Hello, Readers
Tend to your reading life with The Booktender
Welcome to The Booktender. I’m Abra (pronounced like the vegetarian version of Abraham).
I recently said goodbye a 19-year career in higher education to become the Executive Director of the Tucson Festival of Books. Here’s how I got here.
I created The Booktender in January 2024, when I finally admitted to myself that I make a terrible book club member. If I love a chosen book, I’ll read it fast and be on to something else by the time the group meets a month later. If I don’t like it, I’ll DNF— and still have the audacity to be annoyed if whoever chose the book in the first place doesn’t show to the meeting where we discussed it.
But when I stopped participating, I realized: reading alone is also very overrated.
To nudge myself out of a reading slump, I started posting as The Booktender. What would happen if I created a themed menu of books to choose from and shared it with whoever might want to receive it, instead of placing all my hopes for social reading on one single book per month?
What if instead of a scheduled meeting life often interferes with, I could start some asynchronous discussions for readers to engage with on their own time?
Throw in some author interviews and beverage suggestions, and we almost have a party.
True origin
Of course the true supervillan-style origin story for The Booktender starts much earlier.
That’s me, turning the pages of the Sears catalog circa 1976. As the story goes I was an eldest daughter who would gladly turn pages for periods of time unthinkable to most parents of toddlers, freeing my mother to tend to other people and things.
I never gave up the habit, eventually borrowing tens of thousands of dollars from the Federal government to turn pages for four years, earning a degree in Comparative Literature.
And yes, I managed to find a way to pay it all back.
My tastes tend toward contemporary literary fiction, world literature in translation, and juicy memoirs. Sometimes I dip into other time periods or genres when it goes along with a monthly theme I’m excited about.
Though some readers have told me my posts remind them of college English class, I have a rule (eldest daughter) not to make The Booktender about any kind of reading or writing that feels like an assignment to me.
Tend to your reading life
That slump I mentioned? Once I started tending to my reading life, really pouring attention and energy into an experience I’ve enjoyed for as long as I can remember, I realized it was a symptom of a larger stagnation. My baseline acceptable level of joy, creativity, and self-expression in multiple areas of life had flatlined.
As I took in art that spoke to the themes coming up for me, I started to change.
The Booktender began from an impulse to create community around literature, and a goal to spend time in conversation with more readers and authors— especially those connected to my hometown of Tucson.
And now it’s happening beyond what I had imagined.
What to expect
If you’re new to Substack, it’s a subscriber-based ad-free platform host for newsletters. If you click subscribe and give me your email address, you’ll receive the monthly themed lists directly. You can also download the Substack app to read my posts (and explore other publications) there instead.
In addition to monthly themed lists, free subscribers usually receive 1-2 posts per week with commentary on the books on the list and their connection to other happenings in media and culture.
If you find you don’t have much time or energy right now to read for pleasure, but don’t want to lose touch with the idea of yourself as a reader, please enjoy perusing these as a “reading voyeur,” as one subscriber put it. They go deep enough that you can be in-the-know about some current books without actually reading all that many.
If you regularly enjoy my posts and find I’m helping you spend your reading time more enjoyably, I’d be grateful if you’d upgrade to a paid subscription. Monthly subscriptions can be cancelled at any time.
All 2024 proceeds from subscriptions and commissions go to support librarians and organizations mounting legal challenges to public book bans. In the first half of the year The Booktender donated $430 and my goal is to triple that before end of the year.
And here’s my favorite part. For annual paid subscribers, I’ll actively help curate your reading life, taking the time to learn about you and turn that conversation into list of bespoke book recommendations responding to the themes coming up for you this year. We’ll get as deep, or deeply frivolous, as you want.
As The Booktender has proven for me, reading with intention can catalyze well-being and fulfillment. If you need a boost, I can help make this year of reading memorable for you.
So glad you’re here
Thanks for bearing with me on the money talk. When I get quiet I sometimes think the sucking sound I hear is the internet connecting to my own bank account through a straw, so I understand if a contribution is not right for you now—or ever.
I’m so glad you’re here. I hope you’ll click through to comment on posts often, share The Booktender emails with others, and generally have a great time.
Cheers,
If you’re new, start here with an example of my montly lists:
And a related recent post about Joan Didion’s Democracy and current events:
Some more monthly lists to peruse:
All views expressed at The Booktender are my own. To receive news from the Tucson Festival of Books, please sign up on the organization’s website.
I am a new subscriber here, but I love this little catch up around your reasons for starting (and continuing) The Booktender, as well as the realisation that tending to your reading life helped you to see that other areas had become flatlined. I very much resonated with that.
Also, how much fun it was flicking through catalogues as a child!!