The romance genre, especially steamy enemies-to-lovers books, is a vast and steamy place, full of communication shenanigans, tissue-paper bodices, flowing locks of all colors that belong to all genders, and a disproportionate number of English dukes, people with piercing eyes and the ability to raise one sardonic eyebrow. One of the major reasons readers flock to romance is the steam factor. It is a place where readers can experience the joys and heartaches of any relationship arrangement without consequence to our hearts (or our joints, given the variety of possible…er…configurations).

Speaking of configurations, romance readers are statistically around 86% women. And while most readers discover the romance genre between ages 11 and 17 (no surprise there, given puberty, preteen, and teen curiosity around relationships and sex), the average romance reader is ~37 years old, heterosexual (82%), female, and white (86%), according to the Romance Writers Association. That is all to say, this is not a widely diverse readership, but as the genre embraces more diverse expressions of race, gender, and sexuality, I expect those numbers will shift.

More diversity in authorship and characters can only lead to more diverse ways to make us blush in public. With diversity in mind, I’ve done my best to include many different types of steamy enemies to lovers books — including a yaoi manga — to expand your steamy horizons.

As I write this, January is drawing to a close. I cannot believe that we are already one month into 2023. But whether I like it or not, time happens, and once again, the season of love is upon us. Though I never really celebrated Valentine’s Day in any significant way, irrespective of whether I was single or paired up, I have always loved the explosion of cute DIY literary Valentine’s Day crafts for kids and other projects on my Pinterest home page around this time. We crafters love a good theme, and love, hearts, and flowers are about as delightfully theme-y as it can get.

Valentine’s Day is also a perfect occasion to share your love of DIY with the kids in your life – be it in the classroom or at home. Crafting is a wonderful way to keep kids engaged and occupied, while teaching them a thing or two about recycling some of the material that they may have lying around in playrooms and classrooms. Add a literary twist to your Valentine’s Day crafting plans, and you are sure to win the approval of the bookish kids in your life. Here we have collected a list of some literary Valentine’s Day crafts for kids to get you started.

Where the heck did January go? Who cares, it’s February, and there are a ton of exciting books coming out. It’s looking like a great month for fantasy, which is perfect to escape into when it’s cold and still a bit dreary outside. I’m personally already looking forward to National Discount Chocolate Day on February 15, which will provide me with eat-while-reading treats for many months to come. May the odds be ever in all of our favor when it comes to the candy shelves.

Here’s just a selection of what’s coming at us over the four glorious Tuesdays of February. It’s nine books out of the many that are being published, so please don’t mistake this as an exhaustive of all-inclusive list. It’s mostly fantasy with a sprinkling of sci-fi, and there’s romance, there’s darkness and horror, there are retellings and reimaginings of classic stories, and, best of all, at the end of the month there are pirates. I’ve also got you a mix of sequels, standalones, and new series starters. Hopefully there’s something on this list for everyone to love!

As always, you can find a full list of new releases in the magical New Release Index, carefully curated by your favorite Book Riot editors, organized by genre and release date.

With the new legislative season in full swing, now is a crucial time to write to your representatives. We’re seeing unbelievable numbers of new proposals to outlaw intellectual freedom, to criminalize library workers and educators for providing queer and/or diverse literature to their communities, to ban drag shows (including drag storytimes), and to make being queer or a person of color even harder than it already is. You can track every single bill of concern to the freedom to read here, and you should.

In addition to keeping an eye on that legislation, no matter where you are in the country, you need to write your representatives about the importance of intellectual freedom and First Amendment Rights for all. Right now, there are very few public officials championing these freedoms nor proposing legislation that would further enshrine these rights to those from whom they’re being not-so-slowly stripped. Whether you’re in a state facing book ban laws or not, each letter sent is one more voice added to the chorus demanding for better.

