2025: My Year in Books
This year was…something. On a macro scale, it was quite a roller coaster, and I’m not sure I need to go there at the moment. But on a personal scale, 2025 brought me a great deal of growth and clarity, and for that I’m grateful. I spent the year working hard towards my goal of…
Bookends: November 2025
This much-delayed Bookends post is brought to you by my indecision about what to write about. There are so many topics that I’d like to dig into: Outcome vs progress, my impending empty nest (and the concern about what it means if it’s not as empty as I expect), the responsibilities of being a citizen…
Bookends: October 2025
Autumn in Southern California always feels a little like spring in New England to me. Here, instead of purple crocuses pushing up through the grimy snow, the first of the rains makes flowers bloom that have been dormant over the dry summer. It feels like a new start, and it leaves me feeling like joining…
Bookends: September 2025
My favorite and most impactful read from September was Emotional Labor by Rose Hackman, followed at a close second by The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny by Kiran Desai, although it feels a little not-quite-right to compare a novel to a nonfiction read. Sonia and Sunny is quite a tome that apparently took nearly two…
On Different Realities
Where we used to live, we had a neighbor whom we considered a friend. He had a key to our house, we watched each other’s cats during travel, his family attended our family’s birthday parties and vice versa, and he was one of the biggest commenters on this blog. We moved away from that neighborhood…
Emotional Labor by Rose Hackman, and My Most Popular Post
Lately I’ve been really lighting up about what I call reframes: Something I already know presented in a way that makes me say, “Ohhh! I get it now!” It gives me that feeling of an itchy spot finally being scratched. Emotional Labor by Rose Hackman scratches that itch. It was written in 2023, and I…
Something went wrong. Please refresh the page and/or try again.
About Charity
Former editor, clinical research coordinator, yoga teacher, and doula, current educator and avid reader. Imperfect Happiness has been many things over the years, but at the moment, it’s primarily where I share my thoughts on books and life in general, with a couple of recipes thrown in.
Subscribe to Imperfect Happiness
Get new content delivered directly to your inbox.
Imperfect Happiness 