“The past is a foreign country; they do things differently there.” L. P. Hartley’s quote has a life completely beyond its origin in the book The Go-Between. I think a lot of people come to viscerally understand it as they age.

I’ll be 45 in July and I am beginning to understand myself as a time traveler from the 1990s.

My husband sent me this Midnight Murmurations piece on The X-Files. I was bopping along reading about the experience of this person who is younger than me experiencing the show and then got to this part, which discusses 1993 technology like I might talk about the technology of a 1950s sci-fi movie:

A bygone era is put to screen, with big mobile phones that you need to pull an antenna out of in order to use, chunky keyboards wired into bulbous PCs, giant spinning tape recorders, and rectangular cars.

And this was when I realized I’m a time traveler from the 1990s, because I immediately thought, “Well yeah, that’s what technology looks like.” My brain exists in a perpetual 1993-1999, and when it encounters things that don’t belong in that milieu, it’s not because that milieu is old, it’s because I have somehow been transported into this dystopian future.

Watching Jurassic Park with my kid has only reinforced this sense. Of course computers have huge CRT monitors. You can tell it’s the 90s because they’re not monochrome. Of course a twelve-year-old girl is a hacker. (I was 12 in 1993 and while I wasn’t a hacker, I was definitely more computer-oriented than most of the other kids I knew.) This is the world as it should be, except for all the genetically-engineered dinosaurs running around.

Derek Sivers wrote about being a netizen in 1993. This was me, too. This is how I want the Internet to be still, non-commercial, generous. You can still find it some places but it’s definitely not the norm. But I, a woman out of time, still expect it to be.

In late November and early December last year, I started thinking about the things I would do in the new year.

I was going to journal, using The Book of Alchemy by Suleika Jaouad as a guide. I was going to prep more of my own and my child’s food. He and I were going to be less sedentary. I was going to use the craniosacral therapy tool I bought years ago. I was going to hand-code a new version of my website. I was going to blog more. I was going to make something most days. I was going to actually do all the online courses and seminars I have access to.

These weren’t resolutions, I told myself. They were just things I was going to do.

Then, on December 19, I had a cough. The cough turned into a respiratory illness that required me to sleep most of the day. I was better enough to see family on Christmas, but that was a long day and I overdid it. I relapsed. I was well enough by New Year’s Eve to take my kid and his friend to our local museum. I overdid it. I relapsed again. Four and five weeks after this illness started, I was still wiped out even more than usual. I still had a productive cough.

In the next week or two, I got better.

Then we had an ice storm. My kid was out of school for 3 days.

My mom had some medical stuff that seemed resolved.

The pipe in the library burst. (It was the ice storm in the library with the pipe.)

We had a snowstorm. My kid was out of school for 2 days.

My mom’s medical situation got worse again.

I was running myself ragged being an eldest daughter, trying to figure out the library situation, and trying to engage my kid anytime there wasn’t a friend around so he didn’t turn into a screen zombie.

I have not done the things. I’ve done a little of some of the things, but they’ve all fallen off.

I like to let myself celebrate New Year’s multiple times: on January 1. On the spring equinox. On my birthday, in July. At the start of the new school year. At Rosh Hashanah.

And between those, I like to think about the next one coming up, to reflect on what I want to do differently.

Right now, ahead of the spring equinox, still in the middle of the library restoration process, living with chronic illness, I’m thinking I want to learn to be flexible. To hold intentions but be ready to adjust when unexpected things happen.

To learn to cope.

A little over a week ago, as I was getting into the car with my kid to drive to his school, where I work as the Lower School librarian (serving grades 1-4), I got a text from the head teacher. (Sort of like a principal.)

Good morning, I’m sorry to be reaching out with bad news, but I’ve just learned that a pipe burst in the lower school library. I’m on my way to school and will assess myself and text you back with updates. I just wanted you to have a heads up so you weren’t surprised when you got to school.

I thought, “Well that won’t be good but I don’t have many materials stored near where most pipes are.”

We arrived at school. I got M settled in his classroom and then the head teacher showed me the library.

The burst pipe had been in the ceiling in the center of the space. The water from it had destroyed the roof in the center of the library and the library bathroom. Couches had been directly under the collapsed ceiling. When I got there, there was an inch or two of water on the floor. The head of our facilities team said when he had arrived, it had been much more, a flood gushing out of the library door when he opened it.

