Tag: books

Reading and Book Reviews

Favorite Journalistic Nonfiction – My Year in Books 2025

Chrys Buckley

Resuming my weekly tour through favorite books of 2025 after a bit of a hiatus. I’d love to say the break was just because I was so busy with grad school and book stuff and that was definitely part of it, but I was also in a doomscrolling pit for weeks, because of course I was given all that’s going on.

Today we arrive at my favorite journalistic nonfiction. This category was a tie between two very different books that are both examples of excellent reporting:

Blazing Eye Sees All by Leah Sottile
Catch and Kill by Ronan Farrow

cover of Blazing Eye Sees All by Leah Sottile
cover of Catch and Kill by Ronan Farrow

Both books mix a bit of first-person narrative into their reporting but keep the book focused on the main story.

Catch and Kill is about Ronan Farrow’s reporting on the Harvey Weinstein story, and it reads like a spy thriller. I never thought a book could be so equally enraging and entertaining. I couldn’t put it down because the writing was so compelling. There are personal asides and anecdotes that add just the right flavor of touching and funny, and there are terrible tales about what powerful men will do to keep their power, and that is by no means limited to Weinstein and his immediate circle.

I don’t think I’ve ever read a book that so deftly manages to be equally enraging and entertaining at the same time.

Blazing Eye Sees All is about the Mother God cult and also about the history of new age cults in America. It will make you sputter how? and why? and what the actual fuck now? It will make you so angry at the people that propagate cults and lies, and it will also make you feel some empathy for how and why people get sucked into this sort of thing. Leah Sottile does such a good job, in all of her work, in threading that needle.

As a bonus, I got to meet Leah Sottile at the Portland Book Festival with a classmate of mine. We went to her pop-up reading, then went to have our books signed and had a nice chat with Leah. I was internally freaking out bc I’ve long been a fan of her work in both podcasts and books, but I think I held it together enough. We talked about cults and writing and the Crime Writers On podcast and tarot cards.

Congratulations to Leah Sottile for her Oregon Book Award nomination for Blazing Eye Sees All!

Blindness and Disability, Music, My Books, Writing

If You Are a Music Fan . . . You Might Like INVISIBLE VIOLETS

Chrys Buckley
a silhouette of a person with hair flying like they're head banging, with music symbols in the background, including treble clefs, bass clefs, sharp symbols, flat symbols, and music notes.

If you know (and everyone you know knows) you talk about music too much . . .

If you ever had the urge to cover a driveway or sidewalk with chalk drawings of band logos, song names, and lyrics . . .

If you credit music for getting you through your toughest times and hardest heartbreaks . . .

If you frequently have the urge to blast music while driving (or while riding in a car if you’re like me and can’t drive) and sing along at the top of your lungs . . .

If you remember your life by what albums you were listening to when and understand your life through lyrics . . .

If you were the kind of kid who answered parental questions about how the latest visit to the doctor’s office went with what songs you heard while in the waiting room . . .

If you love the 60 Songs that Explain the ’90s podcast (now 60 Songs that Explain the ’00s) or would listen to a similar podcast for your specific favorite music decade . . .

. . . then my forthcoming debut book, INVISIBLE VIOLETS: A Mixtape in Lyric Essays is a book for you. It’s a memoir in 7 essays with a few different themes running through its tracks (essays).

One of the strongest themes is disability (see this post about the disability aspect of the book), and as I write in Track 3: The Caduceus and the Muse:

Not all my writing, not even all my more personal writing, addressed albinism or disability, but I was constitutionally incapable of not writing about music.”

Music is all over this book. Obnoxiously so, even. Music was such a saving force in my life when I was young, and I hope my book evokes that particular sense of connecting with music as a teenager and how that resonates and evolves long after adolescence. How music can reach you when you’re an isolated and outcast kid in a way nothing else can reach you. How music can buoy you when you’re in your twenties and finding your way in the world. How music will always be with you, through all the ups and downs of adult life, as your tastes expand over time. I hope I’ve done a decent job of capturing something that feels beyond and before words.

Your particular favorite genres might be different from mine, and I hope that what I’ve written, while deeply specific, speaks to feelings that transcend genre. Still, you might be especially drawn to this book if you are or were a fan of ’90s rock, especially any of the many musical projects of Chris Cornell, to whose memory the book is dedicated. Almost every band that was on the Singles soundtrack is in the book. The artists and genres mentioned lean grunge and heavy and rock, and there’s also modern pop, singer-songwriter girlies across the ages, classic rock, and weirdly mentions of two very different artists doing covers of Joni Mitchell songs.

