Reading “seasonally” has offered another way to contemplate reading options on my own shelves; and it forms a bridge between my life on-the-page and off-the-page. The first three quotations below were from books that I did not choose to read because it was fall, and I was surprised to
Just when my thoughts were etching a loop as I struggled to describe Madeleine Thien’s new novel, The Book of Records, I came across this Joy Williams quotation*: “What good stories deal with is the horror and incomprehensibility of time, the dark encroachment of old catastrophes.” That is, indeed,
From these ten books alone, anyone might conclude that “we” have a lot of antiques and tigers, typewriters and troubled sisters, and that we all wear sandals with socks in Canada. (I am not a fan: if it’s cold enough for socks, it’s too cold for sandals.) Moving from
Many people think of following the news as a responsibility, but this contrasting idea gave me pause, expressed in Voices of Resistance: Diaries of Genocide (2025). Because priorities shift, during wartime, when your daily life is what other people are consuming as news—on their phones while waiting in line
Over the years, I’ve been reading through my list of 20Something books, a sly way to indicate which books have been unread on my shelves for more than twenty years. The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876) was one of the most stubborn residents, resisted all the more because, even