This weekend, spend 15 minutes to look up the person who represents you both in your state government and D.C. You can look up everyone who works on your behalf right here by inputting your full address. Once you’ve done that, you have a couple of options: write to the primary decision makers who represent you, including your state congressional and senate representatives and those senators and congress people working for you in D.C. (so you’d send a few emails) OR choose to contact every single person listed who would be appropriate to reach out to (your local sheriff might not be useful here, but maybe enough emails land in the inbox of a lower-ranking politician or one who represents you at the county level might draw some attention).

Then, you’re going to compose a letter for each individual you’ve identified. But never fear: you don’t even need to do the work to compose the letter. Below is a template you can use. Change details where appropriate, and feel free to add anything else which you feel may be worthwhile. You can cut, too — this is a longer letter meant to help you have handy access to statistics, data, and relevant court cases that bolster your message.

Don’t feel limited here. Set yourself a reminder every other week or every month to reach out. Continue to send these emails periodically, and if you’re invested, make a phone call. You can use the template here as your script. Yes, it’s scary. But what’s a hell of a lot scarier than making a phone call that an assistant answers is not having books on library shelves…and knowing you could have done something to help save the lives of marginalized people blatantly targeted by bigotry.

After nearly three months of striking, the HarperCollins Union, representing about 250 employees across sectors of the publisher, have reached a tentative deal. This happened quickly after the publishing giant agreed to meet with the Union to discuss their demands. It comes on the heels of the publisher also announcing a 5% reduction in its workforce over the next few months.

HarperCollins Union members began their strike in November. Among their short list of demands were an increase in the starting salaries from $45,000 a year to $50,000, as well as more robust policies to ensure the company would be a safe, healthy, and robust environment for marginalized employees. Until this week, the company did not engage with striking workers.

Details on the tentative agreement are light. Workers across the company will get one-time bonuses of $1,500, and starting salaries will be raised. To what remains unknown. Information about the ways the company plans to ensure a diverse workforce is not clear.

The agreement now moves on to the full Union for vote. If the Union accepts, the agreement will be in place until the end of 2025.

Russell Books is an iconic new and used bookstore in Victoria, BC, Canada. It was started in 1961 in Montreal by Reg Russell and relocated to Victoria in 1991. It’s now being run by the third generation of the family: Reg Russell’s granddaughter, Andrea Minter, and her husband, Jordan.

It started as a 300 square foot, one aisle bookstore and has expanded over the years to two floors connected with escalators and 18,000 square feet. The aisles ares packed full of used and new books in every conceivable genre, and they also have a large collection of rare and antiquarian books.

Russell Books is a popular tourist destination as well as a favorite bookstore of locals for its large selection and discounted prices.

The night of February 8th, the store was broken into, and $55,000 of antiquarian books were stolen, including a signed Walt Whitman first edition worth $10,000 and a book published in 1600. The cases containing the books were also broken.

After two vodka tonics and a cosmo, my ninety-year-old grandmother lifts her glass and says, “But you know that Nietzsche is my boyfriend?” 

“He is?”

“He’s my boyfriend.”

It’s all right—we’ve shared boyfriends before. The actor Javier Bardem. Errol Louis, anchor at NY1. Her new neighbor. Her many doctors. She tells me that Nietzsche is her boyfriend because Nietzsche also hates the German composer Richard Wagner. I tell her Nietzsche hates a lot of people. She nods. “That’s good in a man.” 

This week, the Review is publishing a series of short reflections on love songs, broadly defined. 

Parliament’s “(You’re a Fish and I’m a) Water Sign” is an unabashed ode to passion, to the base and the sensual, to the possibilities of love in the juiciest ways it can exist between people. The song moans into being, a beseeching follows, then there’s a bass so low you can’t possibly get under it, and finally the central question is posed: “Can we get down?” In true Parliament fashion, the tune doesn’t follow a traditional verse-chorus-bridge structure; it consists of an ever-evolving chorus that departs from the lines “I want to be / on the seaside of love with you / let’s go swimming / the water’s fine.” The arrangement is magnificent and the execution velvety, and the soulful, overlapping ad-libs of George Clinton, Walter “Junie” Morrison, and Ron Ford are just romantic lagniappe. Add the production of the track itself, with its big band-y rise of horns and whimsical flourishes atop the funky bassline, and the song is a liquid love affair that pulls you under and takes you there. It’s orgasmic.“Water Sign” is the B side to the much more well-known “Aqua Boogie (A Psychoalphadiscobetabioaquadoloop),” from Parliament’s 1978 hit album Motor Booty Affair. While “Aqua Boogie” is told from the point of view of a person who is afraid of water, having never learned to swim, “Water Sign” shows us how beautiful and liberating it can be to get swept away.

