About
January 1, 0001 · 2 minutes read
Hey, I’m Danielle. The Part Everyone Skips is my personal book review blog and reading journal where I share my book reviews, recommendations, thoughts and ideas.
I started it because reading has always been how I think, how I orient myself, and how I return to myself when everything feels too loud. Not as a productivity system. Not as a list of “must-reads.” As a practice.
What you’ll find here are notes, passages, reflections, and traces of books that stayed with me, reviews, lists of books I want and am curious about. Sometimes that looks like a quote I couldn’t let go of. Sometimes a short response. Sometimes a longer meditation that started as a margin note and grew legs.
I’m interested in what reading does to us—how it shapes attention, how it steadies us, how it opens something back up.
I’m also currently building a reading app I’ve wished existed for 15 years. It’s designed for readers who treat their reading data as self-knowledge: whether you’re tracking tropes across dozens of romance novels, managing research sources, watching your progress through epic series, or just curious about your own patterns without the friction of constant input.
If you’re here, you’re probably someone who reads the way I do: not to escape the world, but to meet it more honestly.
Welcome.
Generation Priced Out: Who Gets To Live In The New Urban America? by Randy Shaw
The challenges around housing in urban areas are about NIMBY politics and the generation that owns everything, according to Randy Shaw. Stories from San Francisco, New York, Seattle, Austin, LA and Denver illuminate.
Quick Lit: Short and Sweet Reviews — January 2026
A grumpy bookseller novel, Lydia Millet’s razor-sharp short stories, Joy Harjo as the wise auntie we all need, and a strange new Roxane Gay–imprint release about grief, obsession, and the soul of a dog.
Meditations for Mortals by Oliver Burkehead
My conversations helped me recognise a deeper issue, too, which is the way our ceaseless efforts to get into the driver’s seat of life seem to sap it of the very sense of aliveness that makes it worth living in the first place.