Book review: Must Love Books by Shauna Robinson

Hello, it's been a while. I hope you are doing well. ♡

A lot of things have happened since I last took a peek here, most notable of which are that I moved to a more spacious unit in a better location but also within the same community and I took better care of my health. A little more than a month ago, I started taking pills again to hopefully manage my myoma (yes, I have them again) and I've generally been okay in the sense that I don't get as much mood swings as when I was using another brand years ago, although I have noticed that I now feel more. Every emotion is magnified: happiness, glee, giddiness from being loved, but also sadness, anger, and even anxiety. Last Friday I spent about two hours crying inconsolably because one of my dolls got destroyed. It's exhausting. I always tell J that it's so difficult being a woman, and I mean that each time. 

Last night I was able to finish my first book for 2023: Must Love Books by Shauna Robinson.

It's a big deal to me because from being able to read at least two books per month, I seemed to lose my reading mojo and for the whole of 2022 I was only able to read one book. One. And it was a graphic novel! How embarrassing. To be fair, I also reread the entire The Sandman series in time for the Netflix TV show, but rereads do not count. 

Anyway, I enjoyed this story because it's about books, authors, the publishing industry, and how the main character Nora finds purpose and navigates her mental health issues. For fans of romance, it's an HFN ending with FilAm author Andrew Santos. Content warning: contemplating suicide. 

It was never devastating events that sent Nora's mind spiraling towards a place that scared her. It could be a major change that slowly gnawed at her, or several insignificant moments that piled up and sent her right back to the thoughts that she tried to avoid. She felt sometimes that her mind was always in some state of interacting with these thoughts, whether it was gravitating toward them, trying to move away from them, or pretending they didn't exist. But they were always, always there.

I related with Nora because I recognize feeling stuck. I spent a long time in my previous job waiting for a promotion that didn't come, underpaid even though I was working way past working hours and even on weekends. My situation, career-wise, is so much better now thanks to my huge leap back in 2021, and I couldn't be happier with my current team. 

However, there are still days when I feel how easy it would be to just... cease to exist. It could be my PMDD talking; I recognize it's just my brain telling me these things, and I know I will never harm myself, but sometimes the thought of being unalive sounds so tempting. Imagine all your problems disappearing and just floating away into the void, versus feeling all these emotions and dealing with all my issues, how easy it would be. I think of these things, but then almost immediately images of my family and J come to me, and how I wouldn't want them to be subjected to something like that. Not like that, when I lost my Tatay almost two years ago and I am still reeling from the loss.

This should be a celebratory come back post, promising more blog posts in the future, but I don't have it in me to try to be cheerful today. Maybe I can do it tomorrow when I try to write about my current hyper-fixation: Leigh Bardugo's Crows from the Grishaverse.

I hope you are doing well. Well, better than me at least. :)