I don’t live in the US, but I do work at a commuter university in a big city in Europe. My school has all kinds of protocols in place - one-way system, no more than 30% occupancy, students stay in one place for 3 hours and can’t leave except to go to the toilet, then the room is emptied and cleaned, etc. So in school…

Totally agree with Emily that this book doesn’t make a lot of sense. I was more confused than apprehensive reading it - why was her dad so obsessed with a per-pubescent girl’s sexuality? He flies into a rage when he learns that she’s naked at Arden’s house because Vera stole her swimsuit and clothes while she was…

Ours is under a tree and wasn’t heated until I was a teenager, so May entries were rare. But some people jump in the day they open their pools for sure.

I had a pool growing up in southern Ontario, where you MIGHT be able to use it for part of June, all of July and August, and part of September. It played a formative role in shaping my psyche. Definitely a big part of most days was floating around on an inner tube with a book, and later, a cocktail.

Unfortunately now I…

I find myself thinking about the Bachelor here: Damian has all these women competing for his attention: Audrina is the sweet virginal one, Vera is the villain, Ruby is the runner-up he took to the fantasy suite but couldn’t quite see himself marrying. Lucky is the one with the right combination of hot and wife…

My parents never censored anything I watched or read, so it was no problem for me to read this alongside my mom when she checked it out of the library when I was about 12.

I’m intrigued by The Mercy Rule.I think in 1999 I took a class at uni called Reading Popular Culture. I remember a lot of discussion about heuristics and pastiche, and that we had to apply it to John Le Carre novels.

Communities not wanting to notice abuse is far from fictional. I have neighbours who live across the courtyard and two stories up and their fights are so loud I can hear them through two sets of closed windows. They go on for hours and often you hear things breaking or crashing. Apparently I’m the only person who…

Whoops, the version I have doesn’t have chapter numbers, so I’m only up to part 2, which is about 1/4 of the way through the book, so I’ll answer from what I’ve read so far.

Audrina herself seems to see Billie as a Good Woman, because she’s kind and thoughtful and bakes her a birthday cake. She doesn’t apply this to…

A couple of things I don’t really get about this book:

I read chapter 6 last night, the one where they mess with Audrina about the delivery guy who said it was March and they tell her no, it’s June. Then she starts a diary to record what day it is, because apparently she’s never seen a calendar. Finally, the mom tells her she’s pregnant. So in this timeline, the mom would…

Last week my cats caught... something. It might have been a big mouse, but it might have been a small rat. Normally we only find the remains of their kills, usually in the shower, where at least they’re easy to clean up. But sometimes the prey gets away and we have a fun few days of waiting for them to re-capture it…

My mom reads 2-3 books a week, 99% of them romance novels, the other 1% literary fiction I check out of the library when I’m there visiting (I live far away, so visits are at least a week). In the 80s and 90s, she went through a VC Andrews phase. I definitely read Flowers in the Attic and Heaven, not sure if I also…

I live in the Netherlands, and, pragmatic people that they are, the government issued guidelines for people who want to live alone but still get frisky. Mainly, have good conversations. They give examples like minimise the number of people you’re both seeing, and see if it’s possible to have the same partner for sex…

My neighbourhood organized a silent disco. Everyone could pick up headphones, then dance either on their balconies or outside in our shared common area. 174 people joined in, and had a blast. A guy who normally sells cocktails at festivals set up his bar outside. You had to text him your order and he’d text back when…

I’m a university lecturer. My cats have recently joined the online teaching staff and I have to look cuter than them. So I still put on a full face every day.

I had an upstairs neighbour who was underemployed. He was fine, but his two brothers, who seemed equally underemployed would come over frequently. They’d proceed get drunk together and start arguing. Sometimes the arguments seemed to come to blows, or at least furniture getting tossed over. If you knocked on the door…

My boyfriend and I met our neighbours a couple of days after we moved in. We were trying to put something from IKEA when the doorbell rang. It was our downstairs neighbours, complaining that we were making too much noise - at 7:30 at night - and they needed to get up at 4am for work, so we should stop. We did, but…

Family group chat continues as normal. My work team group chat is the insane one, even though we’re university lecturers and one of the subjects we teach is called Critical Thinking. Didn’t stop someone posting that ‘Stanford hospital letter’ yesterday and several people commenting how useful it was before I pointed…

Family group chat continues as normal. My work team group chat is the insane one, even though we’re university lecturers and one of the subjects we teach is called Critical Thinking. Didn’t stop someone posting that ‘Stanford hospital letter’ yesterday and several people commenting how useful it was before I pointed…