This year I re-directed my focus away from a couple of years of determinedly reading from backlists (so that new books comprised only about 30% of my reading) back to freshly published and forthcoming books.* What I hadn’t anticipated was how delicately I would need to balance my library
The climate crisis erupts regularly in my reading, in unexpected ways. In Natsumi Hoshino’s manga series for children, Plum Crazy, named for the household’s first cat, even the cats heard a news report and pawed at the light switches to reduce their energy consumption. (My laugh came out more
In the past few weeks, I’ve read a few books for this reading project; at this rate, I will easily read the 32 books I’m aiming for (representing the percentage of people in one American state, who voted in November 2020 on a bill which maintained the legal option to
Here's a glimpse of some current reads which lend themselves more to sampling, in a handful of reading sessions, than gobbling in longer periods of time. Although I no longer need to ponder the ratio of heavy to light volumes in my stack of current reads (because the COVID
When I was a girl, I walked the streets of New York City with Harriet the Spy. And I revisited it regularly via Betty Smith’s A Tree Grows in Brooklyn. From a young age, this was a city I recognized on the page, a place that felt real, a
