Today’s the day! Let’s wrap up our chats on Nichole Perkins’ beautifully, brutally honest essay  collection. Her opinions and views on self, relationships, womanhood, and the way that the influence of pop culture directs and shapes those things are piercingly perceptive and real. Today we’ll be digging into some specifics, and get into just what in the world Miss Piggy has to do with self-discovery and identity. I hope you enjoyed reading along with me on this book throughout this month. I hope that this little book-loving space has inspired you to make more time for  books, to grow a greater love for them, and to find something in them that you hadn’t ever known before. Until we meet here again, take good care, and happy reading.

It’s time to check in on this month’s read! Is anyone else blushing yet? Laughing? Crying? Perkins’ essays threw me around emotionally from one to the next; her thoughts, feelings,and stories are unpredictable, sometimes in the best and sometimes in the worst of ways, but taken all together they make for an absolutely unique collection. Today, we’ll talk a bit about Nichole Perkins as a person and as a writer before dipping our toes into some of the book’s most standout themes and features. Most importantly,I want to think about why, especially for this book, the format of the book as an essay collection holds significance and value to the way we read her stories. Enjoy the rest of this holiday season, and see you when we come back together at the end of the month!

A happy chilly December! This month our focus turns to Nichole Perkins’ essay collection, Sometimes I Trip On How Happy We Could Be. This book is honest, and open, and in it, Perkins shares all, about all, for us all, without any reservations. It isn’t all pretty, but it all comes together to give us a picture of who she is – one of the major purposes of writers sharing their most personal works. Before we jump into this book, though, I’ll take some time today to talk about my vague, still pretty lax, but nonetheless hopeful reading goals for the new year, as we come closer and closer to it every day. I know myself better than to make any goals too specific, but it’s still important, I think, to give myself a roadmap to guide my way and keep working through my stacks. Thanks for joining me and happy reading this month!

November is almost over, which means it’s time for our wrap-up chat on Malinda Lo’s Last Night at the Telegraph Club. This book, as I discuss in today’s episode, is multi-layered and complex. There are so many pieces – of both the details of setting and plot as well as the characters themselves, their identities – that risk being lost in the rest if not taken for every ounce they’re worth. Lily’s story is an important one in the way that it represents the real,  and by the simple act of telling the truth, it refuses to let anything be left out. It was a difficult read for many of the same reasons – it doesn’t hesitate to expose the injustice in our histories, and it demands better of us. There’s something so important  – many things, actually –about a book like this one. I’m glad we had the chance to share it together.

Maybe it’s because of the build-up to the holidays, or maybe it’s  because the hours of daylight keep getting to be fewer and fewer, but it seems like the month is just flying by! It’s already time for our mid-month check-in on Malinda Lo’s Last Night at the Telegraph Club. Today we talk about the way that this book handles the issue of hiding in plain sight. I’ll focus on Lily, and the way that hiding keeps her from fully realizing the truth of her identity – but as you read, think about the other characters who, in various circumstances, are made to hide some piece or part of themselves in order to survive, and what that does to the way they live. I hope you’re enjoying your read so far!

Who knew that November could come so quickly? If you feel like this year is moving by way too quickly, then maybe it’s time to take a little step back in time – and what better way to do that than through historical fiction? For the month, the book we’ll be sharing is Last Night at the Telegraph Club by Malinda Lo, a work that is a bit of an octopus-book, which is a term I just made up to refer to a book that falls under multiple different classifications and categories and takes on a lot of different topics and points of interest. This one, for example, is a young adult-targeted, historical, coming-of-age, LGBT romantic fiction, which in itself contains commentaries on race relations, immigration, political tensions, women’s education and social empowerment, and sexuality and gender, and the history of underground lesbian communities. As so many of us in English studies love to say, “there’s a lot to unpack there.” It’s a lot of work to write a good historical fiction book – it takes dedication and care and closeness and so much research, but when it  all comes together, it gives us something beautiful. I hope that you and I find this month that Last Night at the Telegraph Club is one of the good ones.

Happy Halloween! Today we finish out our focus on the graphic novels Pumpkinheads and Garlic and the Vampire. Mostly, I think what hit me the most while reading these books was how much it speaks to the idea that growing up never really ends. The challenges we face every day never quit. There will always be something next to adapt to, and that is something that should excite us about life as much as it might scare us. I loved the way that the characters in these stories faced those challenges and overcame them. So, with lessons like that shining through the story? Who’s still out there saying that graphic novels are inferior, juvenile, or that their stories don’t matter? I hope you enjoyed joining me this month for these books! I’ll offer you some related reads to close us out as usual, and see you again soon for our November launch.

Anyone else getting into the fall moods now that we’re well into October? As we read through our two picks for this month, we should consider a lot of things: their stories, of course, but the way that the artwork enriches the stories, too. The possibility that the specific ways these stories are told matters a lot, and not just because we might like or dislike the way they’re drawn. Today, I’ll share short author bios for our three writers/artists of interest for the month and share my first impressions of each of the books. Beyond that, I think it quite important to lay out all the cards on why graphic novels have emerged as such a majorly important player on the field of literacy, and relevant also to speculate how and why they might be here to stay. Like we’ve said before about any other stories told in any other format, their tellers have a reason for doing so; finding that reason might be one of the most important pieces to understanding the story as a whole.