Well, I thought, at least it was in the part of the library with the fewest books.

That was last Wednesday.

We were out for weather on Thursday.

On Friday, a day I don’t normally work, our administrative assistant called and asked if I could come in. The insurance adjuster was coming and the facilities head was asking if I would be available to assess the damage.

I headed in. We met the insurance adjuster, who was just finishing up and told me they’d need an inventory of damaged materials and their cost. In this moment, I had no idea how much damage there had been, but I guessed not too much.

The head teacher and I met with our head of finance and head of facilities. We talked about what documentation we needed, what the insurance process would look like, what kind of repairs the library would need, and now that a remediation team had come in, facilities head was able to tell us which parts of the library had a lot of water damage.

Facilities head estimated we wouldn’t be back in before spring break, but we might be able to get the construction work done by then and be using the space again when we returned from spring break.

Head teacher and I sat down with the information they gave us, spreadsheets from a collection audit and analysis I did using data from December 2024, and a list of purchases I’d made for the library since December 2024.

Based on where the facilities head told us the most damage was, we determined that about half the collection would potentially need to be replaced.

That’s about 3,000 books.

Remediation/dehydration of the space is ongoing. I still need to assess furniture and classroom supply damage and make a plan for assessing damage to books. Once we know what needs to be replaced and have the money from insurance, I’ll need to order the replacements.

Our book vendor does a lot of the processing including cataloging, putting barcodes on, and putting spine labels on. But on-site we do some other processing, like adding genre labels and stamping the book with the school’s name and address. So that will have to be done.

We’ll need to order new furniture. Once the furniture is in place and the books have arrived, we’ll have to get everything up on the shelves.

I won’t have to do all this alone, but it’s daunting. I’m overwhelmed and stressed out. I’m emotionally devastated and feel like between last week and the next couple weeks I will have spoken individually to each of 120+ children about how things are looking in there and what we know about the timeline for re-opening (not much).

Overnight, my job responsibilities have changed. I thought I would be spending the next several months supporting instruction with materials and providing research instruction, helping kids figure out what to read next, and leading students through the process of voting in the North Carolina Children’s Book Awards.

Instead, there’s a lot of recovery work to do.

At the moment, I need to wait for the remediation and construction team to finish drying out the library, so I’m turning my attention to what library programming looks like when you don’t have access to the physical space or materials.

This has all been a lot.

Full Disclosure: I am online friends with the author of this book. We met when she taught a workshop I took on creative nonfiction writing for academics.

Here’s the publisher’s description:

Sydney Ciara Warren is excited as she starts her first year of college, but also nervous. Despite her interests in writing and fashion, she has no idea what path will ultimately be right for her. As she tries to figure out her place on campus and in the world, she finds solace in blogging about her life, putting together outfits with meaning, *and spending time online.

It’s within the digital space that she connects with someone who goes by YoungPrinceX. She may not know “X” in real life, but that doesn’t stop her from developing a crush on him. Except she’s also navigating her first romantic relationship, with a sweet boy on campus named Xavier (who maybe could be X???).

Can Sydney Ciara not only make it through her first semester, but thrive in real life, as much as she seems to be thriving online?*

It’s an oft-repeated piece of writing advice that you should write the book that only you can write, and with Love in 280 Characters or Less, Dr. Ravynn K. Stringfield has done exactly that. This is an epistolary novel for the digital age, made up of blog posts, tweets, text exchanges, and emails. Our main character, Sydney Ciara Warren, is a freshman at Coastal Virginia University, a fictionalized public university near Virginia Beach. Syd has been writing online for an age and is keenly aware of how digitally mediated her experiences and relationships are.

Dr. Stringfield herself blogged her way through grad school and lived for years on Twitter (that’s where most of our getting to know each other happened). Her scholarship is deeply entwined with Black girlhood, girl culture in media, fantasy, and comics. All of that comes through in Sydney Ciara’s experiences in a way that makes Syd’s understanding of her writing, both public and private, and her navigation of relationships richly textured. There are authors who would write something like this and it would feel hollow, like a person who never wrote a blog post or tweet trying to do what they think would appeal to readers who had a digital adolescence. Dr. Stringfield instead has given us an incredibly rich portrait of a young woman navigating life and love in the digital age. While the specifics of the technology Syd uses are linked to a particular moment in time, this tightrope walk of IRL-or-not is something all of us, but especially people coming of age, will be living for the foreseeable future.

