Last year I wrote in my 2024 wrap-up and 2025 reading hopes post that I wanted to keep raising the bar for inclusion in the best reads of the year. I’d already said, in 2024’s best book…

Less slumpy in November – I read some excellent books this month. The real issue has been the feeling that I’m teetering on the verge of running out: my print TBR is down to zero, my Ki…

My reading really slowed down in October. I’ve been in pain for much of it – the chest/rib injury from late September, plus what appears to be fasciitis in my left foot, which is being …

Passing, by Nella Larsen (1929): Probably everyone knows the plot of this already because I seem to be the last person on earth to read it, so really I thought I knew the salient points of the prem…

I’m so excited about 20 Books of Summer, I’m already on my way! These first three have all been very different: a distinctly grownup fantasy novella, a sometimes brutally realist memoir…

May. I clung on by my fingernails. Deadlines came and were met. Mental gears were shifted every other day or so. Requirements seemed to cluster mid-month, in one particularly exhausting ten-day spr…

April was… not the cruellest month! My fiancé had a birthday, which we celebrated with steak and Old Fashioneds in Mayfair. I was in Lyon for a few days for work (it’s really one of my …

Hosted, as always, by Rebecca at Bookish Beck, posting on the last Monday of every month. There’s no set formula to this; you can post anything about libraries, whether you’ve recently been to an e…

Hosted, as always, by Rebecca at Bookish Beck, posting on the last Monday of every month. There’s no set formula to this; you can post anything about libraries, whether you’ve recently been to an e…

At the end of 2024 I said I only had a few reading goals for 2025. One was reading The Pickwick Papers, which happened this month (the link to my review in February’s #LoveYourLibrary post is…

Hosted, as always, by Rebecca at Bookish Beck, posting on the last Monday of every month. There’s no set formula to this; you can post anything about libraries, whether you’ve recently been to an e…

At Christmas I got two bookshop gift cards, as well as a bunch of physical books, so I really did pretty well; my complaint that “no one buys me books” does not apply in this instance. …

“Safari”, by Jennifer Egan (first published 2010; chosen by Greg Jackson). This is a chapter of what would become Egan’s Pulitzer-Prize winning novel A Visit From the Goon Squad (…

I’ve spent most of January trying to hold on to the sense of renewal that came with the Christmas holiday. At the end of 2024 I was seriously, and mostly obliviously, burned out. The new year…

Hosted, as always, by Rebecca at Bookish Beck, posting on the last Monday of every month. There’s no set formula to this; you can post anything about libraries, whether you’ve recently been to an e…

Both of these novels deal with multiple generations of Southern families—not all women, particularly in Smith’s case, but usually held together by women. Both also take the form of a mostly s…

“The Bible” and “The Stolen Pigeons”, by Marguerite Duras (chosen by Rachel Cusk; translated Deborah Treisman; written 1943-49?; first published 2006-7). These are so short …

I have become increasingly strict with myself about the year’s “best books”. Because I’ve gotten better and better at choosing things in the first place, I enjoy almost ever…

Here’s another batch of thoughts on stories I’ve recently listened to through the New Yorker’s Fiction podcast, in which an author selects a short story from the NYer’s arch…

I’m not sure why exactly, but November has been a really exhausting month. Most of it has been really nice, it’s just all been happening at the same time. I came back from a research tr…

I came across the New Yorker Fiction podcast because of Julianne Pachico’s blog, the archives of which I’m now reading through. (She’s a great writer—her collection The Lucky Ones…