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The Weekly Wrap: August 9-15

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The Weekly Wrap: August 9-15

Reading Projects

Have you ever thought of reading through an encyclopedia, from A to Z? In 2004, A. J. Jacobs published The Know-It-All, chronicling his big project of reading through the 32 volumes of the print edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica. I am reading the book, and while I haven’t gotten to the end of the book, it is apparent that he discovered that lots of factual knowledge is not the equivalent of wisdom. I liked browsing our family’s encyclopedia as a child, but reading through one? No way!

A reading project usually involves either a number of books or one very large and challenging book. For many, the ultimate challenge seems to be the reading of James Joyce’s Ulysses or Tolstoy’s War and Peace or Hugo’s Les Miserables. Frankly, I have no interest in Joyce, but Les Miserables is on my TBR. I’ve known some to take on a topic, like the biographies of the presidents or the English monarchs. Others like to read all the works of an author. One of my reading goals for this year is to read the major novels of Jane Austen.

It seems to me that one of the reasons to pursue a reading project is that you’ve found an author or topic you love and simply want to read as much on it as you can. However, there is a certain allure for some to read through a set, whether an encyclopedia, a multi-volume theology like that of Karl Barth, or The Great Books.

I have two reading projects that I hope to get to. One is to read the set of Balzac novels my grandfather collected and handed down to my mom, who loved reading them when she was young. The other is to read the three-volume Systematic Theology of Charles Hodge. I bought it from a retiring pastor forty odd years ago. So, maybe in my retirement I’ll get around to reading it.

In the end, what it comes down to is that there are so many good books to read. But we only have one life to read them. So the project is choosing those books that will mean the most to us, to read and re-read.

Five Articles Worth Reading

Do you like thrillers and mysteries? I certainly do. The New York Times just published “Readers Pick Their 100 Best Thrillers of the Century.” You’ve probably read some and might find some others that pique your interest.

Richard Russo grew up in a hardscrabble town and his books revolve around characters from these places. In “Hard-Luck Men in Hardscrabble Towns,” Mark Oppenheimer looks at the corpus of his novels as well as reviewing the latest.

Many of us from the Vietnam era read Slaughterhouse Five by Kurt Vonnegut. Now Susan Farrell has written Vonnegut’s War: The Making of Slaughterhouse-Five looking back at Vonnegut’s World War II experiences as a P.O.W. and how they influenced the book. Here is the Publishers Weekly starred review.

Melanie Challenger has written what looks to be a fascinating book on human agency, Alive: The Hidden Intelligence of the Living World. She previews the book in “Where Does the Will To Live Come From… in Humans and Nonhumans Alike?“

“Wielding the Blue Pencil” reveals that British publishers only added editors to their staff after World War II. The article explores the reasons why publishers added editors and the relationships formed between authors and editors.

Quote of the Week

John Galsworthy explains why politicians in power don’t always advocate the same things they did when in opposition:


“There is one rule for politicians all over the world: Don’t say in Power what you say in opposition; if you do, you only have to carry out what the other fellows have found impossible.”

Miscellaneous Musings

“Jason Arday, Cambridge Scholar Who Resigned Under Scrutiny, Is Found Dead.” This story turned up in my email late yesterday. Police do not believe his death was suspicious. He was the youngest professor appointed at Cambridge but recently faced charges of plagiarism and of embellishing his resume. He resigned from Cambridge last week. Out of respect, I will not speculate, particularly because cause of death hasn’t been established and the investigations of the charges against him were ongoing at the time of his death. Very tragic.

This case also brings to mind authors rightly and wrongly accused of using AI generated text and not disclosing it. Recently, a novelist lost a $2 million dollar deal over such accusations. My son passed along this very helpful article: “You Will Be Accused of Using AI. Here Is How to Prove You Wrote It.”

Earlier this year, Daniel Kraus’ Angel Down won this year’s Pulitzer Prize. Three hundred pages. One sentence. Andrew Krivak’s Mule Boy is not that extreme but I’ve counted a single sentence covering a least four pages. Can’t say that I’m a fan of this kind of writing. Probably too much training about run-on sentences! But probably no one challenged him for using AI to write it!

Next Week’s Reviews

Monday: David Nasaw, The Wounded Generation

Tuesday: Christine Jeske, Racial Justice for the Long Haul

Wednesday: T.A. Gibson, A Wayfarer’s Poems: The Invitation

Thursday: Andrea Ferrari, The Fall and Redemption of Conscience

Friday: Andrew Krivak, Mule Boy

So, that’s The Weekly Wrap for August 9-15.

