Ren Reads Too Much Podcast

This week I’m living for the way reading has completely cracked open my creativity, especially the kind that’s shown up in fandom spaces lately. My reading life is spinning out all this energy, and it’s turning into real-world projects, joy, and small acts of rebellion. Books aren’t just for reading…they’re fuel for investing back into my own creative work, whether that means making cross-stitches...

This month was a crash course in burnout, resilience, and remembering how important it is to let books and small routines take care of you when real life feels a little too real. I’m not going to sugarcoat it: between family changes, tough conversations, and the general chaos that seems to come with June, my energy for showing up in any “official” capacity bottomed out. But you know what? That’s o...

This week, my brain latched onto something it really loves: books that happen on the same timeline and let you see a story from multiple angles. There’s something so deeply satisfying about seeing a favorite story or scene play out in a different character’s head. It scratches an itch for context, for nuance, for that little thrill of knowing more than you did the first time. I talked about this i...

This week was a strange one for my reading life…total hodgepodge energy, hopping genres and moods by the day. I tried (and gave up on) a Booker Prize winner, finally admitted defeat on The Hobbit for now, and dipped in and out of a handful of books that felt exactly right for this moment, even if I’ve picked them up before. Sometimes when I reread something I thought I knew, it just hits totally d...

This week, I leaned in hard to that belief that the book you need always finds you, right when you need it. My reading life has been shifting alongside everything else. Does anyone else feel like 2026 is just this nonstop transformation party that they never even RSVP’d to, but find themselves stuck in? The books on my shelf are suddenly fitting perfectly into what I’m working through in real time...

I'm changing my mind on Tough Guy and switching podcast day to Thursday because Tuesday is just not the day I can make this happen anymore! Some weeks, it feels like my whole reading life stretches and shifts right along with my real life. I found myself in the middle of a massive pile of books, some familiar rereads, some totally new, and realized just how much my experience of a book is shaped b...

Okay, sometimes you go on a tangent about your all-time favorite books, but this week felt like a return to the usual rhythm. I’m deep in my Heated Rivalr y spiral (again?? still??). But now, I’m reading just a chapter or two a day, because I know myself…full-on hyperfixation feels amazing until it doesn’t, and pacing it out keeps things fresh. At the same time, I’m stretching beyond my comfort zo...

This week, I had to pivot a little: less reading, a lot more creating. Getting my pop-up merch shop together turned out to be a much bigger project than I expected, which meant trading some of my regular reading time for crafty energy and behind-the-scenes hustle. You can check out the merch shop, here! I’d love any feedback you have on the designs or what you’d like to see in the shop. Hoping to...

This week, I’m channeling all my energy into the books that have changed my reading life, not the ones that kept me up crying at 2 a.m. (though shoutout to those). These are the nonfiction books that have shifted the way I think, write, and just generally exist in the world. There’s something about picking up the right nonfiction book at the right time that helps me see things a little differently...

This week was…a lot, and honestly, I don’t have the energy to pretend everything is polished or perfect, or worse, try to actually make it be like that. So I figured, why not lean right into the mess and talk about why this podcast exists, why it sounds the way it does, and why I don’t care about editing or fancy extras? Done is better than perfect, and sometimes the magic is in just showing up: i...

Some weeks, my brain is like…yeah, we’re not doing anything new right now. I reread Role Model this week, and knowing what’s happening in The Long Game at the same time?? Completely different experience. There’s so much happening in the background that you don’t fully catch it the first time, and going back to it felt like I was reading it fully for the first time. And at the same time, I picked u...

Some weeks are not “try something new” weeks. And I feel like we don’t talk about that enough. This has been a low-capacity week for me . The kind where everything feels a little too loud, a little too heavy, and I do not have the energy to invest in figuring out if a new book is going to give me the dopamine. So I didn’t. I went straight back to The Long Game because I knew exactly what I was goi...

There’s a difference between being unable to move on and choosing to stay somewhere that feels good. There’s this boring narrative floating around that rereading the same book means you’re stuck. That you should be moving on, finding something new, expanding your horizons like a “good reader.” But that’s not actually what’s happening. When you go back to the same story again and again, it’s usuall...

This week felt a little off. Not in a bad way, just one of those weeks where I really wanted to curl up with a book and disappear for a bit. And instead, I was doing mom stuff, cleaning, organizing, trying to settle into a new rhythm around the house. And when I did get time to read, I noticed something interesting. I wanted something new. It finally felt like I could move on from Heated Rivalry (...

This week felt like one of those moments where I zoomed out a little and realized, oh, there are a LOT of us out here. I had someone comment that they were 83 the first time they read Heated Rivalry or watched the show, and I have not stopped thinking about it. Because that’s it, right there. This whole idea that reading, especially emotional, immersive, sometimes slightly unhinged reading, is jus...

This has been coming up a lot in my comments and messages lately: people saying they’re in a reading slump, they can’t get into anything new, nothing is hitting the same. And I get it. I really do. Because I am still picking up other books right now… My TBR is full of things I genuinely want to read. But it’s been harder to choose, harder to stay engaged, harder to sink in the way I normally do. A...

I’ve been a reader for most of my life…until I wasn’t. College kind of knocked it out of me, as it does for many of us. Reading became something I had to do instead of something I loved. Somewhere along the way, I just stopped reaching for books altogether. And then in 2012, I picked up Twilight from the library as a joke. Which, unfortunately for everyone around me, was not a joke. That one very...