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 exclusively for escaping the world, but also to sometimes meet it in new ways?
Welcome.
Books About the Southwest: History, Fiction, and the Stories We Were Never Told
The American Southwest has been mythologized so thoroughly and for so long that the myth has become almost impossible to see around. These books are a corrective.
Native Nations: A Millennium in North America by Kathleen DuVal
For too long, most Americans didn't take oral history seriously, creating a mystery where there never was one. The question of who built these places and where they went are no mystery, O'odham elders and historians repeat: 'We've always lived here.'
Mammoth by Eva Baltasar
Reducing life to an Excel spreadsheet felt like a crime. I hated my tool, the specialist axe I used to cut up emotions and memories, the experience and suffering of those people who, at the end of the day, had somehow persuaded life to put up with them all those years.