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’m the Executive Director of the Tucson Festival of Books. This is my personal reading newsletter.

In January 2024, I finally admitted to myself that I make a terrible book club member. But when I stopped participating, I realized: reading alone is overrated.

To nudge myself out of a reading slump, I started posting as The Booktender. 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 city, Tucson.

Around here I’m known for my “rabbit hole” monthly reading lists and for creating The Bookstack Directory.

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.

Eventually I borrowed 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.

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 literature that spoke to the themes coming up for me, all of it started to change for the better.

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 my posts 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.

What to expect

In addition to monthly themed lists, free subscribers receive 1-2 additional posts per month with commentary on the books I’ve been reading, new releases or book-related news and culture.

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. I’ll send four posts a year just for paid subscribers to help make this year of reading memorable for you.

In 2024, I donated all proceeds from subscriptions and commissions to support librarians and organizations mounting legal challenges to public book bans. We donated over $1,000.

I haven’t done any events for awhile as I got used to my new job, but I’m working on something for annual subscribers I’ll be excited to announce very soon!

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 menus:

My WiTS End

Curb Appeal

Resting Rich Face

And other posts :

Mid-year reading check-in

Summer Shelf Talker: June

Who's hallucinating now?

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.