Category: Bookish Thoughts
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2025 Bookish Stats
My 2025 reading year has come to a close. If you’re interested, please check back later this week for my Bookish Superlatives and Top Reads of the year. Today I’d like to look at the year as a whole and look at some statistics about some of the things I was looking out for this…
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Bookish Stats, 2024
My 2024 reading year has come to a close, and while it didn’t quite hit the heights of 2023 for me, it was still a wonderful bookish year. If you’re interested, please check out my Bookish Superlatives (parts 1 and 2), and my Top Reads from the year. Today I’d like to look at the…
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My Author of the Year: Robertson Davies (1913-1995)
When I do my end-of-year recaps, it’s important to me that they be representative of my reading year. That’s a big reason why I started doing ‘Bookish Superlatives’ in addition to a Best of the Year list last year. But as I was preparing these posts for this year, I noticed that one author wasn’t…
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Celebrating Audiobook Month!
June is a month of many commemorations, but one that I haven’t seen get much attention so far this year is that June is Audiobook Month. I’m a bit of a latecomer to audiobooks, having only begun to incorporate them into my reading life over the past three years. Like many readers, I was initially…
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Bookish Pairs: Babel and Cinnamon & Gunpowder
One of literature’s many roles is to call attention to issues about which mainstream society (no matter how that’s defined) may be blissfully and complacently unaware. Reading is, therefore, a great way of expanding our awareness and empathy about the world. (That’s probably why book banning sadly remains a beloved tactic of those who don’t…
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Bookish Pairs: The Catcher in the Rye and The Fall
This year I’ve been making a concerted effort to read more classics. And the other week, I happened, quite unintentionally, to read J.D. Salinger’s much loved-and-loathed The Catcher in the Rye (1951) and Albert Camus’ existentialist classic The Fall (published in French in 1956 as La Chute, and published in English translation the following year)…
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Bookish Thoughts: On Reading Classics
As 2022 was winding down, I found myself in a plight shared by many readers. It’s a bookish version of the ‘tyranny of the immediate.’ Namely I found myself reading almost exclusively new or recent releases. This is the problem with being present in the bookish world. Seeking out reviews, blogs, podcasts, and social media…
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Bookish Thoughts: Can My Anti-Wheelhouse Be My Wheelhouse?
It was the physicist Niels Bohr who famously wrote: “The opposite of a trivial truth is plainly false. The opposite of a great truth is also true.” It’s an insight that has become a core belief of mine. (If you’re at all interested in this, you can check out my theology blog.) I was thinking…
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