New reading projects are rooted in personal indulgence for me. Those unwieldy spreadsheets? The gobs of time spent thinking about reading and planning my reading? They eat directly into my reading time and steal from other relationships in my life -- the bookish-sort, the non-bookish-sort (which are outnumbered). And, yet,
A dozen stories, nearly all about women and girls who are deaf, Louise Stern being the fourth generation of her own family to be born deaf. See all those dots on the cover? Sure, more than a dozen, so imagine them as characters, not stories. Then imagine that each of the
When I was working in a bookshop, this is the sort of book we would have put on the counter near the cash register. House of Anansi, 2012 It is a certain sort of customer who deliberately includes this section of a bookshop in their browsing rather than
The images pulled from the lives of Afghan girls and women in Lana Šlezić's Forsaken are immediately and powerfully affecting. House of Anansi, 2007 The cover shot alone hints at the depth of contrast and complexity that the work contains. Consider the fragility (the torn lace) and the endurance (the
Indie presses folding. Mega-presses consolidating. Indie shops closing. Mega-stores dictating terms to publishers. It sounds grim if you're a reader who loves to browse in bookshops and wants a variety of good reading. But what to do? I am a single reader. Here's what I did: I made lists. Because that's what
