This matters because when we read aloud from a picture book we’re not just sliding our eyes along printed text. There’s a negotiation in play: how much visual engagement will the page offer? How dense is the text? And how can you hold the attention of this little person (your kid) sitting on your lap? […]

The experience of picking up a novella differs from beginning a novel. You’re not committing hours of your life (well, maybe, but it’s a short enough distance that we’ll set that aside for now). You can read it in an afternoon or split it over the course of a week. You won’t feel like you’re […]

Having a stack of fantasy books on your bedside table make you feel good. Until you look down and see you’ve committed yourself to a thousand pages of world building and still haven’t got out. It’s all well and good getting excited about that boxset of books, but once you own them, then what? They […]

Panic: “I just picked up the third book in this series and I realize I have absoluteley no memory of what happened previously. This can occur with all sorts of long narrativess, from mystery trilogies to fantasy epics. It’s typically a logistical problem, not an interest problem. Rather than thinking about reading as a project […]