Then at least we would be responsible for our own doom, instead of someone else deciding it for us. And really, isn't that the most any of us can hope for? One of my most frustrating university discussions happened over a reading of Antigone. I don’t even remember now what literature class it was, who the professor was, or even what year I was in, but I still remember the other student’s face, her pale-red hair and floral dress.   Antigone by Felix Resureccion Hidalgo I hadn’t read Sophocles before that class, but Antigone blew me away. We also read Oedipus Rex and Oedipus at Thebes ..read more

It had not taken them long after arrive in Glatton to understand that their service was not truly about the donuts and coffee. They had seen enough boys fail to return from a morning flight. The real service was that their faces, their voices, their sendoff might be the final blessing from home for some of these young pilots. The enormity of this trivial-seeming job became clearer every day. There is so much historical fiction written about World War II that I have grown resistant to it. The sheer volume is overwhelming, and it can become repetitive: just another somebody’s interpretation of ..read more

“That’s true for adults, too; after all we’re just the warped remains of imperfectly loved children. None of us gets the perfect love we ought, but maybe that’s what life is for, to give us time to collect it in bits and pieces, a little here, a little there. Maybe we’re supposed to put it together ourselves slowly.” The God of Endings by Jacqueline Holland is a story about vampires, centered on the character of Anna, a child in 1830s New York whose small village is convinced that the recent spate of illness is caused by the prince of darkness and his minions. When her father, a stoneworker ..read more

Last week at work I wrote a blog post about friendships in literature for National Best Friends Day. (You can read it HERE if you want.) I had some ideas of books I wanted to highlight but needed a few more, so I did a bit of internet research. Something came up quite often in the other lists I found that has been bugging me ever since: The authors of some lists group books about friendship with books about sisterhood. This suggests a couple of untrue things. One is that men don’t have friendships. None of the lists included books about brotherhood grouped in with friendship, only female frien ..read more

“I have dreams where I am back in the gym,” Elena said. “That feeling of control and mastery. That feeling of having a secret power. Defying the rules of the natural order.” I’ve been excited to read Winterland, by Rae Meadows, since I first heard about it last fall. It tells the story of Anya, who lives in Norilsk, an industrial town in Russia’s far north. Her father works at the copper mine and her mother, who was a ballerina, vanished when she was five. She goes to ballet lessons for a while, but she does not love it. Instead, Anya loves doing cartwheels and somersaults with her friend Sv ..read more

“Words are, in my not so humble opinion, our most inexhaustible source of magic, capable of both influencing injury, and remedying it.” Back in October of last year, I decided to listen to Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban (my favorite book in the series). I was wanting an October-esque read and it was available to check out on Libby. It kind of sparked a renewed interest in Harry Potter, so this winter I decided to listen to the rest of the series. Strangely enough, RIGHT after I started Harry Potter and The Goblet of Fire, I read a Facebook post by a friend, wherein she expressed he ..read more

"I think you may be a kindred spirit after all." When I was a kid, I went through an intense season of Anne of Green Gables fandom. I checked them out so often from the public library that my mom noticed, and at Christmas I received a boxed set. I read and reread those stories, wanting to live in that vibrant world of flowers and imagination and scholarly ambition and friendship. (Especially friendship, to my shy little self.) (This was the cover design of the boxed set I had, but mine did not survive the many bathtub readings I put them through) I’m not sure the last time I read them—when I ..read more

One year ago today I was working on a project at work: pulling books and making a sign for a Black History display.  I wrote an Instagram post about it: why I thought the display was important, how bothered I was that almost every book I wanted to put on the display was checked in, how important I felt it was to have displays like this. How important it is, in a community like the one I live in, where the majority of people are white and the city government is run only by white people. (One of my followers called me racist for calling this out.) When I wrote that post, and my follow-up b ..read more

I read 37 books in 2022. This is about my average amount of books for the year, somewhere between 30-40. Is that an abnormally low average for a lifelong book nerd who's also a librarian? Probably (when I see people's year-in-review book posts and they've read 149 that year I feel a bit like a failure). But I chalk it up to the fact that I have several hobbies, so when I have time to do something it's not always reading. Plus there's no shame allowed in reading! Some insights I've gotten as I've put together my list: My blog has mostly become book reviews. I used to blog about all sorts ..read more

If only one could engrave entire memories in silver, though Robin, to be manifested again and again for years to come—not the cruel distortion of the daguerreotype, but a pure and impossible distillation of emotions and sensations. For simple ink on paper was not enough to describe this golden afternoon; the warmth of un complicated friendship, all fights forgotten, all sins forgiven; the sunlight melting away the memory of the classroom chill; the sticky taste of lemon on their tongues and their startled, delighted relief. Some books make my thoughts go in strange directions, and Babel: An ..read more