Who am I?

I’ve run a small-town library in rural Southern Maine for over a decade, and I’ve worked in libraries for almost twenty. Before that, I was a children’s bookseller for… I forget how long? I’ve been thinking about and recommending books for decades, and I’ve been a reader for my entire life.

I started writing Bookshelves of Doom around the same time that I started my library career; I wrote a column about middle grade and young adult books for Kirkus Reviews for a decade, served on the Rise Feminist Book Project from 2017-2020, and have written for various other outlets.

I love narrative in all formats—prose, poetry, song, comics, film, television, podcasts, fiction, nonfiction, and and mash-ups of any or all of them. I’m on most platforms—especially Letterboxd—as bkshelvesofdoom.

I live with my husband, our elderly cat, the ghosts of our beloved Jack Russell and still-opinionated tortie, and all of the various outdoor critters that are trying their damnedest to eat us out of house and home.

What’s this newsletter?

Currently, this newsletter goes out about once a week, usually on a weekday. Topically, I bounce around—I talk about books I’ve just read, stuff I’ve recently watched or listened to, or things I’ve been up to. Basically, the original tagline of my blog—book news, reviews, my life, and anything else I think is interesting—still stands.

At the moment, I’m very into middle grade horror and mysteries for all ages, but my interests are wide and varied and ever-changing. I occasionally do close reads of classic novels—most recently Carmilla—in which I recap the book over the course of a few weeks. But I don’t reserve that sort of thing for Classic Literature… I’ve been known to recap Christopher Pike as well.

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