I’m loving raising my new kid. Funny enough, one of her favorite books right now is Hello Hello by a Brenden Wenzel. I love the way she’ll carry it over to me and crawl into my lap, waiting for me to begin, turning each page for me, how she says hi to the animals in its pages. I don’t care how many times she wants to repeat it, watching her learn and enjoy reading is absolutely delightful. I feel like I’m giving her a superpower by teaching her to enjoy reading. I’ll also read literature or magazine articles aloud to her, and it’s amazing how talkative she’ll become for the next little while, stringing together sentences of babble.

Personally, one of my life goals is to read a book by an author from each country. It’s a little fuzzy since countries have come and gone through history, then there are territories, autonomous regions etc, and maybe not a huge selection of books from each that have been translated into English. I just want to gain a worldwide perspective. One I’ve been slowly chipping away at and had put down for a while but recently became very relevant again is Reading Lolita in Tehran: a Memoir in Books by Azar Nafisi. Also recently finished the Remembrance of Earth’s Past trilogy by Cixin Liu, The Every by Dave Eggers (not really part of the goal, I just like his work, I‘d recommend that and it’s prequel, The Circle, to this crowd) and am saving the 6th and final volume of Knausgård’s Min Kamp for the long arctic winter ahead.