Addie E. Citchens is the author of “A Good Samaritan,” out in the Review’s Winter Issue.

In our Winter issue, we published Mieko Kanai’s “Tap Water,” a story whose remarkable first sentence spills across more than two pages and describes the interior of the narrator’s new apartment as if it were the architecture of her emotional landscape. Who among us has not resolved to stop obsessing over some small piece of our home, only to fail? Inspired by Kanai’s story, we’re launching a series called Home Improvements, in which writers consider the aspects of their homes, gardens, and interior design that have driven them to distraction.

We were still in Colorado when we booked a first appointment with a realtor in Rhode Island. In the hour before our video call, my husband suggested we make a list of must-have and nice-to-have features in a house. He wrote “3 BR” in the must-have column on a page in his notebook, because we each wanted our own office, then leaned back in his chair. “Built-in bookshelves would be nice,” he said. We’ve always wanted built-in bookshelves. We didn’t yet know we were going to run out of space in the shipping container we’d rented and would have to throw out all the shelves we owned. “A fireplace,” he added thoughtfully. I went into my strident mode, a part of my bad personality that for some reason I cannot change. “A fireplace isn’t optional!” I said, taking the pen and writing “fireplace” in the must-have column. “I’m not going to buy a house without a fireplace.”

We’d spent eleven years in Denver, all in the same apartment, not because we liked the apartment so much, but because every year, when our lease renewal came up, we never felt much like moving. We had moved out there from Boston with eighty or ninety boxes of books, and we didn’t want to pack them up again. We kept hitting that snooze button. Finally John convinced me to move back to New England—he was born in Connecticut, and he never stopped missing it, the trees and the stone walls and all that. What pushed us over was the housing market, which was more reasonable in Providence than in Denver. John kept showing me listings for adorable Colonials with mortgage payments not much higher than our rent. They looked cozy, and I thought I could be happy in New England if we had a little house to settle down in—one last move for us and for the books—if we could cozy up together on a couch and read by the fire.

We drove across the country at the end of March 2022, arriving in John’s hometown in early April—an old mill town in Southeastern Connecticut, an hour from Providence. Our plan was to stay with his mother for a few months. This had a dual purpose. We’d save money on rent and recoup the costs of moving while we looked for a permanent place to live. We could also help Linda with some things around the house, and keep her company—John’s father had died the previous fall. We felt useful, helping her clean out the basement, which had flooded the previous summer, and manage the yard, and so did she—on nights when we had to work late, Linda made dinner.

It’s strange to return. I lived in Boston in my twenties, and now I’m in my forties. One weekend in April we visited friends in Cambridge, then stopped in Harvard Square to buy Linda a Mother’s Day present. There was still a bitter chill in the wind that morning, and as we drove around looking for a spot to leave the car, we kept passing places where I remembered being cold. Once I slipped on some ice coming out of a bar on Mass Ave. It must have been 2007. There was frozen, jagged snow all over the sidewalks, and I tore my jeans and scraped up my knees and the palms of my hands. A couple days later I got food poisoning—it was particularly miserable, vomiting while down on my wounded knees.

This journal will publish works of creative literature (fiction, poetry, theater) and essays on particular aspects and problems and tendencies exemplified by the works published in the same issue. It will follow the discourse of Italian literature as it unfolds, through the work of writers who are young or not so young, new or with something new to say.

The journal will make it clear that it’s a discourse—many discourses together, which can be articulated in a general conversation—that runs from book to book, from manuscript to manuscript, and will find the thread of this discourse even where it seems to be merely a messy tangle.

