One consequence of tracking my reading over the past few years is seeing which authors and artists I read most—and realizing that the list is dominated by white dudes. Need to make a deliberate effort to diversify my reading.

Kiddo has decided that she can get away with ignoring requests so long as it’s because she’s reading something. The most annoying part of it is that she’s right that we’ll grant a lot of latitude for that in particular.

Between purging bookshelves and using the filtering feature of my RSS app, today is a big day for overcoming my tendency toward completionism.

There was a Little Free Library just outside tonight’s restaurant, so kiddo’s working through a new book while we wait for food.

I have Ward’s Anarchism in Action waiting for me on my nightstand while I work through a Jimmy Carter biography, so I thought I’d listen to this on hoopla in the meantime (since I regularly do an ebook, an audiobook, and a print book in parallel). It’s an interesting and helpful overview of a political philosophy that I’m still trying to understand. Lots more to be read, but this gives some context.

One of my favorite perks of academia is finding a personally interesting book through the university library.

Kiddo has reached the “I want to read while you buy a few groceries, please steer me so I don’t walk into anyone” stage of bookwormdom.

Kiddo picked up a new library card over the weekend (lots of Kentucky counties do reciprocity agreements, so we collect them), and she’s incensed that there’s a 25-book limit at this system (we regularly check out 50 books each from two different counties).

A friend of mine recently asked whether I had a list of books “that have been particularly impactful or interesting,” especially in the realm of spirituality and religion—and suggested that if I didn’t already have such a list, I could put one together for one of my next blog posts. It took me a while to actually put the list together, but it’s ended up being a really interesting exercise. Of the forty books that I’ve picked, some have been more influential than others. There’s also a bias toward the recent, and I haven’t shied away from the idiosyncracies of my reading habits (that is, there are plenty of comics and plenty of French books on the list—not to mention at least one French-language comic). Nonetheless, I hope this is helpful to other folks looking for a book to read in these domains!

Steven Peck’s “A Short Stay in Hell” gets better each time I read it.

This weekend, I read Kate Beaton’s new graphic novel memoir, “Ducks: Two Years in the Oil Sands” in a single sitting. It was excellent and really got me thinking.

Our family does NOT have a ’too many books’ problem. We may, however, have a ’not enough bookshelves’ problem.

I bought a French novel at a used bookstore last week, but I’ve felt burned out on reading lately, so it’s gone to the pile of books I keep meaning to read but keep skipping in favor of Minecraft or something else.

Looking at the haul of new library books in our living room today, I realized that we’re both a family that buys a lot of books and a family that saves huge amounts of money thanks to the library.

This afternoon, kiddo tried to walk out of the library to the car without stopping her book, which makes me optimistic about her development as a reader.

I read Feed in high school and found it interesting, but when I read it again in 2019, it was amazing. This review gets at why the book is so good—and important. Maybe it’s time for me to visit it again.

I feel like I should love Catch-22, but even though I got a lot more out of it this time than the first time I read it over a decade ago, I just don’t think it’s as funny as it’s famed to be. 📚

One of the most prominent joys in recent parenting has been discovering that the same Jon Agee who was writing palindrome and wordplay books when I was a kid is still at it—and watching kiddo enjoy them even more.

It’s a testament to Apple TV+’s adaptation of Slow Horses that I am now reading the whole book series and that I can only imagine the characters as the show’s actors.

I am about a decade late to Joanna Brooks’s beautiful memoir, and I know I wouldn’t have appreciated it fully in 2012, but I am so, so glad to be reading it now.

Thanks largely to traveling, I powered through my first Franco-Ontarian novel over the past few days, and it was delightful. Some of the best Francophone books I’ve read have been purchased used for about $5, so hooray for used bookstores.

Currently reading Hervé Le Tellier’s « L’Anomalie », and it is so dang good. An English translation (The Anomaly) is coming later this year, so I’m going to go ahead and recommend this book to everyone.

Very interesting speculative fiction.

If there is a better way to end the first week of classes than Ted Lasso and Marcel Pagnol, I don’t know what it is.

Adding this to my to-read list.