Again, though, my hope is that even when our specific tastes and faves differ, the feeling of the primacy of music that infuses this book will still resonate with you as you read.

I’m working on book playlists based on musical references and allusions in the book. One is a maximalist version that’s over the top, excessive, and 1.3 days long. The other is an abridged version that I’ve so far only been able to whittle down to 100 songs, which seems long for an abridged version but might have to stand as is. I’m also working on a word cloud of all the music in the book. So those will be incoming at some point before my book launch on March 13th!

Music as a theme is over-the-top, excessively prominent in these essays:
Track 3: The Caduceus and the Muse
Track 5: Can’t Change Me: An Unnatural History of My Names
Track 7: Distant Lights
Acknowledgments

Music as a theme is central in these essays:
Track 4: August is a Burnt Burgundy-Violet Haze
Track 6: Reasonable Doubt

Disability is present but more peripheral in these essays:
Track 1: Invisible Violet: On Seeing and Not Seeing
Track 2: Blue Alchemy

Cover image of Invisible Violets: A Mixtape in Lyric Essays by Chrys Buckley. Words are green against a textured background of different shades of purple. Near the top of the cover, there is an author blurb that reads, "A fierce manifesto about claiming your own story. This book will change you and linger long after the final page." This blurb was written by Tarn Wilson, author of In Praise of Inadequate Gifts.

~~~

For all the book details, check out the INVISIBLE VIOLETS page!

This post is part of a series, published the second Tuesday of every month, where I think about who my book is for.

~Chrys

Image Description: a silhouette of a person with hair flying like they’re head banging, with music symbols in the background, including treble clefs, bass clefs, sharp symbols, flat symbols, and music notes.

Reading and Book Reviews

Favorite Genre-Bender (and Funnest Book) – My Year in Books 2025

Chrys Buckley

Continuing my weekly tour through favorite books of 2025, today we arrive at my favorite genre-bender and overall funnest book:

cover of Who Killed One The Gun? by Gigi Little

Who Killed One the Gun? by Gigi Little
Forest Avenue Press

I don’t know how to talk about this book other than to say, just read it. It’s so good. Several people I know are getting this book as a birthday present in 2026.

So what can I say that doesn’t give too much away? A (self-described) third-rate private eye gets stuck in a time loop after being killed. He has to solve the case he was working on before he died and his own murder.

It’s delicious. It’s funny. And fun. Gigi Little plays with language in delightful ways. It’s quirky in the best, truest way. It plays with a lot of noir tropes and subverts expectations. Every character’s name is a number followed by a rhyme. They all have distinct voices and personas, and are memorable. There’s a lot of old-timey radio in the book, and it is a blast.

It’s a murder mystery. Two murder mysteries in one. Since mystery was one of my earliest genres—I was a Nancy Drew kid—and is the genre I go to in my distraction-seeking listening behaviors, I’m usually good at figuring out whodunit. Sometimes that’s fun because it’s ego-satisfying to be ahead of the game and figure things out and be right. Sometimes it’s not so fun, more boring and obvious.

I won’t say whether I thought both murders were committed by the same person or different people, but I had a strong suspicion on one of the cases and a weak suspicion on the other. The weak suspicion ended up being partially right, and the strong suspicion was dead wrong.

It was so fun to be so wrong!

Again, I don’t want to say anything that would detract from the reading experience by revealing too much beforehand, so just READ THIS BOOK!

Chrys

Image Description: The cover of Who Killed One the Gun? showing a man (One the Gun) dead on a clock spiral and featuring blurbs by Mo Davies and Lidia Yuknavitch.

My Books, Writing

Invisible Violets – How to Get Signed and Personalized Books

Chrys Buckley
Chrys Buckley signing advanced reader copies of her book Invisible Violets at the Wandering Aengus Press booth at Portland book fest

Since announcing the release of my debut book, Invisible Violets: A Mixtape in Lyric Essays, which releases on March 13, 2026 from Wandering Aengus Press, people have asked me how they can get signed books.

I have answers for you!
And not just signed books, but also personalized!

It’s a bit of a Choose Your Own Adventure depending on where you live, and so this post serves as your answers for every scenario. Whether you live near me or far away, I have ways to get signed books to you.

Chrys Buckley signing advanced reader copies of her book Invisible Violets at the Wandering Aengus Press booth at the Portland Book Fest

How to Get Signed Books in Portland, Oregon

There are lots of ways to get signed books in the City of Roses:

  • Join me at my launch party on March 13, 7-8:30 p.m. at BOLD Coffee and Books. There will be a conversation about the book. There will be the reading of excerpts from the book. There will be food and drinks available for purchase before and during the event, as is always the case at BOLD. And there will be book signing. You can buy the book at the event and get it signed on the spot. This will be an easy way to get a signed book and it will be a blast!
