Monthly Archives: June 2024

My kid is thisclose to being able to actually swim independently enough that I don’t need to be hovering nearby in case the lifeguards are not at their most attentive, and I might actually be able to spend some time on a lounger with a good book, which feels like an appropriate occasion to writeContinueContinue reading “The House of Doors, Tan Twan Eng”

It’s hard to find good books for first-graders that address slavery and racism in ways that are informative but not terrifying. Obviously, the history is terrifying, but I am not persuaded that it’s useful to convey the depths of that trauma to a 6-year-old who is only just starting to learn about these topics. NorContinueContinue reading “Juneteenth for Mazie and Juneteenth, Our Day of Freedom”

This book was fascinating to me, because it approached a topic that I have read a fair amount about — second-generation memories of the Holocaust — from a perspective that was totally new to me, that of an Israeli Jew traveling to his family’s village in Poland. This is a protagonist for whom Poland isContinueContinue reading “Poland, a Green Land, by Aharon Appelfeld, tr. Stuart Schoffman”

I heard about this book from one of my favorite Substacks, The Biblioracle Recommends, by John Warner. It was in a post of Pulitzer Prize predictions (sidenote: these turn out to be very fun to read, because the awards are often curveballs, and totally shrouded in secrecy, so the guesses have to be broad), andContinueContinue reading “Dayswork, by Chris Bachelder and Jennifer Habel”