Dear friends:

You know, with a panicking gangster/terrorist still occupying the White House, it’s not easy to write this letter on a Wednesday for publication two days later. Who knows what will happen between now and then? Please join me in looking forward to January 20th. Until then, join me in prayer.

Elissa’s Family Reading post about overdue book shame made me laugh — her kid is an amateur. When I was packing to go away to college, I found a copy of A Child’s Life of Mary Baker Eddy I had checked out in the fourth grade from the local Christian Science Reading Room. And when the Chicago Public Library was testing a new circulation system back in the ’90s, guess whose record came up first on a list of persistent dilly-dalliers? I take to heart my psychoanalyst friend Gary’s motto that “there is no laziness, only fear.”

Between getting the March/April Horn Book Magazine Publishers’ Preview and Book Review sections finished, I have done zero recreational reading of note, excepting Maud Hart Lovelace’s Emily of Deep Valley, which I was prompted to read from an early look at Mitali Perkins’s forthcoming nonfiction book about children’s classics, Steeped in Stories: Timeless Children’s Novels to Refresh Our Tired Souls (which we are excerpting in March/April also). Emily is a book very much of its time (1950), and despite the fact that its heroine is a recent high school graduate, is worlds apart from what we think of as “YA” today. But its theme of “What am I going to do next?” still resonates even while so much contemporary YA is asking “What am I going to do now?” Both excellent questions ESPECIALLY THIS WEEK.

Love,

Roger