LeVar Burton's Keynote on Reading at Winter Institute, Nightingale Movie, Mass Market Paperbacks Go the Way of the Dodo, The Astral Library by Kate Quinn, Agnes Aubert's Mystical Cat Shelter by Heather Fawcett, Books & Bewitchment by Isla Jewell, and A Winter's Promise by Christelle Dabos

Welcome to March, book dragons and friends. So far March has come in like a lamb, which means it will go out like a lion. Then there's my memorial to the time my best friend Muff and I spent in Ireland on St Patrick's Day 26 years ago, and I hope that her spirit (she died years ago) is aware that I still think about her in March and on June 1, her birthday, every year. I still miss her desperately. Anyway, here are some long tidbits and some good book reviews for ya'all to investigate as you wend your way through this blustery month.

I adore LeVar Burton. He was spectacular in Roots, the mini series that caught America by storm when I was 16 years old, and made a huge impression on my whole family. Of course I had to read the book, which I loved, and I was amazed when I saw Burton again on STNG as Geordi LaForge. I didn't find Reading Rainbow until I was in my late teens, but when I did I was thrilled to see Burton promoting books, my favorite things, though he was mostly promoting children's lit, something I was too old for. Everything he says here in his speech is spot on. I admire him and his work.

Reading Is Power at Winter Institute

"Independent booksellers are so important," said LeVar Burton, actor, literacy advocate, and host of the PBS series Reading Rainbow, during the opening breakfast keynote at Winter Institute 2026 in Pittsburgh, Pa., Tuesday morning. 

Burton, who is also the American Booksellers Association's Indie Bookstore Ambassador for 2026, was in conversation with Janet Webster Jones, founder and co-owner of Source Booksellers in Detroit, Mich. They discussed some of his major roles as an actor, the power of reading, the importance of representation, and his upcoming memoir.

"What you all do is critical to that which it is I do," Burton continued. "You all hold the space for people like me. You create a safe space for us to come and browse and look around and turn pages. You are warriors on the front lines of the culture wars and I cannot thank you enough for doing what it is you do. Because without the infrastructure that makes up independent booksellers, I wouldn't know what to do with my life. Y'all really do make a difference in this world."

Asked about the power of reading, Burton described reading as the "fulfillment of the promise of humanity." People operate best when all of their senses are engaged, and for Burton, "reading just fires more cylinders than almost any activity that I can think of." And the most important of those cylinders, he said, is the imagination.

Burton recalled his childhood in Sacramento, Calif., where he spent a lot of time on his bed "reading and imagining a world that was safer than the one in which I lived, that was more welcoming than the world in which I lived." He said he's "come to believe that reading is really a passport to who you are and why you're here."

Discussing his role as Kunta Kinte in the 1977 mini-series Roots, Burton said it not only changed his life but gave him a "ringside seat to how it changed America." Prior to Roots appearing on television, people talked about slavery as "an economic engine that was necessary for America to achieve its status on the world stage." Post-Roots, "it was impossible to talk about that institution without considering the human cost." He called Roots creator Alex Haley the "best storyteller I've ever encountered" and "a real storyteller's storyteller."

On the subject of Star Trek: The Next Generation, on which Burton played the character Geordi La Forge, Burton noted that he grew up in a household that watched the original Star Trek series "all the time." He could "hardly express to you the feeling of having grown up with that storytelling and then become a part of that storytelling mythos itself."

He grew up in the 1960s, when there were "very few examples of representation on television." Seeing Nichelle Nichols on the bridge of the Enterprise "meant that when the future came, there was a place for me," and along with seeing Sammy Davis Jr. in The Rifleman or Diahann Carroll in Julia, these were "important, formative images for me." They provided validation and confirmation that "there was a place in this world for me."

"I think the honor of my life is to have been able to portray the Black experience in America from our enslavement to the stars," Burton said. "And when you consider that LeVar, the Reading Rainbow guy, is in the middle of that continuum, I know why I'm here."

