Fridays are For Reading
What's on your bookshelf?
What do you do to wind down your day? Your week? Me? I read. Every night. Sometimes it’s just a page or two before sleep catches me mid-sentence or even mid-word. Other times, my partner has long since dozed off and the only sound is the swoosh of me turning the page. Lately, the books I read all have to do with libraries. Libraries!
And why not? Libraries are our imaginations come to life when we can pluck from the tree of knowledge and put ourselves in the shoes of our favorite character. We can learn what others have done, what not to repeat, what to keep, all about the best of ourselves, and the worst. In each book, we find each other.
From Mark Haig’s The Midnight Library to Genevieve Cogman’s The Invisible Library series to T.L. Huchu’s Library of the Dead we visit libraries that take us into worlds as similar and as different as our own.
The Midnight Library was about one woman who got to see what happened when she asked ‘what if’. She was given glimpses of what her life might have been had she chosen one path over another. There’s a much deeper story charged with emotion, courage, and a bit of fear, but these are the broad strokes.
The Invisible Library series takes us on a journey into alternate worlds to save books, and thereby, knowledge. Enter dragons, fae, a human spy, a human detective, and more than a villain or two and these books will keep you busy reading for weeks and months as you follow the story from book 1 to book 8.
I’ve only just begun The Library of the Dead, but the voice in it is so different from the voices I’m used to that I know I’ve found a new author to follow. Thankfully, the Library of the Dead is just book 1 in the Edinburgh Night Series, so there’s plenty more to keep me in books through the summer.
Years ago, I did one book review a week every week for a month. Interested in the same on this substack? Perhaps I’ll do a themed series - like books about libraries - and see how it goes.
When I’m not writing, I’m reading, and my TBR (to be read) pile is creeping up the walls of my little library. What’s on your reading list? Have you read it? What do you think? Would you recommend it? Why?
I’m the one my family and friends come to when they want to know if there are any good books out. Oh, the places we will go when we open the page of a book. See you in the pages!