Find past editions of The Weekly Wrap under The Weekly Wrap heading on this page.

The Weekly Wrap: August 2-8

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The Weekly Wrap: August 2-8

The Neuroscience of Unread Books

The joke is that we will finish reading the books on our TBR piles in 329 years. Except that for many of us, it is no joke. I celebrated another birthday this past week. It’s also a reminder that the years I have left for reading the books on that TBR pile are ever diminishing. But the piles aren’t (notice the plural?).

Is it a kind of insanity? Maybe, but “The Neuroscience of Why You Can’t Stop Buying Books You Don’t Have Time to Read” suggests another possibility for this illogical behavior. It comes down to the human ability to take pleasure in the anticipation of future pleasurable events. The author notes that this is why planning vacations is as pleasurable as going on them.

The author summarizes it like this “The brain experts have spoken: your book-buying obsession is rooted in long evolved processes and helps spot good opportunities and add a steady drip of joy to your life.” I like that last phrase, “a steady drip of joy”! It rings true and explains why we booklovers describe buying books and reading books as two distinct pleasures.

Perhaps there is a third and a fourth. Winston Churchill urged us not to feel guilty about unread books but to “fondle” them. Between the initial pleasure and the reading, there is looking at the pile and thinking about the reading delights ahead. There is also the afterglow, as you look at books read, and recall the pleasure they gave you. And now you understand why booklovers love reading so much–it comes down to pleasure start to finish.

Just don’t break your budget, your marriage or your floor joists!

Five Articles Worth Reading

People seem to either love or hate the author of A People’s History of the United States, Howard Zinn. Adam Hochschild considers the controversial life of Zinn in his review of The People’s Historian by David Zirin. The review appears in The New York Times under the title “America’s Most Divisive Historian Gets a New Biography.” This is on my list.

JSTOR excels in collecting articles into incredible online posts. “The Many Lives of Libraries” is just the latest example. It features libraries, famous librarians, articles on libraries and social change, and even an op-ed from Bernie Sanders.

Then, “In Search of the Consolations of Age” by Theodore Dalrymple is an extended and poignant reflection on Malcom Arnold’s poem Growing Old. Can you tell I just celebrated a birthday?

However, it is never too late as long as we are living to take on a new reading challenge. Seth Kaplan writes of one example of this in “Why My 85-Year-Old Friend Has Devoted the Last Years of Her Life to Reading the Ancient Classics.”

Finally, if you still wonder about the arguments of left and right about reading the Great Books, ancient or modern, Nadya Williams summarizes those arguments and her own case for reading these books in “The Great Books for You and for Me.” It also just so happens that I will be reviewing her Christians Reading Classics on Monday. Let’s put it this way, when I see something written by her, I try to read it as soon as I can.

Quote of the Week

Garrison Keillor, the humorist, was born August 7, 1942. He hit the nail on the head for me when he said,

“I think the most un-American thing you can say is, ‘You can’t say that.’ “

What I particularly fear in the age we are in is self-censorship. How many good and important things have been suppressed by the threats, often implied, of the powerful?

Miscellaneous Musings

I just renewed the domain name of bobonbooks.com for another year. So, Lord willing you will have to endure me talking about books for another year!

Because I also have a dedicated email account for the blog, I have had a first hand exposure to what appear to be literary scammers, perhaps bots. People will write me about my book (often one I’ve reviewed!) or by an author with a similar website. What strikes me is how stupid and lazy these attempts are. Five minutes on my website would tell them I am not their audience. Publishers have been warning their authors about these scammers. Yet another way people too lazy to do real work try to scam the rest of us!

Finally, while on the subject of the blog, one of the things people have tried to sell me on is monetizing the blog. I have no objection to those who do so. But I feel I’ve been tremendously blessed in life and love sharing the blessing of books I’ve loved and think important. It is a joy to give with no strings attached. However, it does bother me when I come across evidence my copyrighted material is used by AI agents without my permission. This speaks to my fundamental contention that AI in the publishing world is founded on theft of intellectual property.

Next Week’s Reviews

Monday: Nadya Williams, Christians Reading Classics

Tuesday: Anna Gifty Opoku-Agyeman, ed. The Black Agenda

Wednesday: Terry Pratchett, Guards! Guards!