Burton, who walked with a cane due to a recent hip replacement surgery, also emphasized the importance of taking care of oneself. Prior to the Covid-19 pandemic, he recalled, he was living his life "like there was someone chasing me," and he felt he'd been "headed for a heart attack in an airport somewhere." The Covid lockdown gave him the opportunity to "not just slow down but stop," and while examining his priorities, he recognized the changes he needed to make "if I wanted to continue to be of service in this life."

Burton revealed that he has written a memoir called Take My Word for It (coming from Random House in November), explaining that he wrote the memoir because he felt it was important at this point in time to "go on the record about a lot of things." And while he's mostly let his work "speak as loudly for me as it can," he recognized there were "some gaps that my work did not address that I really wanted to discuss in detail." His "deepest desire" with the book is to be "as transparent as I possibly could." Booksellers, ultimately, "will be the judges of that."

In closing, Burton said he considered Alex Haley, Gene Roddenberry, and Fred Rogers to be his "three storyteller mentors," and while out in Pittsburgh before the conference, he was surprised to look up and see a "huge portrait" of Fred Rogers. "You are in his neighborhood," Burton said. "Act accordingly." (Editors note: AMEN to that!)

This was such a great book that I am anxious about it becoming a movie. I hope that it will do the sterling work of Kristin Hannah justice.

Movies: The Nightingale

Mark Rylance and Shira Haas have joined the cast of TriStar Pictures' adaptation of Kristin Hannah's bestselling novel The Nightingale. Deadline reported that the project features Dakota Fanning and Elle Fanning, marking the first time the sisters have starred in a film together. Edmund Donovan also stars. Sony Pictures plans to release the film theatrically on February 12, 2027.

Michael Morris is directing from a script by Dana Stevens. The movie will be produced by Elizabeth Cantillon for The Cantillon Company, Dakota and Elle Fanning and Brittany Kahan Ward for Lewellen Pictures, and Reese Witherspoon and Lauren Neustadter for Hello Sunshine.

The Nightingale "tells the story of two sisters during World War II who dare to embark on separate, dangerous paths in the fight for survival, love, and freedom in German-occupied, war-torn France," Deadline noted.

In the town where I was born in Iowa, there was a Rexall Drug store with a magazine rack and a spinner with MMPB books on it, and whenever my mom would stop by to get medicine for myself or my brothers, I would beg her for a quarter for a book (before I was 6 , it was 15 cents!). Sometimes she would magically produce one from her coinpurse inside her regular purse, which smelled of Doublemint gum and hankerchiefs and tissues and lipstick, (smells that will always remind me of mom) and sometimes she'd only have a dime or three nickels, and I'd have to ask the lady at the counter if there were any books or magazines that I could get for 15 cents. Sometimes there was a mysterious sale, and I could get a paperback about space aliens or mysteries, and sometimes it was a teen magazine, but even if I couldn't get anything, it was such a thrill to look through the spinner rack at all those colorful cover paintings and dream about the worlds I could visit inside. This news of the phasing out of paperbacks guts me. They were really important to my imagination as a child.

Robert Gray: Mass Market Paperbacks 'Once Democratized Reading for the Working Class'

When the news broke last December that ReaderLink would be ending its distribution of mass market paperback books because of a dramatic decrease in sales over the past couple of decades (131 million units in 2004 to 21 million in 2024), I had a curious double response.

First, I realized that I couldn't remember the last time I'd purchased an MMPB, nor what that book might possibly have been. And second, I recalled two moments when MMPBs played a formative role in my reading life.

That initial reaction came back to me a couple of days ago, when the Guardian featured a piece headlined "America says goodbye to the mass-market paperback," noting that "for generations of readers, the gateway to literature was not a hushed library or a polished hardback but a wire spinner rack in a supermarket, pharmacy or railway station. There, amid chewing gum and cigarettes, sat the mass-market paperback: squat, roughly 4" by 7" and cheap enough to be bought on a whim." ReaderLink's decision "marks the end of a format that once democratized reading for the working class."