  • Come to one of my other local events and buy a book and have me sign it! A whole bunch of different events are in the works, and I’m working on creating an Events page to keep it all in one place. Suffice it to say, there will be other opportunities outside of the launch.
  • Pre-order my book (pre-order hub here) and bring your copy to any of my events or coordinate meeting up with me in person outside of events to have me sign it.

How to Get Signed Books on Orcas Island and in Seattle

Along with local events, I’m working on some Orcas and Seattle events as well.

Orcas Island: Plans aren’t definite yet, but I’m working on two separate trips for bookish events on the island. One will be in June 2026 and will be an event with my publisher and other authors at the press, details TBD. Another will be next winter, January 2027 or so, and will be more focused on my book and its many mentions of life on Orcas.

Seattle: This is a bit more ephemeral, but would likely be coupled with the Orcas trips, either on my way there or on my way back. Details TBD. My dream is to do an event at Easy Street Records in West Seattle.

For either of these locations, you could either buy the book at the event or pre-order the book and bring it to the event for me to sign.

How to Get Signed Books if You Live in the United States outside of the Pacific Northwest

Most of my inquiries so far have come from people in this category. This is for you if you:

  • Went to high school with me in New Jersey
  • Went to blind camp (or JKRC or Avalon or Drew) with me in New Jersey
  • Went to Washington College with me for a brief time
  • Went to Northern Arizona University with me for a brief time
  • Know me from a certain internet forum (iykyk)
  • Know me from Camp Orkila and don’t live in the Pacific Northwest
  • Went to medical school with me and went outside the PNW for residency and/or practice
  • Know me from social media or this website/blog
  • Don’t know me at all

To make this available to people in places I’m not likely to travel to in the near future, I’ve partnered with local bookstore Annie Bloom’s Books in Multnomah Village, and they will be my hub for signed and personalized books.

Here’s how to get signed books through Annie Bloom’s Books:

  • Order Invisible Violets from them using this direct link to my Signature Page.
  • In your Order Comment at checkout, write these things:
    • You are requesting a signed copy or a personalized copy.
    • What name you want it personalized to.
    • A quick note about how you know me, if you do, so I can write a more personalized note. This is especially helpful if you have changed your name since we knew each other most, or if I know you mostly by a screen name.
    • Your order comment could read something like this. “Requesting personalized copy, addressed to X. This is so-and-so from such-and-where.”
  • Then I’ll go in and sign and personalize and Annie Bloom’s will ship to you.

Note: This is for shipping to US addresses only! Which brings me to…

Chrys Buckley signing advanced reader copies of Invisible Violets at the Wandering Aengus Press booth at the Portland Book Fest

How to Get Signed Books at the NOAH Conference (Columbus, OH)

This isn’t a done deal yet, but I’m thinking of going to the NOAH Conference this summer, and will update here with details as plans progress. If I go, I’ll definitely bring books with me to sell and sign!

How to Get Signed Books if You Live Outside the US

If you want a signed copy of my book and you live outside of the US, you can buy the book from me directly, via Venmo or what have you, which will have to include the shipping costs, and I’ll sign or personalize and mail it to you. You can always reach out to me via my Contact Form if you need to set this up.

I think I have covered every earthly possibility for getting signed books to everyone who wants one. If you have questions or need help with any of the methods, reach out to me here!

Chrys

Chrys Buckley signing advanced reader copies of Invisible Violets at the Wandering Aengus Press booth at the Portland Book Fest

Image description: four photos of Chrys Buckley signing advanced reader copies of Invisible Violets at the Wandering Aengus Press booth at Portland Book Fest.

Music, My Books, Writing

How Did It Get So Late?

Chrys Buckley

When I think about INVISIBLE VIOLETS, my book that’s releasing on March 13 (9 weeks from today!), it mostly fills me with joy and pride. I still tear up with feelings of, I can’t believe this is really happening, OMGGGGG!

Mixed in with all that joy and pride and omfg, though, is sorrow. It feels important to talk about that too. Some of the sorrows are too big to go into on here. One of them I may write about eventually but am not ready for yet because it’s something I learned about very recently. For now, I’m going to stick to the survivable sorrows.

Here is one of them: I’m sad in a bone deep way that my first book is coming out so long after Chris Cornell is gone. I’m sad that my book is dedicated to his memory and not to him as a still living person in the world.

Many years ago, I wrote my first full-length memoir manuscript. It’s known around these parts (this site) as Moonchild (named after one of Chris’s songs). I was always going to dedicate to Chris Cornell because it chronicled the year that his first solo album, Euphoria Morning, had a profound impact on my life. I was thinking about that back in maybe 2007, give or take a year or so, when he was alive and well and making music.