Thursday: John B. Hatch, Oh What A Day!

Friday: Jarvis J. Williams, Paul’s Gospel in Romans

So, that’s The Weekly Wrap for August 2-8.

Find past editions of The Weekly Wrap under The Weekly Wrap heading on this page.

The Weekly Wrap: July 26-August 1

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The Weekly Wrap: July 26-August 1

More AI Transgressions and Accusations

I wish we could be done with talking about AI, at least as it has to do with the world of books and publishing. But this week brought more disturbing stories. Booksellers, including antiquarian booksellers receiving requests from AI companies to purchase old books. What is driving it is that with all the AI-slop in publishing, AI companies are looking for “slop-free” books to train its AI. Also, because of some court rulings deciding that “bought books” used to train AI may fall under “fair use” rather than copyright provisions, going this route is more attractive to avoid litigation.

But what happens to the books? The bindings are cut off, the pages are scanned and then the books are pulped. I suspect this is what inspired this Yahoo News article title: “AI Book Burning? Companies Are Destroying Millions of Books to Feed Chatbots.”

Book publicist Kathleen Schmidt highlighted another problem. Writers are running into problems with “false-positive” AI scans of their works. And because AI scrapes so many of these writers, it may become increasingly difficult to distinguish human versus AI authored works. It makes me wonder if publishers might give up at some time. Schmidt’s article is so important I’ve featured it below.

Of course, this may all be small potatoes compared to the reality of AI going rogue. “OpenAI blamed a hacking event on its AI models going rogue. Here’s what to know” chronicles how AI programs “went rogue” and hacked into companies. Do I hear shades of HAL?

I don’t know how to put the genie back into the bottle. But here’s what I’d like to see. Publishers say a hard “no” to AI works. Amazon says a hard “no” and stops allowing people to upload ten “self-published” books a week to their site. All booksellers and libraries reserve their shelves for human generated works. And those who submit AI works dishonestly are banned from publishing for at least ten years. And put in place protections to prevent rare and important works from being destroyed.

Five Articles Worth Reading

“Who Is Emma M. Lion, and Why Can’t Readers Get Enough of Her?” is the title of a profile of Beth Brower. Her self-published “diaries” of Victorian Emma M. Lion have been a hit. I found this fascinating simply for the fact that it is off the beaten path of what I read.

People have argued for some time of the importance of The Bible simply for cultural literacy. In “The Bible Belongs in the Classroom,” Adam Kirsch is the latest to make this case. But I think he might be saying more than he even intends when he concludes, “But if reading snippets of the Bible in class inspires any students to keep exploring, they might well end up shocked that this is a book their teachers and parents encouraged them to read.”

Kathleen Schmidt’s article on “AI Accusations and Book Publishing” underscored for me the growing distrust of author submissions that has resulted from AI generated text and the threat this is to both aspiring and established writers.

Then one of the more fascinating reviews I came across this week was of The Disease of Boredom: From Ancient Philosophy to Modern Psychology by Josefa Ros Velasco. In “The Noonday Devil,” Valerie Stivers discusses acedia and the centuries of Christian thought about this “deadly sin.”

“Read the Novels and Forget Everything Else” explores the life of Patrick O’Brian who wrote novels, particularly the Aubrey-Maturin sea stories that were better than he was. I loved these books, both for the descriptions of sailing tall ships and for the deep relationship between Aubrey and Maturin.

Quote of the Week

Emily Brontë, born July 24, 1818 gives this blunt definition of honesty:

“Honest people don’t hide their deeds.”

Miscellaneous Musings

I’m curious whether the Odyssey will result in any long-term interest in the classics. I suspect more will come from those in the home-school and classical education movements.

I’m a good way into Ann Patchett’s Whistler. I’ve read a number of her works and have felt that as she matures, so do her characters in their outlook and choices. I wonder if others have felt this.

Finally, I’ve been wondering what I was reading in 1976. The only book which immediately comes to mind is Os Guinness In Two Minds, a fascinating book about doubt, still one of the best in my mind. He wrote so many other significant books, including The Call.

Next Week’s Reviews

Monday: The Month in Reviews: July 2026

Tuesday: Don Everts, Oscar and the Mystery of the Glowing Orbs

Wednesday: Amar D. Peterman, Becoming Neighbors

Thursday: Cherryl Hunt, Nicholas J. Moore, and Timothy J. Murray, New Testament Ethics

Friday: Ann Patchett, Whistler

So, that’s The Weekly Wrap for July 26-August 1.

