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.
Martyr!
It feels so American to discount dreams because they're not built of objects, of things you can hold and catalogue and then put in a safe. Dreams give us voices, visions, ideas, mortal terrors, and departed beloveds. Nothing counts more to an individual, or less to an empire...'Paradise is mine today, as cash in hand,' Hafez had written. 'Why should I count upon the puritan's pledge of tomorrow?'
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.
Small Things Like These by Claire Keegan
Always it was the same, Furlong thought; always they carried mechanically on without pause, to the next job at hand. What would life be like, he wondered, if they were given time to think and reflect over things? Might their lives be different or much the same – or would they just lose the run of themselves?