Finished reading: Golemcrafters by Emi Watanabe Cohen 📚

💬📚 “Hyperlexia is an early sign of golemcraft aptitude. Golems are made of words, just as Jews are made of books.” Emi Watanabe Cohen, Golemcrafters

This is a kid’s novel about two half-Japanese, half-Jewish middle schoolers who learn to make golems from their estranged grandfather.

Finished reading: Heated Rivalry by Rachel Reid 📚

Finished reading: Game Changer by Rachel Reid 📚

The Guardian seems grateful that this year’s Booker winner puts masculinity back at the center of literary fiction, claiming that for a decade women have dominated litfic.

Novelist Caro Claire Burke looked at the numbers: men have ⁷won 60 - 80% of major book awards in the past decade. Seems like “female interiority” is sharing the stage.

Let’s imagine for a minute that litfic was dominated by women for a decade, contrary to fact.

Literary fiction as a term seems to have been popularized around 1980. That’s 35 years before women dominated. Take it back to modernists in the 1920s. Men dominated for 90 years, then. Or go back to the beginning of printing: 500+ years.

Even if women were winning 70 - 80% of literary prizes (and we aren’t), there’s a long way to go before anyone needs to worry that men are being pushed to the margins of literature.

Finished reading: Run Posy Run by Cate C. Wells 📚

Finished reading: Dream A Little Dream by Susan Elizabeth Phillips 📚

If your public library, like mine, is having a delay in ordering new books due to the closure of Baker and Taylor, may I suggest checking out an author’s backlist? Susan Elizabeth Phillips would be a great choice.

Finished reading: The Magpie Lord by Kj Charles 📚

KJ Charles’s writing is so reliably delightful.

Finished reading: Black Rabbit Hall by Eve Chase 📚

💬📚 “…I feel like both her confidante and her baby…” Eve Chase, Black Rabbit Hall