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 mont…