Archives - Weekly Update

The days fly by at Bookreporter when life is normal. During a pandemic, the hours seem to fly by even faster. I am usually awake by 6:30 or 7:00, reading newsletters and news online for an hour. This week, I then jumped on my recumbent exercise bike, riding and reading a book for another hour. Until this week, the bike seat was a very convenient place to stack papers and magazines that I wanted to read. Now, instead of commuting by car, I am pedaling and going nowhere a few feet from my desk. Once the day starts, I try to take a walk midday, but since the weather was pretty uncooperative this week, I was content just biking to nowhere.

Five weeks ago, I sent the staff home with laptops and docking stations, concerned for them traveling on the New York City subway in what clearly was starting to be a real health crisis. Since then, we have been working longer hours than usual, albeit from home, with a goal to bring you the latest news about books and authors, which we know is coming to you at a time when many bookstores are closed to browsing and libraries are only available remotely. We plan to keep up the pace to keep you reading.

IF there is ever a next time that we have to quarantine, I am going to be sure we have a massage therapist stuck with us. We can recommend books, cook, bake, knit and build furniture, but there are other skills needed here. I feel like we are on the prairie, and I want to assemble the best team possible. Tom applied his engineering skills to coloring my hair last weekend; he did a very good job, and we learned a lot in case there is a “next time” for at-home hair color, which I think there will be. He told me he missed a spot, but clearly I cannot see it.

Greetings from our homes to yours. I have been making notes for this newsletter all week, of things I am reading, seeing and watching. We appreciate that you are reading this --- and also that you are reading so many books. I have gotten notes about how book groups are meeting via Zoom and how people are buying from indies, and borrowing e-books from libraries. I am getting ---- and trying to answer as many as I can --- notes from readers.