I first met Charles Simic in 1994 at a dinner to celebrate the Harvard Review’s special issue dedicated to Simic. I had written an essay for the issue titled “He Who Remembers His Shoes” that focused on several of his poems and so was invited to this dinner and seated next to him. While we were eating, a small black ant started crawling across the white table cloth. Simic became mesmerized by this ant. We both wondered if the ant was going to “make it” to the other side, and then, suddenly, our waiter appeared and swept it up. Simic almost wept. (I later learned that ants were his favorite insect.) What an object lesson it was for me in Simic’s compassion for the smallest creatures, what Czesław Miłosz called “immense particulars.” I stayed in touch with Simic off and on after this night, inviting him to read at the M.F.A. program I cofounded in 2001. Simic declined at first, saying he was “too pooped” after a reading tour in Europe, but then agreed to come in 2005. He read at The Fells, John Hayes’ elegant estate overlooking Lake Sunapee in New Hampshire which New England College rented for the occasion. The indelible image of him with the lake and gardens behind him has stayed with me ever since.

On November 21, I interviewed Simic on Zoom after several failed attempts to meet with him in Strafford, New Hampshire, where he lived. He was already having health issues, then but assured me that he was well enough—and eager—to chat. For an hour and twenty minutes we talked about everything from his local dump to his childhood in Belgrade during World War II. He told me, for instance, about what a “blast” he had playing in the streets of Belgrade even as it was being bombed by the Nazis. While transcribing our conversation, I realized that he never stopped playing in those streets. What a genius he was at witnessing to horror with wit, humanity, and a cold eye. I so envied and admired the way he transfigured such “immense particulars” as a forks, shrimp, breasts, ants, “bare winter trees,” and an alarm clock at the dump into powerful synecdoches. 

We ran out of time to talk, and made plans to continue the conversation. But he was rehospitalized several days later, and died in New Hampshire on January 10. I can’t think of another contemporary poet who wrote with such stunning sprezzatura, wit, and compassion. There is no one who can replace him, and he will be deeply missed.

Last week, I watched my first Kurosawa movie: Kagemusha, or Shadow Warrior. One of Kurosawa’s final productions, Kagemusha takes place in sixteenth-century Japan and tells the story of a thief who looks uncannily like Shingen, the leader of the Takeda clan, and who is employed to impersonate him in the event of his death to keep the clan together and protect it from its enemies. Shingen dies: enter the shadow warrior. This three-hour insight into feudal Japan, its structures of power, and the paradigm shift enacted by the introduction of guns onto the battlefield in the Sengoku period is mesmerizingly beautiful. Almost every shot could be a painting—cavalry battle scenes; the many councils of leaders draped with patterned kimonos; the delicate, expressive face of Tatsuya Nakadai, who plays both Shingen and his shadow. My favorite scene was the dream sequence: the kagemusha dreams of Shingen emerging dressed for battle, like an armored bird hatching from a shell, from the urn in which his corpse was deposited. The shadow flees, terrified, against a hallucinogenically colorful sky. The river water that splashes around his bare feet is dark like paint. I am ready to watch Seven Samurai.

—Isabella Hammad, author of “Gertrude”

I am in a book club that has only two rules. The first rule: any novel we read must have at least one murder. Nada, by the French writer Jean-Patrick Manchette, has, by my count, at least eight murders—and flashy ones at that. Originally published in 1973 and set in the hangover after the uprisings of 1968, the novel follows a group of leftist revolutionaries who kidnap the U.S. ambassador to France as a political statement. I’m not spoiling anything by saying that the revolutionaries and their scheme are doomed. The race to the bloody end fuses discussions on the legitimacy of using violence to further political aims with action scenes so gloriously paced that the book feels like a single exhale from start to finish. The characters include a jaded professional who hops from one leftist uprising to the next and a high school philosophy teacher who punches a colleague in the throat, shouting “fuck your face!” There’s also a mostly silent man who “wanted to shoot himself or just go to work—it was hard to say which,” and a rich girl who supplies the country house where the group stashes the ambassador. Her self-description is iconic: “My cool and chic exterior hides the wild flames of a burning hatred for a techno-bureaucratic capitalism whose cunt looks like a funeral urn and whose mug looks like a prick.”

