Brave or Cruel?

Sorting out my feelings about bad books, mothers as writers, and who gets to tell which stories

Every December, I pull out the faded blue notebook that contains the running list of all the books I’ve read in the last year. Every book I start¹ gets a small entry with title, genre, author, and a numerical ranking (on a 1-10 scale). I both tend to read a lot and to forget the title of about 80% of the books I’ve read² , so the list has been helpful in …