mousewithgrayears

bring on the grief, the Greeks, the unlikable protagoni, the unreliable narrators, the queer-coded cyborgs and the drug-addled autofiction. I also like poems

441 points

0% overlap

My Taste

Reading...

The Tangled Tree: A Radical New History of Life

46%

mousewithgrayears wrote a review...

Bite by Bite: Nourishments and Jamborees

mousewithgrayears

Feb 20, 2026

2.0

Enjoyment: 2.0Quality: 4.0Characters: Plot:

I enjoy Aimee Nezhukumatathil's poetry and I really wanted to like this book of personal essays. Unfortunately, I just didn't find it a compelling read. All of the pieces start with a delightful food description and then veer off into personal territory, sometimes interspersed with internet-ready food facts or a glut of adjectives, before trailing off or getting tied up with a bow. I think this author has great economy of language in her poems, but I didn't see that here; it was more like reading a casual blog.

I think the author is at her best in the longer pieces, like "Vanilla" and "Bing Cherry," and elsewhere when she digs a little into themes of colonization and belonging. I found the essays about her perfect husband and children too sentimental for me, and it felt like this was most of the book.

Maybe I am just a sourpuss, but this book was too sweet for me. If you like something light and full of simple joy, you might enjoy this. If you prefer salt, look somewhere else.

mousewithgrayears finished a book

Bite by Bite: Nourishments and Jamborees

Aimee Nezhukumatathil

From the New York Times bestselling author of World of Wonders, a lyrical book of short essays about food offering a banquet of tastes, smells, memories, associations, and little-known facts about nature In Bite by Bite, poet and essayist Aimee Nezhukumatathil explores the way food and drink evokes our associations and remembrances – a subtext or layering, a flavor tinged with joy, shame, exuberance, grief, desire, or nostalgia. Here, Nezhukumatathil restores some of our astonishment and wonder about food through her encounter with a range of foods and food traditions. From shave ice to lumpia, mangoes to pecans, rambutan to vanilla, she investigates how food marks our experiences and identities; the boundaries between heritage and memory; and the ethics and environmental pressures around gathering and consuming food. Bite by Bite offers a rich and textured kaleidoscope of vignettes and visions into the world of food and nature, drawn together by intimate and funny personal reflections and Fumi Nakamura’s gorgeous imagery and illustration.

mousewithgrayears commented on a.door.uhh's review of Bite by Bite: Nourishments and Jamborees

a.door.uhh

Oct 04, 2025

2.0

Enjoyment: Quality: Characters: Plot:

I decided to read Bite by Bite because I love Aimee Nezhukumatathil’s poetry, but her prose just didn’t really click for me. Maybe it’s because I’ve been reading too many dense poetic books, but the simplistic writing style left me feeling a bit condescended to. I would really recommend this for families, especially if they have a kid who loves fun facts and reads at a high level.
Ultimately, I don’t think this is a bad book at all, just not a great fit for me.

mousewithgrayears commented on a post

Avalon

50% (page 102) 'Vanilla' Chapter / Books featuring Edmond Albius, famous Horticulturist

Aimee talked about Edmond Albius during this chapter, the 12 year old enslaved boy on the island of Réunion whose incredible influence on the world of Vanilla today would not have been known had archives not been discovered in 2004 attributing a widely used Vanilla Orchid pollination technique to him. I went to find any books or extra resources on Edmond because I couldn't see anything specifically Vanilla related in Aimee's bibliography - just in case anyone else reading this book is interested in finding out more:

BBC Article on Edmond The Rarest Fruit by Gaëlle Bélem Vanilla: Travels in Search of the Ice Cream Orchid by Tim Ecott The True Story of Vanilla: How Edmond Albius Made History (Orca Biography, 3) by Ann Richards

mousewithgrayears made progress on...

Bite by Bite: Nourishments and Jamborees

Aimee Nezhukumatathil

100%

mousewithgrayears is interested in reading...

Wild Dark Shore

Charlotte McConaghy

A family on a remote island. A mysterious woman washed ashore. A rising storm on the horizon. Dominic Salt and his three children are caretakers of Shearwater, a tiny island not far from Antarctica. Home to the world’s largest seed bank, Shearwater was once full of researchers. But with sea levels rising, the Salts are now its final inhabitants, packing up the seeds before they are transported to safer ground. Despite the wild beauty of life here, isolation has taken its toll on the Salts. Raff, eighteen and suffering his first heartbreak, can only find relief at his punching bag; Fen, seventeen, has started spending her nights on the beach among the seals; nine-year-old Orly, obsessed with botany, fears the loss of his beloved natural world; and Dominic can’t stop turning back toward the past, and the loss that drove the family to Shearwater in the first place. Then, during the worst storm the island has ever seen, a woman washes up on shore. As the Salts nurse the woman, Rowan, back to life, their suspicion gives way to affection, and they finally begin to feel like a family again. Rowan, long accustomed to protecting her heart, begins to fall for the Salts, too. But Rowan isn’t telling the whole truth about why she set out for Shearwater. And when she discovers the sabotaged radios and a freshly dug grave, she realizes Dominic is keeping his own dark secrets. As the storms on Shearwater gather force, the characters must decide if they can trust each other enough to protect the precious seeds in their care before it’s too late—and if they can finally put the tragedies of the past behind them to create something new, together.

