Finished reading: Before She Was Harriet by Lesa Cline-Ransome 📚

Finished reading: Thank You, Omu! (Caldecott Honor Book) by Oge Mora 📚

A lovely picture book about generosity with super cool cut paper mixed media illustrations!

Finished reading: Shadow’s Heart by Kresley Cole 📚

Finished reading: What I Did For a Duke by Julie Anne Long 📚

Oh wow. I love both main characters in this one. The heroine is so tired of being seen as a reliable dog geyser person. The hero is deliberately prickly and mysterious. I love them.

Finished reading: The Secret Garden by Mariah Marsden and Hanna Luechtefeld 📚

The Secret Garden is one of my favorite books from childhood and this is an excellent graphic novel adaptation that captures its magic beautifully.

💬📚 “Rather than seeing ChatGPT as a threat that will destroy things of value, we should be viewing it as an opportunity to reconsider exactly what we value and why we value those things.” John Warner, More Than Words: How to Think About Writing in the Age of AI

Finished reading: I Kissed an Earl by Julie Anne Long 📚

A headstrong lady! Shipboard romance! As always, Julie Anne Long does the job.

💬📚 “Do you want to look back on a life of items crossed off lists drawn up in response to the demands of others? Or do you want to hang on to, and repeat, and remember, the thrill of discovering things on your own?” Rob Walker, The Art of Noticing

Finished reading: How to Tell When We Will Die by Johanna Hedva 📚

This book challenged me. I don’t know the last time I had to look up several new-to-me words in a book, but we’re talking decades. This book was full of essays that resonated deeply with my own experiences and others that were like a window into a completely different world. I’m so glad I read it.

📚💬 “I want a life capacious enough to contain what I choose to be true about myself and that which I did not but have nevertheless learned to work with, to use, to wield.” Johanna Hedva, How to Tell When We Will Die: On Pain, Disability, and Doom

📚💬 “…kindness is a form of magic we can choose to know how to do. What matters is attending to suffering, no matter why it’s there.” Johanna Hedva, How to Tell When We Will Die: On Pain, Disability, and Doom

Finished reading: Let the Children March by Monica Clark-Robinson 📚

A great picture book about the Children’s Crusade in Birmingham in 1963, perfect model of how kids can make a difference.

Finished reading: The Undefeated by Kwame Alexander 📚

A gorgeous picture book poem.

Finished reading: Since the Surrender by Julie Anne Long 📚

Julie Anne Long is really good at the job. Lots of yearning in this one, in the best way.

📚💬 “In illness, the now feels like punishment.” Johanna Hedva, How to Tell When We Will Die: On Pain, Disability, and Doom

📚💬 “Maybe the blast radius of disability destroys everything and also makes new worlds. Maybe these are worlds of paradox: both the radical limitation of what you used to be able to do and an explosion of the horizon around what you thought would ever be possible.” Johanna Hedva, How to Tell When We Will Die: On Pain, Disability, and Doom

📚💬 “The most anti-capitalist protest is to care for another and to care for yourself. To take on the historically feminized and therefore invisible practice of nursing, nurturing, caring. To take seriously each other’s vulnerability and fragility and precarity, and to support it, honor it, empower it. To protect each other, to enact and practice a community of support. A radical kinship, an interdependent sociality, a politics of care.” Johanna Hedva, How to Tell When We Will Die: On Pain, Disability, and Doom

Finished reading: How to Steal a Galaxy by Beth Revis 📚

Super fun but also upsetting because of the social commentary middle book in a space heist romance trilogy.

📚💬 “…this is the conundrum all sick and disabled people live with. To be pathologized is to be allowed to survive.” Johanna Hedva, How to Tell When We Will Die: On Pain, Disability, and Doom

📚💬 “When you have chronic illness, life is reduced to a relentless rationing of energy.” Johanna Hedva, How to Tell When We Will Die: On Pain, Disability, and Doom

Finished reading: Swim Team by Johnnie Christmas 📚

A great graphic novel!

📚💬 “How can you throw a brick through the window of a bank if you can’t get out of bed?” Johanna Hedva, How to Tell When We Will Die: On Pain, Disability, and Doom

📚💬 “How many of us have already met our doom and then had to get out of bed and go on?” Johanna Hedva, How to Tell When We Will Die: On Pain, Disability, and Doom

📚💬 “Disability describes a condition that is both more othered from and profoundly closer to one’s body than any other political condition that I can think of.” Johanna Hedva, How to Tell When We Will Die: On Pain, Disability, and Doom

📚💬 " All the ways we cannot do something, all the ways we won’t be able to do something—what sort of political dreams can come from this as a starting place?" Johanna Hedva, How to Tell When We Will Die: On Pain, Disability, and Doom