, if you say bad things about this book, CoHo fans will send you hate mail. I’ve heard people say this is the worst book they have ever read. Others love it.

My opinion: I didn’t hate it.

It was easy and fun to read. The story was interesting. It has some goofy trope-y bits, but I think that comes with this type of book.

The ending, however, is a mess. There’s a strong implication — no, an overt statement — that a person who is violent towards their spouse isn’t likely to be violent towards their child. This is true even though the violence is so much that it sends the spouse to the hospital, even when the perpetrator admittedly has anger management problems.

One study found that “the presence of wife abuse increased the likelihood of child abuse by about 70%.” Of course, some people abuse an intimate partner but never abuse children. The issue is complicated. But the way “It Ends With Us” quickly and casually assumes an obvious solution, not even questioning that a child will be safe with a parent who abused their spouse, is unsettling.

The only line I highlighted from this book:

I think about how sometimes, no matter how convinced you are that your life will turn out a certain way, all that certainty can be washed away with a simple change in tide.

I find it weird that this book was sort of marketed as a romance novel. I imagine that may have thrown some people off when they didn’t get what they expected.