10 of the Best Indie Bookstores in the World

https://lithub.com/10-of-the-best-indie-bookstores-in-the-world/

 

Calls to ban books hit highest level ever recorded in the US

Demands to censor, most often for gender themes or sexual detail, rose 38% year on year in 2022, with Gender Queer by Maia Kobabe being last year’s ‘most challenged’ title

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2023/apr/24/calls-to-ban-books-hit-highest-level-recorded-in-the-us-censorship

 

TREMENDOUS. WONDERFUL. INSPIRING. TOUCHING. I just watched it on Prime. Cost 6 bucks. That’s nothing. I used to pay 8 bucks for a pint, not counting the tip.

 

BECAUSE I’M READING THIS NOW and PART ONE and because the friend I stayed with in Lakewood, Ohio this past week has a porch on his double house which I sat on and smoked—I never smoke in New York—I thought about being a young college grad, married, with a young daughter in a Lakewood double in 1969. I smoked on the porch then and listened to mostly folk music and read Kurt Vonnegut on a lawn chair on the porch. I taught grade school in a Black school my first year. A guy I taught with who became my friend had gone to law school and needed to teach that year for a deferment. I needed one too. We used to have beers after school. I don’t drink anymore. Some of my friends from my small rural hometown in Western New York didn’t go to college and went to Vietnam.

 

KIDS CAN’T READ: The revolt that is taking on the education establishment (from the New York Times)

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/04/16/us/science-of-reading-literacy-parents.html?smid=nytcore-ios-share&referringSource=articleShare

 

Dogger to the rescue: how my mother’s books brought joy to the children of Ukraine

After the death last year of children’s author Shirley Hughes, her son took hundreds of her books, including the award-winning Dogger, to libraries in Ukraine, where reading is helping to heal the children traumatised by war

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2023/apr/09/shirley-hughes-books-children-ukraine-library

 

Texas Observer journalists raise $270,000 in bid to save publication 

Magazine’s editors asked board not to lay off anyone for a month if staff raised $200,000 after Friday’s vote to cease publication

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2023/mar/29/texas-observer-closing-gofundme