Welcome to The Booktender

Reading alone is overrated. So are book clubs.

Reading Alone is Overrated.

This is me, age one, “reading” the Sears catalog. My baby album contains multiple versions of this picture. They are my mother’s favorites and how could they not be? I quietly flipped through catalogs for unfathomable lengths of time. If I were a supervillain, my origin story would begin here. Eldest daughter, left to her own devices while mother tended to needier siblings in a tarpaper-shingled rural farmhouse, became absorbed in the world of commerce to escape loneliness and neglect…