"When the Cranes Fly South" is about a man and his dog and a son and his father, but it is so, so much more. Definite trigger warnings here: If you have a loved one in a memory care facility, have deep, deep emotional connections to your pets and/or have any kind of dysfunctional family relationship, you either need to sit on this for a while, or keep a box of tissue next to you at all times during this, Lisa Ridzen's amazing…

I try to make sure I share my literary love with more than just a couple of genres, and typically peg the October-ish time frame for a thiller ... and then just go straight to the Stephen King shelf at the bookstore. Because he never fails to deliver. King has been somewhat of an interesting conversation starter these days with friends, when they see me with one of his books.

I'm comfortable enough with my reading whims to admit I usually have entirely shallow reasons for reading literary fiction. It's usually one of two things — I feel like I need to up my street cred by having something that's been nominated for something on my book list for the year, or because something gets so many rave reviews I have to cave and read it (see: …

Full disclosure: Big Jess Walter fan. I was lucky enough to interview him more than a decade ago for "Beautiful Ruins," which honestly I feel like I need to re-read post-Season Two of White Lotus. I haven't read everything by Walter just yet, but I saw "So Far Gone" released this summer and knew it should be added to the TBR pile.

There's family dysfunction and then there's Saul Effin' Williams. Had someone told me earlier that Janelle Brown's latest, "What Kind of Paradise" is crazy family dynamics on top of the tech boom of the 90s, I likely would have picked it up sooner. Because this is a page-turning humdinger of a story. Jane Williams is the home-schooled, living off-the-grid-with-her-father-in-rural-Montana protagonist I've been waiting a while for.

Anyone who is a fan of reading for pleasure has at least one author that serves as comfort food. I've got a few, and Taylor Jenkins Reid is one. I can always count on her books to be accessible, binge-worthy and not too taxing on the noggin. "Atmosphere" did not disappoint. It's not my favorite novel of hers — that honor likely falls to "

Have you ever thought about how your narrate your own life? Do you tell stories to your kids? Family? Friends? Are you a prolific poster on the socials, and if so, how accurate a representation of your life is it? Maybe you are a journalist. Or perhaps you just talk to yourself. And however the manner, is it with purpose or passion?

It's only a matter of time before we see Lily and Sam coming to a streaming service near you, so you may as well read "The Compound" now. I just hope they stick to the storyline and not actually .... no, they wouldn't make this an actual reality show, right? Both highly entertaining and horrifying, Aisling Rawle's dark satire on a Love Island-esque competition reality show highlights both the lengths television producers will go to elicit desired responses from contestants and the amount of psychological torture and physical pain people are willing to endure for the fleeting, at best, gift of fame.

I'm late to the party on all things Kristin Hannah — yes, this means I have not read "The Nightingale" yet. But it was that or her latest, "The Women," which honestly, it seemed like everyone was talking up to be as good if not better. <Maybe a hot take, incoming ....> I thought it was fine. Good. I didn't abandon it, though I thought about it during the first 75 pages or so.

This started out as such a great day. Really. I got up at 5:15 a.m, was out the door by 5:30, and knocked out a 4-mile run. Came home, took the dog out for his morning constitutional, made coffee, got my upper-body weight work in (here's to all of us past-50 women trying to hold on to bone density and muscle mass, am I right?) and was thinking to myself, "It's really been a nice couple of days, weather-wise, I'm in my summer era, all is right with my corner of the world."

Book friends are the best kind of friends. Book friends are the kind of people that you sometimes will not hear from for weeks, months or even years. But the second they read something life changing, they are sliding into your DMs without hesitation, dropping book recs like they can't sleep until someone else takes up their cause. These are my people.

Version 1.0.0 If you are a good and decent person, you should read "One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This." (If you are not a good person, it's not going to matter but yes you should read it as well.) If you are a good and decent person, you will absolutely be traumatized and feel attacked. Good.

