Curated reading lists.

Favorite Essays I Read This Week:

After losing his wife during childbirth, this father turns his pain into purpose (via sheknows)

The sound of grief (via The New Yorker)

Favorite Short Fiction I Read This Week:

Snakes by Danielle Evans

Favorite Flash Fiction I Read This Week:

A middle finger flipped on a school bus by Davon Loeb

Favorite Writing Advice I Read This Week:

How failure defines the writing life, Stephen Marche

Favorite Heart-Clutching Sentence I Read This Week:

“That’s what I always end up coming back to—that I can make something useful, even beautiful, out of any circumstance.” Suleika Jaouad, The Value of Venting

Favorite Paragraph I Read This Week:

“I trust my body more at 70 than I ever could at twenty. The way I see it, if we’re willing to be interested, curious, considerate, and engaged with the skin suit we were given, we will be gifted with quality long life. Even if we were brutal to ourselves along the way, and my hand is way up here, the body forgives us swiftly if we feed it well, move it much, and make the intellectual, emotional, and spiritual commitments to ourselves we deserve.” Affliction or Adventure and Advantage: How to Take Life’s Hardballs and Turn Them into Home Runs, Julia Hubbel

Book Recommendation

This Is Your Time by Ruby Bridges.

I got this recommendation from Ryan Holiday’s The Reading List Email for February 19, 2023. These days I read more short stories and fewer autobiographies. But I couldn’t stop reading This Is Your Time—a book about the incredible bravery of the first black child to interrogate an all-white elementary school in New Orleans in 1960. Ryan recommends the book for kids, but adults should also read this book.

Etcetera

• The work is not enough, Anne Helen Petersen
• 12 powerful books that center Black women’s health (sheknows)
• The most beautiful libraries in the world (via Electric Literature)
• Alone and exploited, migrant children work brutal jobs across the U.S. (via The New York Times)
• A penguin in the desert
• These violent delights have violent ends (via Jessica Wildfire’s newsletter)
• 7 novels about immigrant mothers who defy societal expectations (via Electric Literature)

Did You Know?

In 1986, Ethiopia defeated an Italian military bent on conquest and colonization. On March 2, 2023, for the 127th time, Ethiopia celebrated Adwa Victory Day.