Review: Let Me Be Like Water, by S.K. Perry

I've been remiss in writing here, or sharing reviews, or doing much of anything. I suspect I'll pick this little blog up again eventually--I always do--but in the meantime, I'm hoping to at least share reviews I've written for other sites for the books I'm really loving lately. Here's the first of what I hope will be many more. Reprinted from Shelf Awareness with permission.

Let Me Be Like Water is a beautiful and heartbreaking story of young love and young loss. A meditation on grief and what could have been, S.K. Perry's debut offers glimpses of the sometimes magical ways the world works when life is shattered and we're left with nothing but the pieces.

February: A Monthly Round-Up

February has come and gone, ya'll, and with it that absurd holiday and the last of my pre-race taper. I'm gearing up for my first ultra attempt this weekend, and am battling a frustrated IT band and sore knee plus a forecast for 40mph winds all day. So, we'll see.

The upside of tapering is that it opens up a startling number of hours in each of my weeks (I went from an average of 5-6 hours/week of run time to an average of 1.5), which I filled with books as often as possible. Some were good. Some were... not so good.

Book Review: Endure, by Alex Hutchinson

Ever wondered why you find yourself able to sprint the last hundred meters of a 5k race, when you spent most of the third mile feeling like you couldn’t possibly take one more step? Or why crowd support makes you run better? Or why people tend to collapse after they cross the finish line of a marathon, rather than before?

Alex Hutchinson, columnist for Outside and Runner’s World, tackles these questions and more in his new book, Endure: Mind, Body, and the Curiously Elastic Limits of Human Performance. Hutchinson organizes his research into the limits of human performance into three buckets: Mind & Muscle (with chapters on how the brain interacts with our muscle capacity), Limits (pain, muscles, oxygen, heat, thirst, and fuel), and Limit Breakers (the science of training the brain to go beyond what we think we can do).

January: A Monthly Round-Up

January came and went in a flash, as far as I can tell. I was sick for a solid chunk of the month, so maybe that's what made it fly by; something about losing two weeks to the couch and The Crown made my sense of time a little wibbly-wobbly.

Despite said setbacks, though, it was a good month for reading: