How’s your reading life going?
The coronavirus pandemic has halted so many of our routines, so why not reading? How about yours: Is it affecting your reading life — what you read? How much you read? Where you get your books, and whom you’re talking with about them?
Let us know, being specific yet concise (200 words or shorter). We’d like to write about what you have to say. Email us at erica.smith@pilotonline.com; please include your full name, the city you live in, and (not for publication) your phone number.
Spring into Summer Reading, early: The Virginia Beach Public Library’s annual challenge is starting early to give people fresh ways to keep kids reading while they’re out of school. (Head off the “summer slide”: the drop in kids’ skills that can happen during an extended break.) This is reading for pleasure, folks. With the right book, comic book, etc., it should devour some of the COVID era’s endless hours. Details: the library’s website, via www.tinyurl.com/VBread. (Scroll down and you’ll see a link to recommended books, many of them available digitally.)
The librarians also offer tips to encourage reading: Set a regular time. Set a realistic goal — 20 minutes a day. Let kids pick the books they want to read. Read together. Be a role model: Read, and make sure the kids see you reading.
55,000 people applied to the Artist Relief program for grants worth $5,000 each. This was the first round of five, each benefiting 200 people. About 11,000 people responded to AR’s survey on the impact of the coronavirus: 62% have lost their jobs, 66% can’t afford the supplies needed for their creative work, 80% lack a plan to get through an economic crisis. Average income lost: about $27,103. (Publishers Weekly)
More than 200 Barnes & Noble employees signed a petition asking New Jersey Gov. Phil Murphy to close their warehouse in Monroe so it can be sanitized. (Publishers Lunch)
The head of Kobo, the ebook seller, called out coronavirus fraudsters who use its self-publishing platform. On Twitter, Michael Tamblyn said Kobo yanks about half the COVID-19 and coronavirus ebooks it gets for fakery. He also slapped “authors” who republish material they got free from the World Health Organization. (Publishers Lunch)
In Case You Missed It: Literacy as a right. Kids in the poor-performing Detroit schools system have a constitutional right to learn how to read and write — “a fundamental right to a basic minimum education,” ruled a federal appeals court, since it’s critical to functioning as a citizen. (Voting, say. And grasping what you’re committing to if you sign a document.) The judges noted, “the history of education in the United States … demonstrates a substantial relationship between access to education and access to economic and political power,” The case will continue on through the court system. (Washington Post)
On Wednesday, it’s Michelle Obama: Netflix will stream a documentary based on the former first lady’s memoir, “Becoming.” The program follows her globally on book tour; the book was an international bestseller and has been translated into at least 23 languages.
Obituary note: poet Eavan Boland, “one of the foremost female voices in Irish literature,” was 75. (Poetry Foundation)
New and recent
“At the Center of All
Beauty: Solitude and the Creative Life” by Fenton Johnson. Johnson explores solitude as a calling, as a source of creativity, combining memoir, social criticism and character studies (Cezanne, Eudora Welty, many others). It’s a comforting exploration, perhaps, in a time when many of us have too much solitude and many others have not nearly enough. (Norton, 237 pp.)
Also: “The Highly Sensitive Parent: Be Brilliant in Your
Role, Even When the World Overwhelms You” by Elaine N. Aron, author of “The Highly Sensitive Person.” (Citadel, 272 pp.)