At SBC Summer Camp a couple weeks ago we did a book bedazzling workshop and it was deeply satisfying. I enjoy arts and crafts, but I’m not particularly talented. I am someone who likes coloring inside the lines. I have terrible handwriting and was always jealous of the girls in middle school who wrote in perfect plump, swoopy cursive. They all could draw cute anime-style kittens, too, the jerks.
But gluing hundreds of tiny crystals onto the cover of a book? Now that is my jam. It’s like paint by numbers but way more sparkly. And the end result creates an exquisite contrast of sharp bumps against buttery smooth paper. It’s like ASMR for your fingertips. My friend Jamie tells me with all this bedazzling I am now qualified to be a cheer mom, but I’ll stay in my lane and stick to libraries and book fairs, thanks…
Happy reading!
Guinevere
We’re partnering with our friends at Knopf to give away 5 copies of our SBC Reads pick for August, BEGINNING MIDDLE END by Valeria Luiselli. (Sorry, you can’t have my bedazzled edition. You’ll have to make your own.)
This gorgeous novel is about a mother and her young daughter starting over after a divorce, searching for a new story against the backdrop of Sicily, Greek mythology, and the ominous rumbling of Mount Etna.
If you’re an annotator or an underliner, sharpen your pencil or refill your ink because there are so many passages of prose in this book that will stop you in your tracks. I took photos of entire paragraphs to send to my reading buddy. It’s that good. Here’s one of my favorites, but you must read the book because there are so many more.
“While we think we are simply reading and writing the world for them, our children are always, also, reading and writing us.” —Valeria Luiselli, BEGINNING MIDDLE END
SBC Reads: BEGINNING MIDDLE END
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Aug 3
Really good indie booksellers have an uncanny ability to hand you exactly the right book at the right time. It’s the same superpower that I imagine fortune tellers possess: keen observation, deep curiosity, the gift of storytelling, and a well of empathy that runs deep.
Book-related links and other good stuff online
The internet makes most information instantly available. Is that why mass culture is so boring? The Atlantic
Let's discuss the four types of introversion, shall we? Verywell Mind
Publishing sales hit $33.4 billion in 2025. Adult fiction revenue was up 3.9%, to $7.1 billion. Funny, last month they said books are dead 🙄 Publishers Weekly
Speaking of which, the death of reading has been greatly exaggerated The Bulwark
Caught in the backlash over AI, book publishers face mounting questions Christian Science Monitor
If you set out to design from scratch a tool to facilitate authoritarian rule, it would look exactly like AI The Guardian
The Odyssey book bump is real, and it’s glorious Slate (paywall)
Please judge the books I’m reading The New York Times
There is now an archive of eulogies given by Palestinian journalists to their martyred colleagues LitHub
Art Spiegelman: ‘The US needs a counter-revolution’ The Guardian
Reading books becomes an ‘antidote’ for brains addicted to phones. Vietnam.vn
The El Paso Silent Book Club is the perfect place to hang out and shut up Talk 103.9
A new Hendersonville romance bookstore opens Hendersonville Times-News
Cozy Bookstores and Reading Nooks Alexandria Living Magazine
Local library partners with Missouri National Recreational River to bring reading to Riverside Park Yankton Press & Dakotan
BrightWorks Introduces Silent Book Club in Ann Arbor CityBiz
Bringing ‘Good Vibes’ to Reading in the Park Cochrane Eagle
Five lives. Five stories. Four will live—one will die. Who it will be? In this masterpiece of psychological fiction, the choice is all yours.
Silent Book Club members are invited to a live Q&A with author Ilona Bannister on August 26th at 1pm ET. This event is free, but you must register in advance to receive the Zoom link by email.
📖 What: Live Q&A with Ilona Bannister
🗓️ When: August 26th at 1pm ET
🌎 Where: Zoom (RSVP to receive link)
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