mousewithgrayears commented on a post

yarrowing

Edited

Thoughts from 95%

I’m a chapter and a half from being done, but I started another book rather than finish this one! I can’t reckon with leaving the world of station 11, as heartbreaking and hopeful as it is. If I don’t read the end I don’t have to reckon with it being over 😩😅

mousewithgrayears is interested in reading...

10h

The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins

Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing

Matsutake is the most valuable mushroom in the world--and a weed that grows in human-disturbed forests across the northern hemisphere. Through its ability to nurture trees, matsutake helps forests to grow in daunting places. It is also an edible delicacy in Japan, where it sometimes commands astronomical prices. In all its contradictions, matsutake offers insights into areas far beyond just mushrooms and addresses a crucial question: what manages to live in the ruins we have made? A tale of diversity within our damaged landscapes, The Mushroom at the End of the World follows one of the strangest commodity chains of our times to explore the unexpected corners of capitalism. Here, we witness the varied and peculiar worlds of matsutake commerce: the worlds of Japanese gourmets, capitalist traders, Hmong jungle fighters, industrial forests, Yi Chinese goat herders, Finnish nature guides, and more. These companions also lead us into fungal ecologies and forest histories to better understand the promise of cohabitation in a time of massive human destruction. By investigating one of the world's most sought-after fungi, The Mushroom at the End of the World presents an original examination into the relation between capitalist destruction and collaborative survival within multispecies landscapes, the prerequisite for continuing life on earth.

mousewithgrayears made progress on...

18h

Bite by Bite: Nourishments and Jamborees

Aimee Nezhukumatathil

48%

Post from the The Tangled Tree: A Radical New History of Life forum

mousewithgrayears

Thoughts from 35% (page 163)

I wouldn't say this writer is anti-feminist, but I wouldn't call him feminist, either. Some of his takes and omissions seem 1990s although this was published in 2018.

The writing is a nice combination of scientifically thorough and informal; I like the humorous parentheticals and the way he occasionally addresses the reader. The reading is not as dense as I expected.

mousewithgrayears made progress on...

The Tangled Tree: A Radical New History of Life

David Quammen

46%

mousewithgrayears is interested in reading...

I Deliver Parcels in Beijing

Hu Anyan

Authentic and humorous first person account of one worker’s daily life in the huge system that is the Chinese gig economy. The system could crush you unless you, as the author, have a slightly philosophical look on everyday life. A bestseller in China in 2023 with over 160, 000 copies sold, 400,000 ebooks read, and 1,360,000 audio versions downloaded. Also sold for local publications in 15 territories.In 2023, I Deliver Parcels in Beijing became a literary sensation of the year in China. The story of a worker doing odd jobs in various anonymous mega-cities, Hu AnYan’s voice hit a nerve with a generation of young Chinese who feel at odds with an ever growing pressure to perform and succeed.Hu started posting essays about his experiences online during COVID lockdowns. His recollection of night shifts in a huge logistics center in the South of China went nights so hot that even drinking three liters of water does not require a toilet break; colleagues going for KTV instead of trying to get a few hours' sleep; where are the affordable rooms with proper air conditioning, and what is the best amount of alcohol in order to sleep but not feel drowsy a few hours later? The work is brutal, and there is no real sense of future in sight. But Hu is armed with a deadpan sense of humor and a strong idea of self, he moves on when he feels from logistics in the South to delivering parcels in Beijing, over to other odd jobs, all the while also discovering the power of reading and writing.A unique first person portrait of a society we never hear from but everyone has opinions about and benefits from.

mousewithgrayears commented on a List

these titles are complete sentences!

mousewithgrayears is interested in reading...

