What are you reading? seems to be a go-to question among friends and colleagues and family, especially in the summer months when we allow for such rewarding but hard to find time for endeavors. During July and August school children sign up for reading programs, beach novels get traded sand and all between besties, and adults of all degrees become literary critics with ease pronouncing and denouncing across their social media platforms. I too enjoyed a few novels in between the relentless weekly New Yorker. Whatever you are feeling today, joy over Taylor & Travis, excitement about Alcaraz’s buzz and level of excellence, or despair over the latest school shooting, marking over 430 such massacres of children since Columbine, fright over the walk-out of science and medical experts from the C.D.C., terror over Putin’s control of the current US President, anger towards the cowardly GOP dismantling voting rights, citizen rights, or anything that would require a conversation, horror over the wars still raging in Ukraine and the Middle East, in any case you just might find a way out of going crazy by reading a novel. Yes, fiction to start. But history and memoir and art and poetry and on and on through the whole myriad of genres will all guide you through the darkest of days and longest of nights.

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