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Friday, October 10th Sunny’s Pages 178-210 A Discovery of Witches It’s a Friday afternoon and I had planned to meet up with one of my friends and colleagues at 4 o’clock for a beer in the Aksarben area of Omaha. Fun fact: Aksarben is Nebraska spelled backwards! If you didn’t know this, don’t feel bad. I actually lived in the Aksarben neighborhood for almost a year and never put two and two together. As happens every so often on a Friday (ahem at least every othe

Thursday, October 9th Omaha Public Library Millard Location A Discovery of Witches pages 148-178 Making one of my first stops for the project at the library seems like a natural fit. I hadn’t been to the library for ages since I get the majority of my books from the half-price bookstore or AbeBooks.com and I was a little shocked by how bright the place is. I clearly spend too much time in low-lit bars and restaurants. I walk around to find a comfortable seat but the best I

Saturday, September 13th Corkscrew A Discovery of Witches pages 80-115 I have just gone to the theater by myself to watch Downtown Abbey: The Grand Finale even though I have never watched a single episode of Downton Abbey in my life and historical period dramas are sooooo not my thing. But one of the ways I’ve been handling my daughter’s departure is to go see whatever is in the theater to fill up some time on Saturday afternoon and when I say whatever is in the theater, I

Monday, September 7th On my deck Pages 1-47 of A Discovery of Witches by Deborah Harkness So, my deck isn’t technically out in public. However, I think it still counts since we have three yards bordering ours and I’ve been disturbed numerous times while reading out here by the following: overhearing two neighbors yell across the fence to each other about the epic pool party they were having in their back yard that we were not invited to; the incessant yapping of another nei

In the end, it was really about control. My life, it felt, was going off the rails. I had just taken my daughter Delaney to college and sobbed from the parking garage to my home, fifty miles away, then continued to sob randomly to anyone who would look at me the wrong way–including the cat–for the next few weeks. I was also clearly in the throes of perimenopause: exhausted all the time, foggy-brained, anxiety-ridden, and seemingly getting fatter by the minute no matter how I

Welcome to The Roaming Reader blog! Like many blogs (I’m imagining), this started out as a book idea. Last year I had just taken my only daughter to her first year of college and I was grieving this transition with the add-on bonus of hitting perimenopause. Hard. It was not good times, people. Not good times at all. I needed a project, a distraction, and a purpose, and that’s how The Roaming Reader book idea was hatched. As grandiose plans usually do, this one went full stea