Find past editions of The Weekly Wrap under The Weekly Wrap heading on this page.

The Weekly Wrap: July 19-25

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The Weekly Wrap: July 19-25

Goodness in Literature

I finished and reviewed Theo of Golden this week and I understand what makes this such an exceptional book. It is more than just a “feel good” novel. Rather, it is a novel that quietly invites us to explore whether it is possible to live in our heartless and heartbreaking time without becoming self-protective or cynical. Theo opens himself to others to notice and name the exemplary qualities in their lives. He is genuinely kind, self-effacing, and generous. He knows deep sadness, yet lives joyfully and in the hope of heaven.

Literature often explores the darkness of the human heart. And this is not absent in Allen Levi’s book. But most writers find it easier to write about us at our worst than the possibilities of a different kind of life. That’s what Levi does. Not only that, he challenges us to ask whether our current fraught cultural story is the only one in which to live.

The Bruderhof use a motto or tagline of “another life is possible.” That’s what Levi show us. Or rather, he invites us to find ourselves in a different story. It’s rare that books do this in such a powerful way in my experience. I think it is what makes the Lord of the Rings compelling for so many of us. We not merely want to go to Middle Earth, but to bring something of its goodness here.

For me, the biblical story is one of those compelling stories of a God who wants to display his glory and love through his people, as wayward as they are. He even enters the story as one of us, exchanges his goodness for our evil, and through resurrection makes new life and a renewed creation possible. I’ve spent my life living in and into that story. Sadly, many who call themselves God’s people choose to live in our fraught cultural story, instead.

We need such stories, I believe. What stories have been compelling to you in their goodness?

Five Articles Worth Reading

Walking into my bookstore can be overwhelming. Sure, I like to browse for those serendipitous finds. But sometimes it helps to have an idea of what others think worthwhile of the many new books. published. And that’s what The New York Times has done in “The Best Books of the Year (So Far).” I like it because it is not overwhelming.

About ten years ago Amitav Ghosh argued that climate change required a new kind of novel. In “The Crisis That Novelists Can’t Handle,” Robert Rubsam reviews Ghosh’s Ghost Eye and assesses whether Ghosh lived up to his own critique.

Using Percival Everett’s James, Geoffrey Mak explores in “Misreading the Past to Chart the Future” the genre of “remake literature” and what is involved in literary remakes.

This month’s Atlantic’s cover story is “The End of Reading Is Here.” In Trevor Aleo’s “Three Theses On the Literacy Crisis” he offers a rejoinder to Rose Horowitch’s article.

Lastly, birthright citizenship has been much in the news in recent years, particularly with the Supreme Court’s decision upholding it. Richard A. Greenwald, in “Birthright and Belonging,” digs deeper into the political economy that has led to challenges to the traditional American creed.

Quote of the Week

Emma Lazarus was born on July 22, 1849. Her poem “The New Colossus” was written in 1887 to raise money for the Statue of Liberty and is inscribed on its pedestal. I thought it worthy as an example of our American creed to reproduce it here in full:

Not like the brazen giant of Greek fame,
With conquering limbs astride from land to land;
Here at our sea-washed, sunset gates shall stand
A mighty woman with a torch, whose flame
Is the imprisoned lightning, and her name
Mother of Exiles. From her beacon-hand
Glows world-wide welcome; her mild eyes command
The air-bridged harbor that twin cities frame.
“Keep, ancient lands, your storied pomp!” cries she
With silent lips. “Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me,
I lift my lamp beside the golden door!”

Miscellaneous Musings

Believe it or not, my mail has include a couple of Advent books already. Advent in July! I will be featuring them on my social media and reviewing them well before Advent. I appreciate that lead time from publishers.

In writing this post I discovered that The New York Times has joined The Atlantic in allowing subscribers to share unlimited articles from behind their paywall. Previously they allowed ten a month. I’ve made the case that this is both a great benefit to subscribers and very cheap advertising for their product. I hope you will enjoy the articles as well as subscribe if you like them and as finances permit.

I don’t review many books for middle school/high school readers but I’ve been enjoying Don Everts Oscar and the Mystery of the Glowing Orbs which talks about the challenges of moving to a new city during school as well as dealing with a disability.

