The reading never stopped. The blog did. Stepping away seemed necessary, if only to trust that the words would wait, as if they ever do. Journaling began last year. This year, while setting up my 2026 Traveler’s Notebook, it became clear that returning to the blog was overdue, two entries in, and the work that had been missed announced itself.
Why read? A line from Grady Hendrix’s The Southern Book Club’s Guide to Slaying Vampires lingers: “A reader lives many lives… The person who doesn’t read lives but one.” True enough. Reading travels without packing a bag. Over the past year, journeys were taken to Green Town, Illinois (wink), New York City, London, Paris, California, Japan, and Canada, all through books. Not quite the same as living it, but close enough to see the world through someone else’s eyes.
What kinds of books appear on the shelves? Thrillers rub shoulders with novels of almost no plot at all. Literary fiction claims attention most often, but the appetite is wide, restless, ungoverned. For 2026, more nonfiction is due. More Didion. Perhaps Mary Oliver.
The collection itself is a quiet map of fascination: Ray Bradbury, Sally Rooney, Donna Tartt, Stephen King, J.K. Rowling, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, J.D. Salinger. SJP Lit and the 2025 Booker Prize demanded attention last year, revealing new corners of thought and imagination. Along the way, smaller goals were accomplished, books lingered, lists shortened, pages turned. And finally, a long-standing challenge reached its conclusion: all of Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes mysteries were read, awaiting their own telling.
Between lines and pages, mischief persists: a wink at Green Town, a thrill in plotless novels, a quiet audacity in the books chosen and the lives glimpsed. Reading is never passive. It is living, lightly, sometimes recklessly, through many lives at once.
Xoxo,
A Greedy Reader
Books and Mischief 