On this day in history six years ago, a Book Report was born.

Six years feels like a long time but also like a short time. That's the thing about subjective time, I guess.

Typing up the intro for this particular Report has felt eternal, largely because I’m having a hard time bracketing off my anger about “current events” and the fact that I’m living through the same dumb shit from the early 2000s except this time it’s even dumber and even shittier.

Well, every day I learn something new, not always for the first time. And today I re-learned an evergreen lesson about not leaving things until the last minute!

Maria Semple, Go Gentle (April 14, 2026)—Mentally, I wasn’t ready to leave the world of philosophy filtered through fiction, and physically, I didn’t really want to go out into the frozen and increasingly filthy streets of New York to browse in the library or a book store, so I asked the kind people at Putnam if I could please have an advance reader copy of Go Gentle, which is “the story of one woman’s cheerful determination to live a life of the mind.” I am grateful to Putnam for granting my request.

Let me start by acknowledging that when I say this novel “doesn’t have enough philosophy,” I am speaking purely from a subjective perspective. Objectively, it has probably the exact right amount of philosophy for the story that Semple has written, because Go Gentle is a book about being a woman of a certain age in a certain time, and philosophy is only one of many lenses that help explain the life, actions, and motivations of narrator/protagonist Adora Hazzard.

I found this book to be a lovely distraction from everything happening in the world. Semple is very funny, imo, even and perhaps especially when she personally attacks me with her character who, “years back . . . made the executive decision to waste no brainpower fussing over what to wear each day" by instead wearing a “uniform” of "blue, long-sleeved dresses [she] could put in the wash.”

You know why I think Go Gentle is good? Because at its heart, it’s something of a rom-com—a genre that we all know is not for me—with a happy ending and everything, and I still liked reading it.

🚨🚨🚨🚨🚨🚨🚨🚨🚨🚨🚨🚨🚨🚨🚨🚨🚨🚨

It’s happening for real. I’m already 200 pages in. This train cannot be stopped. I'm finally rereading Middlemarch (1871/1872).

I neglected to mention last month that Mr. Charles was adopted. A bittersweet event, because I really loved him and it was hard to say goodbye, but he went to someone who loves him very much!

I'm not neglecting to mention this month that Ginger Spice obtained a yurt.