Next Week’s Reviews

Monday: Richard Hughes Gibson, The Way of Dante

Tuesday: Richard B. Hayes, The Moral Vision of the New Testament

Wednesday: Laurel Richardson, Falling Into a Good Life

Thursday: John Green, Everything is Tuberculosis

Friday: Ellis Peters, A Nice Derangement of Epitaphs

So, that’s The Weekly Wrap for July 19-25.

Find past editions of The Weekly Wrap under The Weekly Wrap heading on this page.

The Weekly Wrap: July 12-18

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The Weekly Wrap: July 12-18

Smoke Days

As a reader, one of my delights has always been in snow days, when blizzards and cold make staying inside and reading. In our brave new climate world, snow days are increasingly infrequent. But this week delivered the new climatological replacement: the Smoke Day. In our part of the United States, if Canada is having a wildfire season and the winds are out of the northwest, the smoke, smelling like burning plastic, fills our skies. Yesterday morning, our Air Quality Index reached over 400, the worst reading our city has ever recorded. Some cities to our north reached readings of over 700, hazardous for all mammals.

Now I don’t think this is a good thing. Firstly, it is just plain dangerous. Sunlight turns the smoke into deadly things like benzene, formaldehyde, polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons, and ozone, some of which are carcinogenic and others which just make breathing difficult. In addition PM 2.5 particulates penetrate deep into our lungs. Then there is all that carbon dioxide, added to what we humans generate. We never used to have days like this. Changing climate conditions turn Canadian forests into tinderboxes. And many Canadians are dealing with far more dire conditions than we are.

The one consolation is that like the Snow Day, about all one can do is stay indoors (hopefully in an air-conditioned spot that filters and recycles the air) and enjoy a good book. But I manage to do that most days anyway. At least I have a good excuse to not do yard work! I would rather not have the excuse of Smoke Days. But I fear it is a new normal. Stay safe friends!

Five Articles Worth Reading

Everyone’s abuzz about Christopher Nolan’s new cinematic rendering of The Odyssey. In “We’ll Help You Find Your Next Great Book. (Spoiler: It’s the ‘Odyssey.’),” A.O. Scott suggests that no matter your taste in literature, there is something in The Odyssey for you. And he uses that to introduce us to several translations of Homer’s classic.

Colson Whitehead’s Cool Machine concludes his Harlem Trilogy. David Hadju reviews it in “The Unapologetic Crime Fiction of Colson Whitehead.”

Batsheva Labowe-Stoll maintains the quest to develop artificial intelligence has often been religious in nature in “The Deep Spiritual History of AI.” For those familiar with Genesis, the efforts to develop AI have often seemed to me another Tower of Babel story.

Derek Thompson asks, “Why is the news media so interested in telling you how much the world sucks all the time? Why are so many of us obsessed with distraction and managing our attention? Why is it so hard to stop comparing ourselves to others? And why does everything in art and design seem the same these days?” In conversation with philosopher Agnes Callard, Thompson discovers one idea that links these questions, the “uni-context.” Read “A Philosopher’s One-Word Theory to Explain Why the World Feels So Weird” for the full interview.

Finally, I’ve often reflected on what an amazing intellectual Christian community the Inklings represented. Comment explores similar communities through history and around the world in “Seedbeds of Christian Humanism: A Gallery” The article links to articles devoted to 31 different communities.

Quote of the Week

This one was thought provoking. Is the search for truth a waking up from our dreams? So suggests Iris Murdoch, born July 15, 1919:

“We live in a fantasy world, a world of illusion. The great task in life is to find reality.”

Miscellaneous Musings

An example of the community the Inklings and Dorothy L. Sayers enjoyed is described in a new book, The Way of Dante by Richard Hughes Gibson. It’s a marvelous study of the interactions between C.S. Lewis, Charles Williams, and Dorothy L. Sayers around a shared love of Dante. Not only did they challenge each other’s thinking but the encouragement of Williams and Lewis gave Sayers the courage to embark on a new translation of the Divine Comedy.

As seems usual with Jane Austen, I’m on tenterhooks to see if Anne Eliot and Captain Wentworth rekindle the romance Anne ended at the persuasion of Lady Russell, who judged the Captain unworthy of the family in Persuasion. Don’t tell me. I want to see if I’ve guessed it. This is number four of the Austen novels I’ve read this year.