Paula Rabinowitz, a professor emerita of English at the University of Minnesota and the author of American Pulp, observed that the format "generated a new technological explosion of this form of mass reading. The whole idea was to make the books no more expensive than a package of cigarettes at 25 cents and they were often sold outside of bookstores."

Shelly Romero, a literary agent in New York City, told the Guardian she has early memories of going to her local supermarket and buying pulp fiction: "We were very working class; my mom was working two jobs sometimes. The appeal of books being cheaper and smaller and able to be carried around was definitely a thing.

"They had that democratic aspect to them where you can just find them anywhere and it always felt like it was the pick 'n' mix candy-type store where there is something here for everyone, whether it's the Harlequin romance novel or something very pulpy like a sci-fi or horror novel that you could quickly get."

I get it. I also grew up in a small working-class town, where my only book-buying options were Colville's news stand (also a great destination for comics) and Calvi's Dairy Bar.

My first personal library was courtesy of the news stand. In addition to watching every episode of The Man from U.N.C.L.E. (IYKYK), I read, re-read, and collected the tie-in novel series, with subtitles like The Doomsday Affair, The Copenhagen Affair, and The Dagger Affair. I bought new editions as soon as they were released and carefully shelved the numbered MMPBs (1-23) on top of my dresser, between wooden bookends my father had made for me. Those novels were an early bridge to the world I would choose to live in as an adult--the world of books where I became a reader, a writer, a bookseller, and an editor.

Six decades later, a quick inspection of the bookcases in our home (and there are a lot of bookshelves) shows that my MMPB collection has been reduced to just two titles, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's The First Circle, translated by Thomas P. Whitney (Bantam, 1969, $4.95); and The Making of One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich (Ballantine, 1971, $1.25),translated by Gillon Aitken, with an introduction and screenplay by Ronald Harwood.

Although I saw the Denisovich film adaptation in 1973, two or three years earlier I'd made my first great reading "find" on an MMPB spinner rack at Calvi's Dairy Bar, which was owned by Delfina, a first-generation Italian immigrant. Calvi's was one of those miraculous establishments that managed, in limited space, to fit a lunch counter with stools, a few booths (discretely tucked in the back), a line of glass-enclosed display fixtures offering myriad curios, and, most importantly, the shrine to reading that was the MMPB spinner rack. 

Incredibly, The First Circle was wedged among the romance, thriller, mystery, self-help, and diet books. It would inspire me to read Solzhenitsyn's One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich and Cancer Ward. The chance discovery had a profound effect on my reading life. Thanks, Delfina.

In December, after ReaderLink announced its decision, Esther Margolis, publisher of Newmarket Books, told NPR's Daniel Estrin: "I'm very sad about it. I've been sad about it for a while. Even during the '80s, when it started to really shift, I was sad because it really--like you asked before, that you could actually establish a total unknown. 

"Today, thank God, you have TikTok and BookTok. They could take somebody unknown and somebody can just get on a camera and say, I love this book, and next thing you know, you have Colleen Hoover or somebody. But that's what you could have done in the past paperback that you can't do really today. To me, Stephen King is a great example. I mean, his whole career, I don't know what--how that might have been built otherwise, if not for the mass-market paperback."

MMPBs still live, of course, but I guess this is my quiet, pre-RIP paying of respects to the format. Or maybe it's just my old eyes acknowledging the fact that I probably couldn't read the small type now anyway.--Robert Gray

The Astral Library by Kate Quinn is a blend of romantasy and magic realism with women's trauma based fiction that was a real page-turner. I found the characters fascinating and realistic, and I could NOT put it down...I read the whole book in 6 hours. Here's the blurb: 

From author Kate Quinn comes a gorgeously written fantastical adventure which poses the question: Have you ever wished you could live inside a book? Welcome to the Astral Library, where books are not just objects, but doors to new worlds, new lives, and new futures.

Alexandria “Alix” Watson has learned one lesson from her barren childhood in the foster-care system: unlike people, books will never let you down. Working three dead-end jobs to make ends meet and knowing college is a pipe dream, Alix takes nightly refuge in the high-vaulted reading room at the Boston Public Library, escaping into her favorite fantasy novels and dreaming of far-off lands. Until the day she stumbles through a hidden door and meets the Librarian: the ageless, acerbic guardian of a hidden library where the desperate and the lost escape to new lives...inside their favorite books.