It’s rare that a crime novel takes as an epigraph a quote from Hegel (“The heart that beats for the welfare of mankind passes therefore into the rage of frantic self-conceit …”), but Manchette is hardly an ordinary writer. His terse, propulsive sentences recall, a little, John le Carré, if le Carré had a passion for philosophy and a loathing of capitalism. Lucy Sante’s insightful introduction to Donald Nicholson-Smith’s translation points out Nada’s “theoretical shortcomings,” which Manchette himself acknowledged: the book fails to connect the Nada group with larger social movements and to depict the state interference, COINTELPRO-style, that would almost certainly occur. The likely Manchette mouthpiece backs out of the kidnapping because “terrorism is only justified when revolutionaries have no other means of expressing themselves and when the masses support them.” Still, when an ex-comrade condemns him “to eat shit and say thank you and cast blank ballots” for the rest of his life, it’s hard to disagree that something’s lacking in his pacific leftism, too. If Nada proves anything, it’s that “political” novels can be as unsettled as the politics we live with.

In our Winter issue, we published Mieko Kanai’s “Tap Water,” a story whose remarkable first sentence spills across more than two pages and describes the interior of the narrator’s new apartment as if it were the architecture of her emotional landscape. Who among us has not resolved to stop obsessing over some small piece of our home, only to fail? Inspired by Kanai’s story, we’re launching a series called Home Improvements, in which writers consider the aspects of their homes, gardens, and interior design that have driven them to distraction.

The second time I met my boyfriend, S., he told me he was getting divorced. I thought, Great. I liked the way it sounded. We were in our late twenties and so it made him and by extension me seem original, and I like people who have made mistakes. To me the marriage sounded unserious, and therefore unthreatening: it was a visa marriage, granted one that came out of a relationship. They met at work, were married after about a year, and divorced bitterly after fewer than three. I have never met his ex-wife but initially I pictured someone stylish and ethereal, and he had said she was a bit older so she was perhaps intimidating in that sense but, ultimately, good company.

The problems started with her stuff. For a brief period before they broke up, they both lived together in the house where he, and now sometimes I, live. Meaning that, as a result of the divorce happening long-distance in a kind of pandemic limbo period, and us meeting very soon after it, for the early stretch of our relationship many of her things were still in the house just outside of Belfast.

After the second or third time I stumbled across a wicker handbag or a drawer of beauty products or, once, underwear (polyester), I became alert to her things, seeking out and cataloguing items like they were pieces of evidence from a crime scene. Brown spray bottles labeled “citrus cleaner” and “disinfectent” [sic], with labels printed using a label maker. Patent beige open-toed stilettos with brittle-looking heels. Clothes, a couple of dresses, all slightly floral; she is thinner than me. A set of very large—I consider them comically large—cocktail glasses. A crate-size box of “environmentally friendly” toilet rolls with marketing copy reading “who gives a crap,” addressed to Mrs. T (Mrs.!). Wedding photos, in desktop frames bought from Next. A cheerful book on adult crafting for mental health. I could keep going, and for months, talking to friends, I did, until I could feel them start to try to edge me toward other topics or edge themselves away from this one. 

But then there were her plates. They were a set of around ten, made by her as gifts for him, vaguely artisanal craft-fair pieces in speckled white and muted blue. There is not a way to say this without sounding like a snob, but it feels relevant that she was not a potter or ceramicist in the sense that she made money from it or did it prolifically, or that the pieces she made were fully functional for their intended use. Pottery was an aspiration, a hobby that might become something more, and the plates reflected this. Tasteful but not imaginative, each one was a clear attempt at an ideal of a plate: marginally different sizes, visibly honed edges, glazes dripping slightly over rims. 

