Miracle Max, Jellicle Cats, Hadestown, The Good Place, and Parodies for Charities

A few reminders that I hope you'll find useful:

Hanukkah is two seconds after Thanksgiving this year.

Christmas isn't far off, either.

Parodies for Charities proceeds are currently going to the National Alliance to End Homelessness.

That means that, in exchange for donating to help end homelessness, you can give a gift like this Miracle Max/Jellicle Cats nonsense. Or this Good Place/Hadestown nonsense. Or some other nonsense, custom-written for your friends, your family, and your in-jokes.

Happy holidays, and I hope to write you some nonsense!

Recommendations, nine of which are books

It was, of course, a weird year (or so) for virtually anything--but I'm happy to say that my weird year's activities included serving on the Boston Globe-Horn Book Award committee with Luann Toth (chair) and Nicholl Denice Montgomery. Just as I grew sick of the sight of my own walls, those walls became lined with ever-shifting piles of books, culminating in this pile of winners and honor books, which were announced Wednesday:

From top: Fiction and Poetry winner and honor books; Nonfiction winner and honor books; Picture Book winner and honor books.

I'm thrilled with the choices we ended up with, and highly recommend every one of these books. 

This was my second award committee (and not my first set of Zoom deliberations--the Sydney Taylor Book Award was chosen remotely before it was cool). Though the two experiences were different, each one showed me new things about what I value in books; paradoxically, I've found that committee work teaches you about yourself as an individual. I highly recommend that, too.

(Also, bookshelves. I recommend bookshelves.)

A fantasy for 2022

(I started a post about the new year. It came out weird. Instead, here is a very short story set in the fairly near future.)

I'm sitting on a bus, on my way to visit loved ones. I check the news on my phone; the news is boring, so I go back to the physical book on the seat next to me. (As this is a fantasy, I have excellent habits and am not even tempted to scroll a whole bunch of social media. Also, I have a row to myself.) 

I flip to check something in the back matter. I flip back and read on.

Happy New Year. Let's keep turning pages.