macsbacks's blog

April is Earth Month and National Poetry Month, so the focus this month is nature, poetry, and nature poetry. I’ll start with one of my favorite nature books from the past year, Aimee Nezhukumatathil’s sumptuous essay collection, World of Wonders.

Happy Women's History Month! There have been so many great books by women released in the past few years that it would break our website to try to list them all. Instead, I'll list some of my favorite fiction, graphic novels, and essays.

Let's start with Anna North's Outlawed. Dystopian. Feminist. Western. Okay, you've just pushed three of my literary buttons.

In celebration of Black History Month, the focus is on African and African-American writers. If the events of the past year have taught us anything, it is that the voices of people of color have been ignored, and in many instances, willfully suppressed for far too long. A crucial step in combating systemic racism is to not only read and absorb the words of Black writers, but to actively do the work needed to stand up for racial justice.

Happy New Year! As we drag our weary souls out of the clustercuss that was 2020, there is much to look forward to. A vaccine (yes!), new leadership in the White House (cautious optimism), and, as always, new books. The cold winter months and the seemingly endless pandemic make hunkering down and reading an appealing and safe prospect. 

On the necessity of book clubs in plague time —

Art by Austin Kleon "Overheard on the Titanic"

Fall is the perfect time to curl up with a great work of historical fiction. This month we look at Maggie O'Farrell's rich new novel -

Hamnet by Maggie O’Farrell

    Hamnet Shakespeare’s sliver of a life ended at age eleven, probably due to bubonic plague. While his name appears on the cover of Maggie O’Farrell’s (I Am I Am I Am) latest novel, the book is really about his mother, Agnes.

This month, in celebration of the much-anticipated publication of John "Derf" Backderf's Kent State: Four Dead in Ohio, we turn our focus on graphic novels as a conduit for gaining new perspectives on history -