Dear friends:

Oy, I have eighty-seven book reviews to edit, thirty-one Publishers’ Preview questions to write, and a Talks interview tomorrow, and here I am, writing to You People. I hope it’s worth it.

Hopefully (hey, let’s see if I can get a singular they in here someplace, too) this will all be done before the weekend, which I plan to spend reading mysteries and watching trains and movies on TV stretching and running and practicing piano scales and reading Saint Augustine. (They is one intense dude.)

About reading mysteries — there was a social media discussion somewhere about people rereading books they loved for comfort during this dismal time. I mean, sure, but isn’t that the basis for genre publishing in general (note I say “basis” before you get riled)? And TV — last night we were watching new-to-us Heat of the Sun and I swear it has all the tropes of every other Brit detective show, here set in 1930s colonial Kenya. I am only waiting for them to fire the weenie medical inspector and bring in someone more suitably cynical and mordant. But we largely like our TV and reading choices to be more of whatever it was we last enjoyed. So — for real now — I plan to read The Less Dead and hope it is not like the last Denise Mina, which was stupid, and more like the one before that.

I don’t know if the Horn Book Magazine is pleasure or professional reading for you, but the new issue is out (including the editorial I began a ways back in a letter to you). If you read it for work, get busy; if you read it for fun, go do your work now and savor us on the holiday weekend. Back to book reviews.

Love,

Roger