Like Dr. Stringfield’s debut, Love Requires Chocolate, this is marketed as a romance but is more about one young woman’s transition to adulthood than it is about one particular romantic relationship. Most of the book involves Syd connecting with people on campus including a girl with incredible style and perfect baby hairs, a boy with a killer smile and ambitions of being a diplomat, and a PhD candidate teaching assistant who acts as a mentor and supports Syd through some of her most difficult moments. Through all of this relationship-building, she writes about her life, texts her best friend who is at a college a three-hour drive away, and navigates her mom’s ambitions for her to be pre-law when she’s not sure that’s what she wants at all.

Syd is thrust into the online spotlight when she writes about an incident where her best friend’s roommate is followed home from a party and arrested for breaking and entering when he accidentally uses the wrong card to try to swipe into the dorm. In sharing the information she heard from witnesses and the young man’s fellow students, she receives messages of gratitude and solidarity from other Black college students and messages of hate from people who refuse to believe that the young man could possibly be anything other than a criminal.

Syd has to ask herself, is she an activist writer? Is it possible to divorce the political from her writing? In the face of the realities she and her fellow Black college students experience, can she write only about fashion without bringing politics into it? All of this figuring herself out is entangled with her relationships with her best friend Malcolm, her boyfriend Xavier, her sister Janaya, her friend Angie, and her mentor Zion.

I love this book. I’d recommend it to anybody who enjoys coming-of-age stories and especially anybody who is interested in how our online and offline identities intersect. The publisher says it’s perfect for fans of The Neighbor Favor by Kristina Forest and I think that’s a good comp. I could see Sydney growing up into someone like Lily, the main character in that book, and they both tackle that online-IRL spectrum of experience.

Book: Love in 280 Characters or Less
Author: Ravynn K. Stringfield
Publisher: Macmillan
Publication Date: April 15, 2025
Pages: 320
Age Range: Young Adult
Source of Book: ARC via NetGalley, Public library

One of the units the first and second grade classes teach at our school is about pollinators, so last year I started keeping an eye out for books to support this unit. Call the Bee Doctor. How Science Is Saving Honey Bees caught my eye and I requested a review copy on NetGalley.

This is a short non-fiction book appropriate for middle grade readers. At school, I would recommend this as something for teachers to read aloud to students over multiple sittings in first or second grade.

Sandra Markle wrote The Case of the Vanishing Honeybees, published in 2013. After the book’s publication, she learned about the efforts of some scientists to help honeybee populations recover. She researched a variety of approaches apiologists were taking and shares what she learned in this book.

Markle discusses multiple reasons for the depletion of bee populations: pesticides, poor nutrition, parasites, and pathogens. She then explains approaches to managing these causes including vaccinated queen bees, providing food supplements to improve nutrition, and genetic modification. She concludes by discussing the impact of climate change on honeybees and providing recommendations for actions readers can take for helping honeybees.

Vibrant photos and clear diagrams illustrate the book. Markle provides a glossary, a list of her research sources, and books and websites readers can explore to learn more.

I would recommend this book as a purchase for elementary and middle school libraries as well as public libraries.

Book: Call the Bee Doctor! How Science Is Saving Honey Bees Author: Sandra Markle Publisher: Millbrook Press Publication Date: October 1, 2024 Pages: 48 Age Range: Middle Grade Source of Book: ARC via NetGalley, Public library

Here are the books I finished reading in 2025.

Hello, friends! It’s time to talk about my favorite thing to talk about: books! There are some glitchy issues with the way Micro.blog is tracking which books I read which year, so the numbers on my list are probably inflated, but I definitely read over 100 books this year. Fewer than 10 of those were children’s books. 86 were romance or romance-adjacent (like Sarah MacLean’s These Summer Storms). I track my romance reading at Pagebound as well as at Micro.blog.

2025 Reading Goals

My main reading goal for the year was to always be reading one more book than I’ve already read. I love this target because it’s achievable right up until December 31st. At some point I decide that’s it, I’ve met the goal and I’m not increasing it by one. I’m currently reading Susan Elizabeth Phillips’s Match Me If You Can and I’ll probably call the reading year done after that.

I had some stretch goals for the year, too. Let’s see how I did!

Read one nonfiction book a month.