In May 2020 I began an intermittent diary, a notebook of infrathin sensations. I was housebound in a heat wave in London, in a pandemic, with my wife, A., and our daughter, R. S., who was then four. I started to notice what I was noticing in this reduced era: minuscule sensations, tastes. I was becoming obsessed with everything that was nonverbal. I started to seek it out. I was getting into perfume samples, which I ordered in batches from a perfume shop in town, the perfumes all decanted into miniature atomizers and sent in clear plastic sachets; and also natural wines I bought online, old music, tarot cards, the coffee I was drinking, the chocolate I was eating. I took photos of flowers as they faded. I was worried that if I tried to write down these impressions in the journal I was keeping for the novel I was writing at the time they would get lost. So I began a separate notebook. It was a very small notebook, made by a Japanese manufacturer, that I’d bought and had never known what to use for. Writing in it always felt like defacement. But now its miniature size could be useful. Each new entry took up half a page.

The more I wrote, the more I started to think about what these impressions represented. I decided that the category of experience I was describing could be extended to anything that lingered—tiny scraps from my reading, stray physical memories. I came up with different definitions for what I was after: old-fashioned words like nuance, or timbre … I liked nuance because in Barthes’s lectures, collected in The Preparation of the Novel, he describes nuance as the practice of individuation. “Nuance = difference (diaphora),” he wrote, and then added a literary analogy: “one could define style as the written practice of the nuance …” On the level of style, he continued, nuance constituted the essence of poetry, the genre of minute particularities; on the level of content, nuance represented life.

Life! I missed life very much.

Anyway, this infrathin diary lasted about six months, maybe a little less. Then the urgency of these feelings and of recording these tiny sensations began to dissipate and was overtaken with a new obsession, or a new version of this nonverbal investigation. I started manically buying paper and ink and colored pencils and pens—to make small drawings and diagrams. And so I abandoned that notebook and began another.

One of the more remarkable things about being behind the wheel of a tour bus for Pavement is that you can easily kill Pavement if you want to. I bring this up with their driver, Jason, who responds only by smiling at me while driving at a professionally breakneck speed on the interstate somewhere between Saint Paul and Chicago at 4 A.M. as every one of the six members of the beloved nineties band lies asleep in their bunks in the cabin behind us. To my left, Jason’s freshly filled coffee mug—personalized to read LORDY LORDY, LOOK WHO’S FORTY above a beaming middle school graduation photo—jangles in its cup holder.

A fizz of dispatch comes through the receiver from the other driver, Jeff, who drives an identical bus bearing a platoon of tech and crew members that’s ripping down I-90 just ahead of us. Since we left Saint Paul, a relentless stream of consciousness has flowed from Jeff to Jason via CB radio, coursing through points of interest such as God and the best way to cook snake, to which Jason has responded only occasionally, if at all, with transmissions like “That’s a negative,” “Mmhmm,” or “Lord, that is crazy.” Jason has hardly taken a week off since his last nationwide tour (three months, Def Leppard) yet remains magnanimous, gallant, sweatless, surely underpaid. “I think it’s about time for a squirt in the dirt,” goes Jeff’s voice overhead. “All due respect, sir,” Jason says, seizing the mouthpiece, “but there is a woman in this vehicle. Please refrain from that sort of language. Over.” We pull over onto a shoulder and wait as Jeff’s crew bus deposits toilet runoff into scrubgrass with the push of a button. “I make it a point to listen to the bands that I’m moving around,” Jason offers as we watch the spot of sewage bloom, “and I think I get why people like these guys.” 

I’m accompanying the indie rock group Pavement for a thin slice of their hugely anticipated, nearly sold-out, four-month monster of a reunion tour. Founded in 1989 and nominally dead a decade later, Pavement belonged to the category of unsuccessful and confounding superstars—a band who was never really that famous, that scrutable, that glory-seeking or ambitious. None of their albums or songs ever got anywhere close to gold or platinum in the US. But they were treated as life-affirmingly, almost irritatingly influential by their big- and small-time rock contemporaries, knighted as “the finest rock band of the nineties” by Robert Christgau, and earned Pitchfork’s number one song of the nineties, back when people relatively cared about the opinions held by either Christgau or Pitchfork. They summed the epoch’s diffidence (its huge concern for “authenticity,” its allergy toward the idea of “selling-out,” et al.), were blessed and cursed with the idea that they were the vanguard of a loosely defined genre called “slacker rock,” and, for some among a population that remembers using the word hipster regularly, they are—as they were for the long-lionized English DJ John Peel—“one of the best bands in the world.” This is also a band that hasn’t written anything whatsoever together since their dissolution twenty-one years ago and whose last tour happened at the tail end of the aughts. 

