READ ALL ABOUT IT
Since 2012, I’ve been writing about books. And the act of reading. And the importance of story and narrative. But, mostly, the underlying theme of all I write is how taking a moment to stop and digest some longform text — instead of scrolling, instead of watching a video, instead of multitasking — can be one of the most grounding things we can do for ourselves. Here’s the one-stop online home for all this writing.
You can read more about me and my work by moseying over here. Want to peruse periodic “essay drops” — excerpts from my work-in-progress essay collection about Homesickness? Here ya go.
Not Oprah. Not Reese. Just Me: A Lifely Read & My Top 10 Book Club Picks
Sometimes I think of this blog as my own personal book club. I pick a book, read it, and then discuss it with – myself. That’s the writing part. What happens next, though, is I’ll receive a text from a friend who’s read a post and continue the “conversation” or someone will comment online about some aspect of a post with an interesting thought. So perhaps this blog is, in fact, kind of a “real life book club.” Readers and I “meet” outside of a regular gathering, but the jumping off point for discussion is – hey ho – right here.
Back Off: On Success, College & The Female Persuasion by Meg Wolitzer
The NPR podcast “Raising a Human” just released an episode called “The Perils of Pushing Too Hard, And How Parents Can Learn to Back Off.” So basically, if you’re a parent, you dropped everything and read/listened when it crossed your path even though you may have your own already-developed thoughts on the issue. (Yup, I do.) Why? Because a trend piece like this complements more than a few hot topics circulating the contemporary parenting world: a recent New York Times front-page piece about suicides at colleges and universities, the brouhaha over standardized testing (or more specifically, “teaching to the test”), and the lengths students (parents?) go to obtain perfectly perfect test scores in order to (maybe) gain admission to a tiny group of “select” third-level institutions. Notice a pattern? In America, privileged parents are almost universally focused on college and how our children will fare once they’re there.