I read six or seven adult nonfiction books this year, so I missed this target. But I have a couple nonfiction books on the go. I did shift my habits so my default while taking my meds and eating breakfast is to read nonfiction. The books I’m in the middle of are Animal, Vegetable, Junk: A History of Food, from Sustainable to Suicidal by Mark Bittman and The Notebook: A History of Thinking on Paper by Roland Allen. I look forward to continuing reading these in the new year.

Stop requesting books from NetGalley that I don’t know anything about except what is on NetGalley.

I did this one!

Stop requesting books from NetGalley based on marketing emails they send me.

I did this one, too!

And as a bonus, I even have reviewed some of my older NetGalley requests. I’m trying to improve my feedback ratio and the easiest way to do that is to give feedback on books I’ve requested in the past.

Keep up with new releases from authors I love.

I’m going to say I did this. Here are some new releases from authors I love that I read this year:

• All of Us Murderers by KJ Charles
• Stop Me If You’ve Heard This One by Kristen Arnett
• A Tropical Rebel Gets the Duke by Adriana Herrera
• These Summer Storms by Sarah MacLean
• A Curse Carved in Bone by Danielle L. Jensen
• After Hours at Dooryard Books by Cat Sebastian

Any time I’m in a city with a romance-only bookstore, visit it.

CloseI I visited Peach Basket Books, which opened up in my city, and Friends to Lovers in Alexandria, Virginia. I didn’t make it to Bright Side Books and Wine, which is in a city near mine.

Other Notable Things in My 2025 Reading

Here are some things worth noting about my reading this year.

• I read several books Sarah MacLean recommended for learners in her class, Start Your Romance Novel Today.
• I read all the extant titles in Disney’s Meant to Be romance series. These books are written by popular romance authors and reimagine Disney version of fairytales as contemporary romance. My favorite is Kiss the Girl by Zoraida Cordova but they’re all fun.
• I read big chunks of Lorraine Heath’s, Julie Ann Long’s, and Lisa Kleypas’s backlists.

Looking Ahead to 2026

So, what do I want my reading to look like in 2026? I’m not even calling these goals. They’re just things I’m thinking about.

• More memoirs and diaries
• More children’s books
• More of my old NetGalley requests

How has your reading year been?

Faye and her brother Shiloh are half-Japanese and half-Jewish. At their school in Boston, other kids bully them. Over their spring break, their estranged grandfather visits, determines that it’s time to teach them how to build golems, and invites them back to his apartment in New York for training.

While there, Faye and Shiloh start having shared dreams where they are living the lives of other people with the same Hebrew names as them. Faye has the makings of a powerful golemcrafter, but she’s afraid of her power.

Emi Watanabe Cohen has meticulously researched the history of the Jewish diaspora and incorporated the history of Japanese people and Japanese Americans along with that history. Cohen provides an extensive bibliography.

This book is hard to read because it so clearly reflects the struggles Jewish people have faced and continue to face and explicitly connects the antisemitism of the past with the antisemitism of the present. Cohen presents this challenging story beautifully.

Structurally, the story wasn’t quite what I expected. I expected something with a sort of classic fantasy structure, but instead there is a lot of time spent in the dreams and a conclusion that felt to me like it should really be the beginning of the next part of the story rather than the end of the whole thing.

Readers looking for an exploration of Jewish history and why it’s important for Jewish people to hold onto who they are will find that here, from the perspective of modern kids.

I myself am three generations out from the Jewish people in my family who assimilated and intermarried so successfully that nobody was really around to pass on Jewish culture directly in our family. I’ve had to seek it out through other sources. As assimilated as my family has been, I still felt a deep connection to the story of these two kids and their ancestors.

Recommended for kids with interest in Jewish heritage and the commonalities between Jewish people and other oppressed peoples throughout history.

Book: Golemcrafters
Author: Emi Watanabe Cohen
Publisher: Levine Querido
Publication Date: November 12, 2024
Pages: 264
Age Range: Middle Grade
Source of Book: ARC via NetGalley, Public library

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.

I had grand dreams for Blaugust. I was going to not only write blog posts, but also read blog posts. I set up Feedly again! And the month isn’t over, so I may yet do some stuff.

But I need to recognize that as an educator working on a traditional schedule in the US, August is a month where anything that’s not for work is going to lose priority. And I only feel like doing fun things that don’t require my creativity.

So. I will only prioritize writing my own posts and they will happen when they happen.