I wanted to put it out there, in the world, in concrete words in a book, how much his music had meant to me. I hoped he’d read it someday and feel good that his art had had such a profound impact on someone. Lots of someones.

But then I put writing on the back burner for all sorts of reasons for a really long time, and Chris died in 2017 and now my first book, a different book, is dedicated to his ghost.

On Christmas, I found myself thinking all sorts of sad thoughts about time and regret and how I know it wouldn’t have changed anything if Chris had read a book of mine dedicated to him back in the day but still I wish I’d had a way to convey the magnitude of his art’s impact on me (and on so many other people).

What if I hadn’t put my writing on the back burner for all those years? What if I’d gotten my shit together so much sooner? What if I hadn’t thought there would always be time, always be later, until there wasn’t?

The funny thing is, all the essays in my upcoming collection are from the back burner years. And Moonchild, if I ever do anything with it, will now be dedicated to someone else, someone who was a very important and good friend to me during the year the book focuses on, someone who died in 2023.

Things always change, and mostly I’m at peace with that, but sometimes there are sorrows that need to be spoken. For me, having a book launching soon is bringing up some of those sorrows. I think that’s okay. Grief is weird and nonlinear and yeah, I’ve found myself unspeakably sad lately about a rock star death that happened almost nine years ago.

It doesn’t help with the sadness that I’ve been working on a book playlist and listening to so much Chris Cornell, solo and in all of his bands.

The title of this post comes from the song “Disappearing Act” on Chris’s second solo record, Carry On, and here I give you the music video:

Disappearing Act Video on YouTube

Chrys

Image Description: Picture of Chris Cornell

Pop Culture, Reading and Book Reviews

My Year in Books 2025

Chrys Buckley
cover of Fifteen Wild Decembers by Karen Powell
cover of The Great Believers by Rebecca Makkai
cover of Who Killed One The Gun? by Gigi Little
cover of Blazing Eye Sees All by Leah Sottile
cover of Imagine a Door by Laura Stanfill
cover of Reading the Waves by Lidia Yuknavitch
cover of Cekpa by Leah Altman
cover of Where We Call Home by Josephine Woolington - winner of the Oregon Book Award
cover of Catch and Kill by Ronan Farrow
cover of The Winter Sister by Megan Collins
cover of The Likeness by Tana French
cover of The Love of My After Life by Kristy Greenwood

This hasn’t been a banner year for me in number of books read. Grad school will do that. So will managing two departments of a press. So will having your own book in the works—I’m pretty sure I reread my book 9 times this summer for editing purposes. So will the state of the world.

I didn’t read as many books as I typically would. But, in all the chaos (internal and external) and busyness, I did read some excellent books. It was a banner year for quality, so I thought I would highlight some favorites.

My original intention was to post about books as I was reading them. I had that “I want to tell everyone in the world about how great this book is!” feeling, but then the list of books I wanted to post about but hadn’t found time for grew and grew. My next intention was to get a big Best Of list together by the end of 2025…and that obviously didn’t happen either.

So, time for a next next intention. I’m announcing it so I have to do it, this thing I’ve been wanting to do for months now. I still really want to share and exalt the great books I read and tell as many people as possible why I think they’ll love these books.

Over the next several weeks, on Sundays, I will post about my favorite 2025 books by category—completely made up by me—and write up about book in the gallery at the top of this post. I want to give each book its due, and share my excitement for each one.

In all cases except for one, these are books that I read in 2025, regardless of when they were published. Some of the books came out this year, and some definitely didn’t.

The order that book covers appear in the gallery at the top is randomized so that I wouldn’t play favorites with my favorites.

See you next Sunday!

Chrys

P.S. I also read some great manuscripts last year in my role at Ooligan Press and in independent editing work, books that are on their way to being out in the world but aren’t yet. Maybe that will be the next post series after this one because there are some incredible books in the pipeline that I think you’re going to want to know about.

Image Description: A gallery of book covers displayed in a 6×2 grid in randomized order: Fifteen Wild Decembers by Karen Powell, The Great Believers by Rebecca Makkai, Who Killed One the Gun? by Gigi Little, Blazing Eye Sees All by Leah Sottile, Imagine a Door by Laura Stanfill, Reading the Waves by Lidia Yuknavitch, Cekpa by Leah Altman, Where We Call Home by Josephine Woolington, Catch and Kill by Ronan Farrow, The Winter Sister by Megan Collins, The Likeness by Tana French, and The Love of My Afer Life by Kristy Greenwood.

Education, My Books, Writing

Putting My Game Face ON

Chrys Buckley

