Poindexter Anonymous

Why your TBR pile suddenly feels like homework, and what to do about it      Hey, bookish bandits. It's Poindexter Anonymous, and today we're talking about the elephant in the library: the reading slump.      I had tea with my bestie recently and we both confessed the same embarrassing secret. We've been struggling to pick up books. Not because we stopped loving the worlds waiting for us on the shelf, but because, well, we just didn't want to. Disinterest, apathy, a vague sense of existential dread, take your pick. The reading slump is real, and it is an absolute menace.      You know the feeling. One minute you're inhaling books like they're the last snacks on earth. The next, you can't even work up the energy to finish a magazine article, let alone a novel with actual chapters and plot points and things to keep track of. That conversation with my friend turned into a full deep-dive on how to escape the clutches of a slump, and I figur...

Because your TBR pile is not a problem. It's a retirement plan!         It's Poindexter Anonymous, your friendly neighborhood reader with a TBR pile so tall it technically qualifies as a fire hazard. Today's burning question, the one that shows up in my DMs at least once a week: what's a good approach for tackling a massive TBR pile?      Honestly, it's right up there with life's other great unanswerable mysteries. Why did the chicken cross the road? What came first, the chicken or the egg? Are chickens the animal representation for philosophy?      Let's be real. There are too many good books and not nearly enough hours in the day. Back in 2020, my emotional disaster year, I could plow through an eight book series in a week, which in hindsight was less "impressive reading stamina" and more "elaborate avoidance tactic." These days, if I finish one book a month, I throw myself a small parade. Meanwhile my unread shelf has balloon...

     I thought I would take a quick vacation from the Gothic books that I’ve been reading to give us both a break. Though, my heart will always live in the macabre, I do travel to other lands to explore what’s out there. And that’s how we’ve landed on Bringing Down the Duke . I was still in the Victorian state of mind, but instead people fighting for their lives, I thought I would read about women fighting for their way of life. Women’s suffrage but make it Bridgeton. Quick Snapshot Rating: 3.5 ⭐ Heat Level: 2 🌶️ (warm, not five-alarm, but the book knows exactly what it's doing when it turns the temperature up) Genre: Historical Romance Vibe: Jane Austen if she were allowed to write smut. What This Book Feels Like      Reading Bringing Down the Duke feels looks proper. It sounds proper. There's Oxford, there's suffrage meetings, there's a lot of very correct Victorian hand-touching. And then somewhere a...

     Let's get one thing straight before we dive in: I have fallen off my couch approximately four times while reading books, and Stalking Jack the Ripper is responsible for one of them (another is when my foot got caught in the blanket while I was trying to move positions, but that’s not important). This book took a girl obsessed with cadavers, a Victorian serial killer, and a boy who flirts exclusively through insults, and made me a full-blown convert.      Hi, bookish buddies. It's you book bestie, Poindexter Anonymous, here to talk about the book that finally made me understand why everyone loses their minds over Kerri Maniscalco.      I’d like to let you know that I do read books with dragons in them, and we will review one at some point, I’m just in a gothic reading vibe right now. Bare with me, I’m seeing the rabbit hole and entrance to Wonderland, but I haven’t found the way out yet. The Backstory (Because I Overshare)  ...

A love letter to everyone who has ever hidden a book cover with their hand in public      Congratulations, you've made it to the second post on this blog. Let's both celebrate. You, for your curiosity. Me, for actually writing a second post, which honestly puts me ahead of most New Year's resolutions I've ever made. After this, I think we both deserve to buy that book we've been circling like a shark for three weeks.        I've been seeing a lot of online discourse lately about the literacy crisis , and how reading has apparently dumbed down our whole society because people are more likely to pick up a "trashy" romance than a classic that actually challenges them. And here's my hot take, served with a side of side-eye: that's simply not true. Reading at any level, in any genre, on any device, is not what's contributing to declining literacy. What's contributing to declining literacy is people not reading at all, and not developing th...

       Okay so. Okay. I need you to sit down. Actually no, don't sit down, stand up, because I need you to be in a state of readiness to immediately go buy a book the second I'm done yelling at you, and standing up is more conducive to that kind of urgency.      I finished One Dark Window at 11:47 AM on a rainy Tuesday morning, full couch burrito mode, blanket up to my chin, coffee gone cold two hours prior because who has time to drink coffee when there's a monster in someone's head, and I immediately, and I mean immediately , before my brain had even finished processing what my eyeballs had just witnessed, opened my Kindle app and bought the sequel. That's it. That's the review. I could stop typing right now. You could stop reading right now. Go buy the book, read it, and come back and comment your feelings at me because I need someone to scream with.      Still here? Okay fine. Fine! I'll give you words. But I want it on record ...