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.
Measuring Up
About a year ago, my brother-in-law posed a question on Facebook: “Comedians judge each other by The Aristocrats joke. My dad judges chefs by their chicken parm. What unique yardsticks do you have?” In other words, by what metric do you judge something specific? I responded that despite the cliché, I do, in fact, judge a book by its cover. Incidentally, that’s how I ended up purchasing Ghana Must Go by Taiye Selasi. I’ll readily admit that if a book’s cover doesn’t register aesthetically for me, I’ll have to be convinced about its content. The converse, of course, is that I’ve been burned a time or two by books whose innards don’t match their eye-catching exteriors. By the way, I’m not alone in this fascination: Here’s a piece from The New Yorker about the ins and outs of cover design.
