It will not surprise you that I love reading book reviews, perhaps as much as I love reading books themselves. Every Sunday, I work my way through the New York Times’ Review of Books, taking note of books I’d like to read as well as those I firmly will avoid. I’d already noted Emma Straub’s latest, This Time Tomorrow, thanks to Lisa’s DIK review. The NYT’s review, also rather glowing, begins with a question I am fascinated by: If you could travel back to 1996 for 24 hours, how would you spend that time? To be more accurate, I think often about this question: If I could relive one day of my life, which would it be?

It’s an impossible query, of course. It’s like asking if you could only take one book to a desert island, what would it be? There are too many answers and one’s choice depends on one’s current mood and context. […]

The world is so often full of gloom and doom. Somedays, I find myself thinking ENOUGH ALREADY! There is so much to be joyful for! Let’s think about that for a change. So, I ask you, got any good news you’d like to share?

I do. Our extended family took two vacations this summer and, for the first time ever, my three US based kids (my eldest lives in India) each brought their significant other. One we’ve known for a decade, one for three years, and one we met for the first time in July. The glad tidings? Not only do I like (and approve of) them all, the six of them got along swimmingly. I watched them, each evening, play Mexican Train or Code Names or Durak, laughing and chatting and oh! how it gladdened my heart.

How about you? What’s warmed your world–in a good way!–lately?

I am so sorry for the phenomenal insensitivity and stupidity of today’s Ask.  I had written it earlier in the week in a poorly thought out effort to connect romance to the wider world. It was dumb and horrible and, in retrospection, I wonder how I could have been so tone deaf. I have taken it down. It obviously never should have gone up in the first place. Again, I apologize.

Dabney