Here's one for all the "I wasn't really interested in getting that promotion anyway" folks. Samantha Harvey's "Orbital" is a slim but mega-impactful read that should come with a trigger warning for anyone with anxiety, including those that live in fear of climate change, catastrophic weather events, and well, Earth's timeline in general. A story of a single day in the lives of six astronauts aboard an orbiting space station, readers are invited inside the thoughts of each as they move through their routines, beginning with morning exercises and ending with a movie night, all while a mega-typhoon is swiftly moving toward landfall on Earth below.

"Deep Cuts" is the reason you keep reading a book even if at first you aren't completely in love with the story. And that's not a poke or jab at debut author Holly Brickley — if anything, quite the opposite. "Deep Cuts" is a compelling story about all kinds of friendship from start to finish. For me, I just had to look past my own Judgy McJudgerson attitude toward certain personality traits to see the characters for who they really were.

It's officially summer reading season. Are you ready? Thanks to Independent Bookstore Day last month, I have a TBR pile that will likely last me well into 2026. I tapped into it this week for my latest read, Eric Puchner's "Dream State" — one of Oprah's picks for 2025. Short review? It didn't disappoint and was a great way to kick off summer.

This shouldn't have taken so long to read. I sat on Chris Whitaker's "All the Colors of the Dark" for a good while, pushing it further down into my TBR stack than it deserved. It's a longer story, amongst all of my TBR books that are longer stories, and I had received some mixed commentary about it. (Also, I decided to binge the entirety of "The Pitt" last weekend, which significantly cut into free reading time.

Adulting is .... exhausting. Sure, it's got its perks. We can pick our own bedtime. Control the TV remote. Eat an entire box of Ding Dongs. We only have ourselves to answer to for the choices we make, the consequences of which we are mostly the only ones to have to experience. When it comes to emotions, though, the choices we make in engaging, reacting and just plain feeling impact not just ourselves but those around us — our spouses, kids, friends, coworkers, neighbors, strangers — when it comes to emotions, more often than not, there's more than one person on the receiving end of your reaction to something.

Maybe this is the right book at the right time. I live in the Chicago 'burbs. We still haven't turned the corner into Spring, despite what the calendar says. Both work and personal life bring new challenges every day, it seems, and I am sick to death of having to dress like I am doing time on The Wall just to take my dog out for a walk in the morning.

Keru and Nate just might be my spirit animals. In Weike Wang's "Rental House," readers are invited into the lives of Keru ("like Peru") and Nate, an interracial couple that met each other at a Halloween party in college and never looked back. Both considering themselves outsiders to their environment, they were drawn together by a shared social awkwardness that neither seemed to mind having.

I just ... wow. A good friend of mine texted me a few weeks back and asked if I had read Miranda July's "All Fours" yet. "Have you read this? It's super crazy," she wrote. I asked if it was good, and she responded, "Interesting. Weird sex stuff. Kind of like watching a train wreck. It's good. I could see the movie version."

I've been asked more than once, "When are you going to write a book?" At least now I can say, "Go read 'Colored Television' and then ask me that." It's a natural question to ask of someone that loves to both read and write. And I am sure there are plenty of life experiences from which I can pull storylines.

"It is so much easier to sit in things and wait for something to save us." Wooooo, Phoebe. You just said a mouthful, sister. That pretty much sums up my generation's current modus operandi — ill-prepared to tackle any of today's societal freakouts because we've spent the entirety of our lives cos-playing disaffection, just sitting back and waiting. Thankfully, for Phoebe in Alison Espach's "

I should not have sat on this one. Percival Everett's "James" was one of the "It" books last year — so much so that I got a little contrarian about it, dug my heels in a bit, and even talked myself into a convoluted justification for not reading it. It felt like homework, I said, based on my elementary understanding of its premise — that it was a retelling of Huckleberry Finn from Jim the runaway slave's perspective.

This year. Whoo boy. I am incredibly grateful for my love of books. This was an outstanding year for reading. There’s little else from this year I want to remember, except for the books I rea…

I hate going into a new year with an unfinished read, so I have to thank Kaveh Akbar for creating something that inspired me to engage my “Do not leave this sofa until this story is over&#822…