Dear friends,

As I write this I am eating my other lunch, Kashi GO Toasted Berry Crisp with fresh blueberries, dried cranberries, and crystallized ginger in whole milk. It’s a complete sugar bomb.

“Mind the Gap” — I do love this slightly obnoxious list the Horn Book allows itself once a year, twitting the ALA Award committees about books they had — AHEM — “missed.” It’s never what wins that actually provides the fun, is it, it’s what — pointedly? — does not. (Glenn: between you and me, it’s not your performances, which are wonderful, it’s the scripts.) While reality would have it that the award committees were not, in fact, excluding The Book You Think Should Have Won so much as they were selecting The Book They Liked the Best, it is still cathartic to darkly mutter and cast aspersions.

Also over on the website you should read Elissa’s plea to remember that kids need books — book-books — amidst our screen-saturated COVID-19 world, and she also celebrates some great librarian friends of the Horn Book who are literally out there getting books to children. I wish we could resurrect the Book Caravan!

As far as my non-work reading goes — and how goes yours? — I’ve given up on the Swedish mystery and gone slightly west to catch up with Kristin Lavransdatter, who when I last left her was settling surprisingly well into her marriage to the hot but dim Erlend. Henry Cavill for the movie, maybe?

Love,

Roger