The Weekly Wrap: October 5, 2025

People make assumptions when you're a librarian. They, weirdly, assume you know everything. They assume you're a nerd. (That one is, for many of us, accurate). They assume your job is to read all day. Related to that last one, they assume that you have read all the books. Not only have we not read all the books, most of us have HUGE gaps in our literary repertoire. 

Here is a list of books people assume I have read but I have not once cracked the cover on.

• Anne of Green Gables
• The Lion, The Witch, and the Wardrobe
• The Lord of the Rings series
• War and Peace (or, really, anything by Tolstoy)
• ​A Tree Grows in Brooklyn
• Angela's Ashes
• The Outsiders
• Lolita
• The Secret Garden
• Anything by Charles Dickens
• Atlas Shrugged
• The Wind in the Willows
• Charlotte's Web
• The Call of the Wild
• Moby-Dick
• The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy
• The Little Prince
• The Old Man and the Sea
• The Great Gatsby
• Little Women

My list is heavy on the juvenile literature and books you should have read in high school. These gaps surprise people because they assume librarians must have been bookworms growing up. I mean, I was a bookworm, I just had very different tastes from the "classics."

What are your reading gaps?

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• The layers of life. [Sketchplanations]
• Not surprised to learn this happened when schools banned phones. [WaPo - gift link]
• YUP! [The Grudge Report]
• We need to talk about death more openly. [The Hollywood Reporter]
• A brilliant move with kids. [group life]
• I'll be trying some of these party tips out. [Atoms vs Bits]
• There's a lovely new bird but for a bad reason. [CNN]
• Making beauty from words. [The Atlantic - gift link]

• H-1B visas are good for the economy overall. [The Indicator]
• Planet Money is at it again! [Planet Money]
• Much ado about Malala. [Code Switch]
• Most colleges are already about free speech. [College Matters]
• We all have lots of thoughts about screen time. [Culture Study]

• If you want to adventure back to a movie that is a product of it's era, I recommend After the Sunset. This is a heist film with a great cast - Pierce Brosnan, Woody Harrelson, and Salma Hayek. But it has all the problems of early 00s films. There were a of cringe moments. You can also see the ending coming from about 10 minutes into the story. [Netflix]
• 28 Years Later was way more art house that I anticipated. For a zombie film, this one didn't have a lot of zombies. I thought the filmmakers did a good job of expanding the world of the first movies in the series. That said, the evolution of the zombies for the time span seems a bit far fetched. [Netflix]

• I needed a quick to make meal prep that also used up half a back of coleslaw mix. Beef and cabbage stir fry fit the bill. This was a quick cook and reheated well in the office microwave. My only regret was not adding a squirt of sriracha on top. The dish was begging for a bit more heat. [Budget Bytes]
• Years ago, I made sausage and kale skillet when we had another couple over for dinner. Turns out they had made the recipe many times before but, in their house, it was called Pizza Stew. That was the perfect name. This dish really has the flavor of pizza. We served ours with a few slices of garlic toast for dipping. [Budget Bytes]