The Librarian takes a dazzled Alix under her wing, but before she can escape into the pages of her new life, a shadowy enemy emerges to threaten everyone the Astral Library has ever helped protect. Aided by a dashing costume-shop owner, Alix and the Librarian flee through the Regency drawing rooms of Jane Austen to the back alleys of Sherlock Holmes and the champagne-soaked parties of The Great Gatsby as danger draws inexorably closer. But who does their enemy really wish to destroy—Alix, the Librarian, or the Library itself?

 This is one of the very few novels I've read that had an accurately described secondary character who was bi-sexual and more fun than a barrel of monkeys...in fact, the delightful Beau outshone the grumpy and fearful (and immature) female protagonist Alix in every scene/chapter that they shared. (Always preceded by "Oh honey, no" which I found to be a hilarious affectation). Alix's journey from angry foster-care child who felt discarded to fierce library defender dragon was a pleasure to read, if only because the more she grew as a person, the less Alix whined and cried and complained about not being "chosen" by her horrible parents. The way that the final battle decimates the current horrors of the bible-belt book-banning ninnies (most of whom haven't even read a book in decades), and the bureaucrats who can't stand the non-profit nature of libraries everywhere, which serve the people without expecting to make a dime off of them, is breathtaking as it is profound. I thoroughly enjoyed this novel, and give it a well deserved A, and recommend it to anyone who loves reading and the sacred space that is a public library.

 

Agnes Aubert's Mystical Cat Shelter by Heather Fawcett is a paranormal romantasy with added delights of time travel and more than a few fascinating felines who manage to both complicate and ease things along in the plot throughout this fascinating novel. Here's the blurb:  A woman who runs a cat rescue in 1920s Montréal turns to a grouchy but charming magician to help save her shelter in this heartwarming cozy fantasy from bestselling author of the Emily Wilde series.

Agnes Aubert leads a meticulously organized life, and she likes it that way. As the proudly type-A manager of a cat rescue charity, she has devoted her life to finding forever homes for stray cats.

Now it’s the shelter that needs a new home. And the only landlord who will rent a space to a cat rescue is a mysterious man called Havelock—who also happens to be the world’s most infamous magician, running an illegal magic shop out of his basement. Havelock is cantankerous and eccentric, but not-not handsome, and no, Agnes absolutely does not feel anything but disdain for him. After all, rumors swirl about his shadowy past—including whispers that his dark magic once almost brought about the apocalypse.

Then one day a glamorous magician comes looking for Havelock, putting the magic shop—and the cat shelter—in jeopardy. To save the shelter, Agnes will have to team up with the magician who nearly ended the world . . . and may now be trying to steal her heart.

Havelock is everything Agnes thinks she doesn’t need in her life: chaos, mischief, and a little too much adventure. But as she gets to know him, she discovers that he’s more than the dark magician of legend, and that she may be ready for a little intrigue—and romance—in her life. After all, second chances aren’t just for rescue cats. 

Agnes is kind of a wimpy, transparent character who becomes more substantial as the novel goes on and she has to protect her rescue kitties, but, her crush on magician (scatterbrained though he is) Havelock, who supposedly nearly destroyed the world not long ago, makes little to no sense at all...and in fact feels rather forced (romance for its own sake rather than romance that springs from a spark between characters). I must mention, before I forget, that this book is beautifully produced in Art Nouveau style and with glorious cover art. The prose is equally elegant, and the plot moves along like a windstorm in fall, full of colors and danger. Though there's a pretty good HEA, I'd still give this fantastical novel an A-, and recommend it to fans of magic, fantasy and kitty cats.

 

Books & Bewitchment by Isla Jewell is another paranormal romantasy novel, however, this one has witches and a definite Gilmore Girls cozy vibe to it that is irresistible. Here's the blurb: In this cozy, witchy romcom, a young woman works to turn a run-down small-town video store into the bookshop of her dreams, only to discover a powerful magic that’s been lying dormant—and a forbidden love she can’t resist.

