I highly recommend reading at the local diner while you wait for your omelette and hash browns. (Also, this book is fantastic.)

It’s impossible for me not to capture my 30th year through the 30 books I read. Time felt as though it passed in chapter increments. I didn’t read every book at the same pace, of course. Like time itself, some read faster, and some read slower. I am at the mercy of the plot, the prose, the genre, the subject matter—whatever it may be. To some degree, the book decides how quickly you read it. I like that it’s not all in my control.

When I reflect on my first year of a new decade, I think not only of the worlds both fictional and real in the books I read, but also each of the places I pored over the pages. There was Leesa Cross-Smith’s lyrical novel Half-Blown Rose, which I read while flying around Europe on our honeymoon, just as the book’s protagonist Vincent traveled around Europe, rediscovering herself amid ruptures in her life back home. Reading Red, White & Royal Blue in Washington, D.C., a choice that felt cornily appropriate. Finishing T Kira Madden’s haunting, searing memoir, Long Live the Tribe of Fatherless Girls, at the local vegan restaurant this fall as mist fell outside, a foreboding reminder (when you live in the Midwest, anyway) that it would soon become snow. Continue reading →