I read 52 books in 2025, just barely making my goal. This is what my reading pattern looked like this year (chart from The Storygraph, my recommended book-tracking site): nothing 3 months into each school term – March and October. (Though it may not have been actually nothing – I…
Read MoreWell, I had hoped my reading would have improved in volume by now, but I’m still crawling out of a hole in my ability to concentrate. Last year (2022) I did just barely manage to make 52 books, but this past year (2023) I didn’t – I could have if…
Read MoreJust Kids and M Train by Patti Smith After having it on my list for years, I finally got to Patti Smith’s memoir about her long friendship with photographer Robert Mapplethorpe. One of the most striking things about the story is the confluence: both Smith and Mapplethorpe became iconic cultural…
Read MoreJane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë Okay, yes, I have read this book umpteen times, starting when I was about 13 or 14, I think, when I stayed up all night to finish it. I even wrote a substantial poem about it in my second book, where I imagined Jane in…
Read MoreJeesh, January will be over soon, so I better get on my annual blog post! After a miserably light reading year in 2020, I was determined to make 95 books in 2021, but I could see right away that it would be an issue given how exhausted I was between…
Read MoreAt the top of my notes for this, my annual blog post, I wrote “memorable 2019 reading,” which is maybe just your average new year’s date error, but sure feels like an attempt to block something out. It was a year when, buoyed by my success in meeting the 95-books…
Read MoreWell, I didn’t get as much writing done this summer as I would have liked, though I did finish a shitty first draft of a novel, which is something. I’m just about finished re-reading it, and boy, does it have holes (though I knew this as I was writing!). Now…
Read MoreI've been a doodler for a long time, and this past winter gained a bit of doodling confidence when I took a grad course in making comics with the wonderful Sarah Leavitt. Here's a link to some of the comics that we created in that class and in some of…
Read MoreWhen you define yourself as a writer—or, I suspect, any kind of artist—no matter how awesome your day job is (mine sure is!), it can really bring you down not to have the time or energy to create. I went through a really low productivity period for a few years,…
Read MoreIt’s been a long time since I had a book out. This saddens me, but is also freeing. For one thing, when you don’t have a new book out, you don’t obsessively auto-Google for new reviews. And then if you hit a bad review, you get briefly depressed and angry…
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