As with most artists now granted the vague honorific of “cult band,” the enthusiasm for their reunion borders on unreasonable. Resale tour tickets in some cities were going for a ludicrous $500. Serious devotees have documented and color-coded each stop with spreadsheets that sort out setlists by album and frequency of track repetition. By the end of their North American leg, there had been a fan-made musical and a museum erected in their honor. Now, a feature-length film is purportedly in the works—one that (once again) imagines a universe in which Pavement is “the most important band in the world.” 

Great historical fiction is immersive. As a kid, it often made me feel like I’d time traveled. Karen Cushman’s middle grade novels from the 1990s, The Midwife’s Apprentice and Catherine, Called Birdy, transported me. Historical fiction also made me realize what I had in common with people from the past and which social issues still existed in my own time.

The phrase “girl power” was everywhere in late 1990s pop culture, when I was in 4th or 5th grade, and I associated it with loud, angry rock bands. My family has always encouraged me to be independent and opinionated, but I probably thought independent women were a recent phenomenon. Although the aesthetics were totally different, Cushman’s novels helped me realize people have felt trapped by societal expectations and fought them throughout history.

Catherine, Called Birdy is an epistolary novel written in diary format. Birdy’s entries contain everything about her daily life in 1200s England, from mundane chores to saints’ days. As Sarah Rettger wrote about Birdy on Book Riot in 2013: “Wouldn’t you choose keeping a diary over doing your daily spinning?” The 1995 Trophy Newbery copy I read had a cover illustration of Catherine rigging a bucket to pour over a suitor’s head.

Lena Dunham adapted and directed Amazon Prime’s 2022 movie adaptation of Catherine, Called Birdy. She remembers the book as a childhood favorite. The movie, starring Bella Ramsey as Birdy, captures the character’s unique voice and rebellious personality. Her exclamation of “Corpus bones!” is repeated frequently in both the movie and the book.

Birdy is a vivid character — never vague. She’s ambiguous, though, because readers can interpret and identify with her for various reasons. She wants to be a monk, not a nun, demonstrating how thoroughly she rejects traditional gender roles. Her brother Edward, a monk, says she wouldn’t succeed at disguising herself as a boy.

I sometimes fear that if I don’t buy a book, I’ll forget about it and it will be lost in the great chasm of time and space. That even if I add it to my Want-To-Read shelf on Goodreads, it will fall into the depths, never to be seen again (which is a possibility; I have over 5,000 books on there). But really, how much do I remember about the books I already own, across three different formats and nearly ten different platforms? How many times do I see a book on social media and wander over to Amazon to buy it on Kindle, only to discover I had already bought it (sometimes years ago, sometimes only days before)? How many times do I grab a book from the library, only to discover I already have my own copy of either an advanced reader copy (ARC) or even one that I might have purchased in a different format?

This year, I’m taking that same energy that I have for new books to rediscover the ones I own. 

I have written many times about how many books I own. How many books I then proceed to borrow from the library and get from Kindle Unlimited. (P.S. I’m back on that KU train. Couldn’t stay away.)

You don’t need to read those articles to understand that…it’s a lot. A lot a lot. 

And I was feeling those numbers in late fall of 2022. I feel those numbers regularly, but I was sort of despairing about the obvious proof that I would never read all the books I wanted to. I was also in a horrible slump and hadn’t finished a book in a ridiculous amount of time, which for me could have been a few days or a couple of weeks. No books were going out, but plenty were coming in — whether they were retail therapy or review copies sent from publishers. I was starting to feel the pressure, but I couldn’t break myself out of it.