Sara Ryan

  I checked out this book, with that cover (other versions of the cover just look wrong), so many times from the library. Like a lot of kids, I was fascinated by ancient Egypt — or rather, by the version of ancient Egypt that you tend to get in elementary school, focused mainly on mummies, [...]

One day when I was home sick from junior high, my mom read to me about Archy, the vers libre poet reincarnated in the body of a cockroach, and his friend Mehitabel the cat, who may or may not be the reincarnation of Cleopatra. I fell in love with them both, and with the George [...]

Don’t get me wrong. I’m a longtime fan of the Anne of Green Gables series, too. (Click the link for Gwenda Bond‘s excellent recent NPR piece about the Anne books.) But not as many people ever seemed to know about the Emily books, and that automatically made them more appealing to me. That, and the [...]

I’ve just spent the last half hour or so entering my recently inherited Pogo collection into LibraryThing. When Dad first started collecting Pogo, he wrote his name in the books. Sometimes, underneath, he’d write the city he was living in. Every time I pulled a book off the shelf to enter its title, I looked [...]

I am the child of two librarians. I grew up in libraries and used bookstores. I don’t remember Mom or Dad ever telling me that I was too young to read a particular title, though I do remember once being scolded for trying to impress my parents’ friends with what I was reading. So I [...]

I was talking with a friend the other day, saying that writing the long sad post about my father had gotten me thinking about how I’ve been oddly shy and reticent about posting about other things here; things about which I might reasonably be expected to have a certain level of expertise and knowledge. “Like [...]