Goodbye, 2025. Hello there, 2026. New year, new me. All that jazz.

a person covered by post-it notes

It’s a wildly intense time in my life, and on Monday I go back to grad school for winter term. I’m gearing up for a doozy of a course load. And oh yeah, I also have a book coming out ten weeks from today. So there’s that, too.

Yesterday, I did a lot of my calendaring for the term, made a weekly template of when I’ll do work for which class, when I’ll fit in book promotion work, when I’ll work on ebooks and audiobooks for my manager roles at Ooligan Press, when I’ll shower, when I’ll check my email, when I’ll pee. Okay, that last one, and only that last one, was a joke. I’m scheduled to the hilt is the deal.

Every term for the last several, I’ve made a mega Master Plan google doc that lists every due date, every reading assignment, every discussion post due in Canvas, every project, every paper. Some of it’s very granular, like preparing for two weekly Ooligan meetings each week, teaching a department lesson at Ooligan every week, and recurring reflection assignments for classes. Others are big projects.

This document is in a grid, so that on the left are the weeks of the term, and across the top are the classes. It’s not a spreadsheet, but it’s close, with everything in checkable boxes to cross off when they’re completed. You can take the type A planner med student out of medical school, but you can’t take those organization instincts out of the former med student, I suppose.

While creating this Master Plan of Winter Term Domination, I had two thoughts swirling through my mind over and over.

Continue reading “Putting My Game Face ON” →
Writing

Predictable Post-Term Energy Curves

Chrys Buckley
A red saucer chair surrounded by bookshelves

A little over a week ago, I finished my second (of three) year in my grad program in Book Publishing. As with so many things, it went by both quickly and slowly.

It was often a frenzy. Especially this past spring term. I can say definitively it was the most intense term I ever experienced. And yes, that includes med school. I’m sure I’ll get more into the details of the term before too long on here, but now, in the more immediate aftermath, just thinking about it makes me too tired to function.

Since the term ended, I’ve gone through some swings in energy. And I’m remembering and realizing that it’s almost always this same pattern. The terms and the workloads may change, but this after-pattern is pretty constant.

I wonder, does anyone else have this same pattern too?

Continue reading “Predictable Post-Term Energy Curves” →
Music, Writing

The Call

Chrys Buckley

In light of the amazing publishing news I posted last month, I want to post about different parts of the process. Mostly, that’ll entail looking back at how I got my manuscript ready for submission, but today I want to talk about the call. It’s important to me to be as transparent as possible, especially for other writers reading this.

I was home sick from work. A bug had been rampaging through my grad program, and it was my turn. So I’d gone to bed early the night before. This was a good thing, because when I woke up, I had an email from Jill McCabe Johnson, the publisher at Wandering Aengus Press, sent the night before, asking if we could find a time for a call so she could ask me something.

After running through about fifty-three thousand possibilities, I settled on suspecting what she wanted to discuss would be something like, “We’d like to publish your book, but…” I couldn’t imagine she wanted to call me just to reject me–I remembered how when I was applying to medical school, a call meant you were getting in, and if they wanted to reject you they’d do it with an email or a notification posted in their online portal–and the need to ask me something wouldn’t likely apply to a straight-up acceptance.

Mostly, I was shocked that they could have an answer for me so quickly. I’d expected to wait until April, at least.

Continue reading “The Call” →
Blindness and Disability, Music, Writing

Yesterday I Did a Thing

Chrys Buckley
Screenshot of Duosuma Submission Manager showing trail to table and Wandering Angus Press Book Awards submission

Yesterday, on the new moon and the lunar new year, I submitted a full-length book manuscript to the Wandering Aengus Press Book Awards.

The manuscript I submitted is a collection of fourteen personal essays. The topics I explore within the pages are pretty reflective of this site in general but with less Breaking Bad. Not none, mind you, but less. There are essays discussing blindness and albinism and disability, essays about medical school, essays featuring the internet of the early 2000s, essays touching on pop culture in so many forms, essays rooted in land and place. Under the surface, they’re all contemplations of choice and time and memory.

They all, and I do mean all, touch on music in some way. In fact, I have a playlist underway and it is both massive and amazing.

My title, at least for now is

INVISIBLE VIOLETS: An Album of Personal Essays.

In some ways, it’s been in the works for over a decade. In other ways, it took shape over the last two or three. In yet another, it came together over the last eight weeks.

I plan on posting more about the process, as it’s been a wild ride I’d love to share.

But for now, for my first post in over four years, I’m just gonna bask in knowing that I did a thing.