Kimberly Hirsh

Yesterday the House Committee on Education held a session called Protecting Kids: Combatting Graphic, Explicit Materials in School Libraries. In this session, some of the witnesses claimed that they didn’t want to ban books, only remove them from school libraries. They claimed that any book you can still purchase is not banned. But what they didn’t discuss is that not everyone has the funds to buy the books they want to remove. Parents have to decide for themselves whether they should control what their own children read. But they certainly shouldn’t control what other people’s children read. If you’re in the US, please consider using this tool from the American Library Association to contact your legislators and ask them to protect the freedom to read.

Finished reading: The Hacienda by Isabel Cañas 📚

Great all the way through but extra compelling for the last third. Like Mexican Gothic, it uses Gothic tropes of a spooky house and a mysterious husband to interrogate colonialism in Mexico. Highly recommend.

🔖📺 Read How The Haunting of Hill House conveys the horror of family.

In the world of Hill House, devotion to family is a tender kind of madness that exists just on the other side of mourning, a ghostly insistence that the love that binds us is also the thing that keeps us chained.

I’m having one of those days where you give yourself credit for every single thing you do. So here’s what my work task list looks like today so far.

✅ Download Word.
✅ Install Word.
✅ Download report with comments.
✅ Open report.
✅ Get paper from studio.
✅ Put paper in printer.
✅ Print report.

I’ve been obsessed with Paris as long as I can remember. Maybe it’s because I was born on Bastille Day. Maybe I read Madeline at an early age. Maybe it didn’t get into full swing until I saw a kid perform Music of the Night from The Phantom of the Opera in full costume at a school concert in fourth grade.

Whatever the origin of this obsession, I feared when I finally got to travel to Paris this past spring as I accompanied my husband on his Fulbright Award travel, I would discover that Paris wasn’t for me. After a long day of travel on the Eurostar from London, carrying full suitcases on escalators and stairs, and going the wrong way on the RER, while my 6 year old complained most of the trip, I was exhausted, sweaty, and cranky.

But when I stepped onto the street out of the RER station, all of that faded into the background. Paris immediately took my breath away. The Hausmann architecture. The lights. The Art Nouveau vibes of the Printemps department store building. I felt like I had found my heart’s true home.

We stayed in a nearby garden city, Le Vésinet, for two weeks. Every day, when we walked home from the train station after going into the city, we stopped in at a boulangerie that was on our way home and picked up fresh baguettes and pain de campagne. We went to the Jardin du Luxembourg and my son sailed a boat on their big pond. We toured the Palais Garnier, where The Phantom of the Opera is set.

The whole place exceeded my every expectation and I eagerly look forward to going back.

Want to read: The Brain that Loves to Play by Jacqueline Harding 📚

Want to read: The Brain that Loves to Play by Jacqueline Harding 📚

Feted my kid thoroughly and now I am so tired.

Tonight I’m very obsessed with the idea of reading The Secret Garden as a child as a gateway to a love of Gothic literature. 📚

My kid is 7 today. I love him so much.