I’m sick, the kids are sick, and so we are watching too much Frozen (the movie), drinking lots of tea and warm water, and reading lots of books. The kids gravitate toward their all time favorites: anything with the heroic Lowly Worm, as well as bell hooks’ Homemade Love which we can basically read on repeat forever.

I’m reading a young adult book like usual (I’m on the Norton Award Jury for YA and MG science fiction and fantasy, so I read an ungodly amount of great teen fiction). At the moment I’m loving “Expiration Date” by William Campbell Powell. It’s a book that I’ve had on my shelf for a while, and it’s taken me a while to read it, for no good reason besides the title and the cover point to a certain type of dystopian near-future thriller that I’m a bit burnt out on. But, when I did start reading this book, I found something really unique and beautiful. It is an end of the world story about robot children when humans are no longer able to bear kids, and even better than that, it’s a meditation on humanity and personhood that I’m finding quite profound, as well as amusing and provocative. It’s a book that’s as much about being in a band and having an unrequited crush on a cute boy as it is about the end of the world. I highly recommend it.

Whenever I get books to read for award consideration, I never know how well they are doing out in the world. And yes, I suppose I could go look up some numbers and figure this out, but I don’t really want to. I want to take each book as it comes, and do a better job of not judging a book by its cover, and dive into it optimistically. And this book? I hope it is doing really well out in the world.