Variations on a Dream: A Novel

Angelique LaLonde

From the Giller-shortlisted author of Glorious Frazzled Beings comes a beguiling debut novel humming with sensuality, intelligence, and a tinge of the absurd.After years of shouldering the childcare and housework, trying to keep her creative life and career alive, and managing her husband’s existential anxieties, the once whimsical Sarah is too burned out to dream. Most days, all she can muster is an imaginary version of her husband Trevor, one who actually listens to her, an almost-IRL replica of the husband in the picture-perfect image of their family she crafts online. Meanwhile, Trevor is caught in a downward spiral of his own. Strangled by his fear of artistic mediocrity and mounting sexual frustration, he fantasizes about the early college days when their romance was still athrill with seductive possibility.When both Sarah and Trevor secretly stumble on an auteur porn film based on the ancient Greek myth of Ariadne and Dionysus, they are immediately sucked into a dizzying maze of obsession, betrayal, and duplicate selves echoing backwards in time. With the arrival of a brilliant, alluring new student in Trevor’s university class, the line between fantasy and reality is increasingly blurred, threatening to collapse the walls of their mythology forever.With startling psychological insight, a sly sense of humour, and all the peculiar twists of a fairytale, Variations on a Dream is a fearless exploration of the lengths we will go to save what we believe to be a dream come true.

mousewithgrayears is interested in reading...

We Have Always Lived in the Castle

Shirley Jackson

Shirley Jackson’s beloved gothic tale of a peculiar girl named Merricat and her family’s dark secret Taking readers deep into a labyrinth of dark neurosis, We Have Always Lived in the Castle is a deliciously unsettling novel about a perverse, isolated, and possibly murderous family and the struggle that ensues when a cousin arrives at their estate. This edition features a new introduction by Jonathan Lethem.

mousewithgrayears is interested in reading...

There Is No Antimemetics Division

qntm

An antimeme is an idea with self-censoring properties; an idea which, by its intrinsic nature, discourages or prevents people from spreading it.Antimemes are real. Think of any piece of information which you wouldn't share with anybody, like passwords, taboos and dirty secrets. Or any piece of information which would be difficult to share even if you complex equations, very boring passages of text, large blocks of random numbers, and dreams... But anomalous antimemes are another matter entirely. How do you contain something you can't record or remember? How do you fight a war against an enemy with effortless, perfect camouflage, when you can never even know that you're at war? Welcome to the Antimemetics Division. No, this is not your first day.This ebook is an official release by me, qntm from the SCP Foundation wiki! PM me if you require confirmation. This ebook collects all of my Antimemetics Division SCP-055, SCP-2256 and the complete serials There Is No Antimemetics Division and Five Five Five Five Five.

mousewithgrayears made progress on...

The Tangled Tree: A Radical New History of Life

David Quammen

27%

mousewithgrayears commented on a post from the Pagebound Club forum

booksinwildplaces

Medical book recs

Hi everyone, I really enjoyed Emotional Female by Yumiko Kadota and When Breath Becomes Air by Paul Kalanithi. I'm looking for some more medical book recs (memoir-style or fiction) to try if you have any suggestions 🩺 .

I've also read You Went to Emergency for What?, A Little Unwell and This is Going to Hurt. Thanks!

mousewithgrayears commented on a post from the Pagebound Club forum

Annie2000

Edited

Books within books 🪆

I'm currently reading 'Death of the Author' by Nnedi Okorafor, which is amazing so far. One of the things I love about the book is that you get the main story, but also chapters from the book the FMC is writing. I think you have to be insanely talented to make this concept work, because you basically have to write two books.

I have read one other book where this happens, 'Eliza and her Monsters' by Francesca Zappia, which was also amazing. So that made me wonder, are there more out there?

So if you know about books where you also get to read the book the MC is writing, please let me know! If I get enough responses I'll make a list out of it.

Update: Wow, this post got a lot more replies than I expected. RIP to my TBR. I have made the list and you can find it here.

mousewithgrayears is interested in reading...

Truth & Beauty

Ann Patchett

Ann Patchett and the late Lucy Grealy met in college in 1981, and, after enrolling in the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, began a friendship that would be as defining to both of their lives as their work. In Grealy’s critically acclaimed memoir Autobiography of a Face, she wrote about losing part of her jaw to childhood cancer, years of chemotherapy and radiation, and endless reconstructive surgeries. In Truth and Beauty, the story isn’t Lucy’s life or Ann’s life but the parts of their lives they shared. This is a portrait of unwavering commitment that spans twenty years, from the long winters of the Midwest to surgical wards to book parties in New York. Through love, fame, drugs, and despair, this is what it means to be part of two lives that are intertwined--and what happens when one is left behind.

Gift Pagebound Royalty Merch Store Roadmap Founder Announcements

Support

FAQ Contact Us Report a bug

team@pagebound.co

Company

About Us Terms of Use Privacy Policy Content Policy

Gift Pagebound Royalty Merch Store Roadmap Founder Announcements