This will be my last week writing Reviews & Reflections. As BiblioBuffet has gotten larger and more visible and as more writers have come aboard my time has become strained almost to the breaking point. I even found my enthusiasm for reading fading to such a degree that I had to force myself to pick up books. That was a shock. I love to read. I love books. Always have. What happened to change that? More importantly, how could I get back my passion?

Choices obviously had to be made, but I kept putting them off one day at a time. Then three weeks ago, I received an call to action in the form of an email from a writer who wanted to join BiblioBuffet. It was like an epiphany, this perfect person at the perfect time.

The upshot is that Lisa Guidarini will be writing Reviews & Reflections on a permanent basis beginning next week, and R&R will return to being a weekly column. She’ll be great. I like to think I see a bit of myself in her smart, sassy and forthright style—or maybe that I see a bit of her in me. At any rate, she will write as I did about anything that captures her interest. Though I will talk more about the changes and about Lisa in next week’s Letter, let me assure you that I will not disappear. I will still be co-writing On Marking Books, our column about bookmarks, with Laine Farley. Whenever I have something I want to say that requires a column—interviews, profiles, reports, essays, occasional reviews—I will be found in Bibliopinions along with our guest columnists. And of course every week I will be here.
 
Am I happy with these changes? Oh, yes! I am ecstatic. Last night was even a surprising and welcomed confirmation that this is the right move. As I was preparing for bed that night, I felt an almost gravitational pull toward my bookshelves. That once-familiar pattern of browsing my shelves, of pulling one book, then another off and opening them up to read the first line before making my choice had not vanished. The love for reading that has defined my life is still there as it always has been. It may have been overwhelmed for a while, but no longer. I am, again, a reader.

It’s not just the ardor for reading that has returned, though. I treasure the incredible contributions made by each of BiblioBuffet’s writers. They are what make this site the increasingly important venue for readers that it is. As I see it, my job is to support them, to make their work the best it can be and to show it in the best way possible. We are only three months away from celebrating our second birthday, and I am as excited as any two-year-old with a cake in her near future. Thank you for being with us and for trusting us to bring you “writing worth reading, reading worth writing about”—like this week’s new columns:

Amanda Joseph, our newest contributor and the young Australian writer of Rants and Raves From Down Under, is also a law student in her final year. In her current column, she takes a look at the Celts who flourished in Ireland during the so-called Dark Ages. Their society, she notes, was the first with a “practicing legal system with the head of the judiciary being a judge rather than a king, as it was in the rest of Europe.” And because of that, many of the books she is assigned in her classes are histories of early Irish law with their implications for modern Australian law. It’s a fascinating journey into books you probably never knew existed.

In A Walk Through My Bookshelves, Paul Clark re-discovers a discovery he made in 1980—Anne Lamott’s first novel. She was unknown then, and he only found her because he considered the publishers the finest in America at that time. It was “the North Point colophon,” he notes as the reason he found her—but not the reason he came back to her.

Continuing his thoughts on things relative to banned books week, Henry Carrigan, in Readings, notes that the “list I drew up contains books that did change the world by overturning a prevailing set of principles and transcending time and place. I had intended to simply list the books, but I then offered some comment on some and not on others.” But responses to his list have prompted him to explore in more depth the questions they raised. It’s a fascinating, challenging essay (and not the last one on this subject) that will have you exploring your own lists and the reasons for the books on them.

I enjoy literary quizzes, puzzles, trying to match up names, titles, lines, quotes, reviews and other bits to one another. Even guessing answers has its challenges. So as my last regular column for Reviews & Reflections, I am giving you as a kind of reverse game from the first lines quiz—a last lines quiz.

Stress is a factor in most modern lives. Our jobs, families, friends and commitments demand a lot—and sometimes we need a break, however small, from them. In Seasoned Lightly, Anne Michael discovers that even a great suggestion for relieving stress might have its own hidden surprise stressors.

A special treat for the lovers and collectors of bookmarks is the essay submitted by visiting author Michael Atkinson in this week’s On Marking Books. “If this is a story about bookmarks,” he writes, “. . . then it’s also a story about time, human passage, memory (or poignant lack of it), and rue, as well as about how all of these are hopelessly entwined with culture’s essence as something we manufacture in order to reach each other.” Though long, it is a brilliant and enthralling journey into that time and memory of which he speaks.

Is it true that size doesn’t really matter? Well, it depends on who you are. It certainly matters to these folks—lovers, collectors, designers and publishers of miniature books. Miniature books are those considered to be no more than three inches in size—height, width or thickness. (Some prefer to consider one inch as the maximum; see here for an excellent example of a truly miniature rare book, The Smallest English Dictionary in the World at 1 1/16” x 3/4”. You may need to scroll down a bit.)

Beginning in just a few days, the Miniature Book Society will be holding its Grand Conclave XXV in Seattle, Washington. These annual meetings include speakers, workshops, tours, and auctions and book swap meets. (So it’s probably a good thing I can’t get off work to go. Right?)

Until next week, read well, read often and read on!

Lauren