Want to dig a bit deeper, stretch a bit wider, discover unique insights in your reading? So do I! That's why we literary nomads explore beyond the comfortable beach read. Subscribe for podcasts and video, fiction and poetry, essays and online courses, unexpected freebies, and ways to lever your literacy into activism! For students of all ages, educators of all kinds, and just plain out litterateurs!
On TBR, Tourism, and Gratuity
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14 June 2026 Reader, I'm Reading! Why Does My TBR List* Just Get Longer?*To-Be-Read List When I retired from teaching, my TBR List was a few hundred titles long: I read a great deal while I taught, but too often had to set authors aside for classroom priorities. (And writing for my self? Forget about it!) Now, after five years, that TBR List is well over one thousand books, even though I've read nearly 500 books since! I don't know if your experience is similar, but it is becoming obvious to me that I am not on anything like a path to completion, even if the world's writers stopped at this moment. So whether my reading brain fails me tomorrow or when I'm 108, I must in honesty set aside any expectation of reading everything I want to. But such an affirmation also means that another expectation must follow---that is, if I am to take my reading life seriously. If it isn't the quantity of books I read that can be managed, it must be the quality of the reading which changes. “It's not so much the book in front of me that is at issue, but what I do with it, what as a reader I bring to it.” Certainly by this, I could be thinking about the titles I choose for the level of reward they offer. To be sure, selecting a book by Celeste Ng or Fiston Mwanza Mujila or even Thomas Mann will certainly by an enriching and captivating experience. They certainly beat the hell out of choosing a pulp genre reading like Barbara Cartland romances or Clive Cussler thrillers. On the other hand, I might be better off to think less about (or not only about) what I bring as a reader to whatever title I encounter. In other words, it's not so much the book (or film or poem or art or song or essay) in front of me that is at issue, but what I do with it. If the book is worth buying, or borrowing (or stealing), then it is worth the time to read it richly, make some quality use of it, whether that is the wealth of world-disturbing compulsions it implants or the significant weight of its strength to center and relax me. And these require a posture or attitude about what I read that the "rush to completion" philosophy simply fails at. If I can make no quality use of a book, I must learn how to read it differently or set it aside. After all, we all desire a life of quality, and it's a shame that this will only be marked as true if I die with a dog-eared copy of Infinite Jest near my bed. (I keep one there, anyway, In Case of Sudden Departures.) Recently I have read a few books like this which have challenged me, but just as often I've learned that it is my attitude towards the book which is off, not the story. I recently finished the longish manga from the 1960s, Dororo, by Osamu Tezuka. But it carried with it a series of literary tropes and traditions that I was altogether unfamiliar with: I could not decipher their meaning, and once I learned about those techniques, it opened to me in new ways. Similarly, I just read Olivia Laing's To the River, a travelogue/literary examination of Virginia Woolf as understood by walking the length of the river outside her home, the Ouse. I was frustrated, because each time Laing stepped gingerly into the Woolf literary space, she immediately turned about to talk about some boys she met fishing, the aesthetics of duckweed, the area's Reformation history, or a bad relationship she had broken off. The problem was not hers: it was mine for expecting her to be writing something closer to literary criticism. Put another way, my prejudice almost ruined my reading of her marvelous work: I had to meander with her as with the slow-moving river, to slow down and let the space and text work on me as it would. Once I abandoned the impatience, the beauty (and geographic epiphany) came. Reading, after all, is not also the object of reading; it is itself a verb, an act to which we commit. It is not a fidelity to the number of books consumed; it's what we do each time a page is turned. Let the TBR List grow---it offers a larger menu, and probably a more varied one. And then, when we adjust our expectations for what we read by re-aligning to how we read, it might never be said that when you are finally run over by a herd of jackals, you had still more to do. Tell me about a reading experience you had that felt "wasted." Or tell me how long your TBR List is!
Literary Nomads: Journey 7 TrailerWe're set to begin our next season's Journey on the trails of Literary Tourism and centered on Anne of Green Gables! But if you think you're in for a fandom ogling of the Montgomery heroine, reconsider. We have a lot of ground to explore. I've built the season structure and concepts around a recent academic work by Nicola MacLeod, Literary Fiction Tourism, a book I am not recommending partly from cost and partly from its less-than-ambitious surveying of the tourist industry for potential entrepreneurs. Nevertheless, the spine of its argument will help us look at literature, travelogues, and places fictional and literary as readers. Along the way, as the trailer describes, we'll find elements of our readerly desire which themselves require interrogation. Where will we end up? Even I don't know that, yet! (But the 12 planned episodes have begun to double in length and---true to my promise---I have begun splitting them to keep the weekly listening shorter!) Episodes ahead:
Also, the Listener Survey for Journey 6 is open! Take a few minutes. Do the survey. Get stuff.
Calendar: Solstice and Waywords BirthdayTea dresses, ruffled blouses, and straw boater hats Tuesday!
Chapter 3: The Unpredictability of ViolenceWhat is increasingly clear from reading Blackhawk's The ReDiscovery of America is a long and grisly series of misreadings of culture and the narratives which result from these. Here, we look at the Iroquois Confederacy and how what seems "savage" to colonists is, in fact, "cultural survival strategy," a culture so powerful that the Europeans themselves had to first accommodate (and later emulate) in order to survive themselves.
Early Book RecommendationA History of Reading by Alberto Manguel (1996) I've had a bit of a dearth of really good reads, lately, but I just began Manguel's History of Reading and find myself called back again and again to it, even when I have other more urgent needs. Yes, it's one of those books, and also it's a thoughtful non-chronological history of not only how we've learned to read as humans, but why we do. And, by the way, why has it again taken me so long to discover Argentinian-Canadian Albert Manguel, a lifelong scholar of reading, of libraries, and of all things literature, with dozens of titles to discover! At one magical instant in your early childhood, the page of a book—that string of confused, alien ciphers—shivered into meaning. Words spoke to you, gave up their secrets; at that moment, whole universes opened. You became, irrevocably, a reader.
As centuries of dictators have known, an illiterate crowd is the easiest to rule; since the craft of reading cannot be untaught once it has been acquired, the second-best recourse is to limit its scope.
Life happened because I turned the pages.
Why Do We Keep Killing Our Darlings? by Sarah Braunstein Author and educator Braunstein worries that we might have some form of disorder: we writers, perhaps readers too, or viewers of Game of Thrones. Why, she asks, is there this growing epidemic of leaving conflicts unresolved by the wanton deaths of main characters? What evasions are at work? What is it in the world that we are reflecting? Is our conception of justice growing skewed? What forms of resolution no longer seem tenable or reachable to us? What has become of our accountability to each other, for literature, for everything else?
Writing and reading every day right now, it seems. That's a pretty good routine. Now if I could only fit in the gardening, the recreation, a movie or four, and food on a routine schedule . . . Always priorities! Steve What's Still Ahead?
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Waywords Studio
Want to dig a bit deeper, stretch a bit wider, discover unique insights in your reading? So do I! That's why we literary nomads explore beyond the comfortable beach read. Subscribe for podcasts and video, fiction and poetry, essays and online courses, unexpected freebies, and ways to lever your literacy into activism! For students of all ages, educators of all kinds, and just plain out litterateurs!