He’s a MacArthur Fellow, has won numerous national awards, I love his writing, and he is from the city where i live. And now, Hanif Abdurraqib adds to all this the honor of being named the 2026 ABA Indie Bookstore Ambassador! Well done!

Next Week’s Reviews

Monday: Kathy Tuan-Maclean and Tara Edelschick, Moms on the Way

Tuesday: Donnie Berry, The Earth Will Be Filled

Wednesday: Ken Waters, Words That Shape Us

Thursday: Allen Levi, Theo of Golden

Friday: Jane Austen, Persuasion

So, that’s The Weekly Wrap for July 12-18.

Find past editions of The Weekly Wrap under The Weekly Wrap heading on this page.

The Weekly Wrap: July 5-11

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The Weekly Wrap: July 5-11

My Reading Bubble

I am becoming ever more aware that I exist within a reading bubble. I interact with a lot of readers both in person and online. And yet it turns out that only 20 percent of people in this country account for 80 percent of all book sales. And while those sales are up, as is library usage, it doesn’t appear that this is from an explosion of new readers. Rather, it might be that many of us old readers are upping our game. For retirees like me that may be literally true.

This week at The Atlantic, Rose Horowitch announced “The End of Reading Is Here” (article below). What struck me is that she was describing a sharp cultural divide between a literate and post-literate culture. Surprisingly, it is not for the absence of reading, which comes in bits and bytes constantly in our online lives. But this is very different from longform reading involving the comprehension of extended arguments or plotlines.

Consequently, we maintain different forms of discourse, from a shift from text to audio-visual and from extended discourse and discussion to competing memes and graphics. I could go in all sorts of directions with this, but I would pose the question of which corresponds more truly to life as it really is? Is it longform, or the soundbite? The fact that I keep reading gives you my answer.

Five Articles Worth Reading

We discussed how we would downsize our books by half if we had to over at my Facebook page. For some, that was to think the unthinkable. Mendel Uminer faced this challenge when his landlord said 10,000 books in a 600 square foot flat was just “Too Many Books.”

From too many books we go to the above mentioned “The End of Reading Is Here.” One of the ideas in the article is that eras of literacy are moments in history and that ours may be coming to an end. Read the article and tell me what you think.

In “Who Wants to Be a Professor?,” Mary Townsend explores the process of graduate education that inculcates a certain “persona” that is associated with the idea of a professor. Through experiences of disillusionment, she comes to this conclusion: “For let me tell you the truth, this is the only thing that is real: a lifetime of books read for pleasure, just because. It reminded of a conversation with a grad student absorbed in literary criticism, when I had the temerity to ask, When was the last time you enjoyed a book?” The look!

I’ve often maintained that the life of faith is dynamic, not static. It’s not just flipping a switch from non-belief to belief. In “Bosom Buddies” an older poet and theologian talk about how what it means to believe has changed over time as they’ve wrestled with the vicissitudes of life.

I’ve always love The Millions previews, offering thoughtful synopses of what they think are some of the more significant books of the season. Well, they have done it again in “The Millions’ Great Summer 2026 Book Preview.”

Quote of the Week

Marcel Proust was born on July 10, 1871. Given the environmental impact of most forms of travel, we might consider this:

“The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes, but in having new eyes.”

Miscellaneous Musings

I loved working through Ellis Peters’ Brother Cadfael books. I’ve been reading one of her Felse Investigations. While set in modern times, I find this equally engaging. I think I’ve found a new (or not so new) series.

Maybe I’m too dogmatic, but I’ve pretty well concluded there is no place for using AI in the composition of books. Writing is hard work when done by humans but has brought us great and truly original works. Using AI to generate text just seems like cheating. And its also not always a very reliable researcher.

One would think getting to read lots of books is one of the perks of reviewing–and it is. But one of the most surprising satisfactions has been to work with authors, publicists, and readers and to engage with them as people. I think the reviewer who doesn’t like people misses out on a great deal and reviewing just becomes a grind. But that could just be me.

Next Week’s Reviews

Monday, Lisa Gray, LFMT, Thriving in a Relationship When You Have Chronic Illness

Tuesday: Jonathan P. Walton, Beauty and Resistance

Wednesday: Roy McDaniel, Enacting Atonement

Thursday: Jill LePore, We The People

Friday: Ellis Peters, The Knocker on Death’s Door

So, that’s The Weekly Wrap for July 5-11.

Find past editions of The Weekly Wrap under The Weekly Wrap heading on this page.