currently reading: oh, people. If you made a New Year’s resolution to read more this year, then this is a good week to get started if you haven’t already. I’m over halfway through Begin Again, by Emma Lord, who gave us Tweet Cute, You Have a Match, and When You Get the Chance. She writes these dense, meaty stories with effervescent characters, and I just absolutely get lost in them. This one is no different. Andie Rose is off to her first-choice college, a transfer in the middle of freshman year, and she is ready for the future she’d been planning for her whole life. Nothing goes quite how she expects, but with secret societies and an underground podcast and her advice column and friends and snack cakes and Eternal Darkness coffee and bagels with unicorn cream cheese, she finds that you don’t have to start over in life. You can just pick up the broken pieces and start where you are. (And if you were unclear about my thoughts on this one, it’s a definite yes! It’s phenomenal!)

I’ve also started reading The Twyford Code, the latest mind-bending suspense novel from Janice Hallet, who wrote last year’s The Appeal. This one is all audio transcripts which have gone through a computer program to decipher it. So right off the bat, you know that what you’ll be reading will have moments that don’t quite make sense or where parts are muffled or cut off. But then you have to try to figure out why these transcripts matter to someone and who that someone is and why. I loved The Appeal so much—it was not only an amazing story, but it was told with such panache and ingenuity, it felt completely fresh. So far this one does too, so it’s a lot of fun and I cannot wait to find out more of the story.

And that is just the beginning of the great books coming out this month, so keep checking back here for more book recommendations.

up next: Quirk Books was kind enough to send me an early copy of A Spoonful of Time, and I am intrigued! Maya starts to cook with her grandmother, and the two of them start to time-travel to her grandmother’s memories. It sounds amazing. I can’t wait. Watch for this one early in April.