Dutiful and hard-working, Rhea Wolfe lives a simple, if mundane, life with her pet parrot in small-town Alabama. Sure, she may not love her desk job working for an insurance agency. And her on-again-off-again relationship with the local mechanic may not have the fiery passion she’s read about in her favorite books. Still, things are stable, which is more than she can say about the two hopelessly immature younger sisters who rely on her.

But when Rhea’s estranged grandmother dies, leaving her everything—including a magical heritage Rhea never knew she carried—she finds herself in Arcadia Falls, the quaint mountain town her mother made her swear to avoid at all costs. While the defunct video store she’s also inherited needs a serious upgrade, Rhea’s lucky that resident handyman Hunter Blakely is more than happy to help—and more than easy on the eyes. If only he wasn’t the grandson of her grandmother’s sworn enemy in witchcraft.

Yet as Rhea makes plans for the bookstore of her dreams, she learns that her grandmother made a terrible choice, one that could ruin her own chance at happiness. As she gets ever closer to solving the mystery of what exactly is happening, each clue points to Arcadia Falls’s magic hanging in the balance. To keep her new home safe, Rhea must step into her enchanted birthright and harness her newfound powers . . . before it’s too late.  

 

Though Rhea is too much of a pushover to her immature and parasitical sisters, She still manages, by sheer force of will and luck, to transform a shabby used videostore that is out of date and in the worst shape into a lovely, bespoke book haven that the entire town becomes invested in. This has been the dream of so many bibliophiles, myself included, that I was riveted as Rhea managed the ups and downs of her own transformation as well as her growing crush on the town's fix-it fox, Hunter. The prose was delightful and fresh, and the plot danced along on joyful feet. I'd give this fun and hard to put down novel a B+, and recommend it to anyone who has longed to own their own magical book shop.

 

A Winter's Promise by Christelle Dabos was, from the outside, right up my alley. Unfortunately, this YA epic fantasy lost its luster in the first 100 pages. At nearly 500 pages, it was also full of redundancy and info-dumps that bogged down the plot to a crawl. Here's the blurb: Lose yourself in the fantastic world of the arks and in the company of unforgettable characters in this French runaway hit, Christelle Dabos' The Mirror Visitor quartet.
Plain-spoken, headstrong Ophelia cares little about appearances. Her ability to read the past of objects is unmatched in all of Anima and, what's more, she possesses the ability to travel through mirrors, a skill passed down to her from previous generations. Her idyllic life is disrupted, however, when she is promised in marriage to Thorn, a taciturn and influential member of a distant clan. Ophelia must leave all she knows behind and follow her fiancé to Citaceleste, the capital of a cold, icy ark known as the Pole, where danger lurks around every corner and nobody can be trusted. There, in the presence of her inscrutable future husband, Ophelia slowly realizes that she is a pawn in a political game that will have far-reaching ramifications not only for her but for her entire world.
The World of the Arks
Long ago, following a cataclysm called the Rupture, the world was shattered into many floating celestial islands, now known as arks. Over each, the spirit of an omnipotent and immortal ancestor abides. The inhabitants of these arks each possess a unique power. Ophelia, with her ability to read the pasts of objects, must navigate this fantastic, disjointed, perilous world using her trademark tenacity and quiet strength. 

Disjointed is a good word to use for the entire misogynistic mess of fatphobic, dull prose and hideous characters. The female protagonist is a pedophile's dream, childlike and starving, whose pre-pubescent looks are slavered over in every chapter (EWWWW, GROSS!). Her betrothed, Thorn, is old and cruel and mean, which she somehow is attracted to, but only in the way that a child is attracted to a father, which makes his sudden desire to keep her alive and nearby even more ick-inducing. I would give this disappointing and gross novel a C, and I can't think of anyone I'd recommend it to, unless it was someone I don't like. Give this one a pass, folks, and do yourself a favor.