Dear Reader,
Please welcome today's guest author, Ashton Lattimore. She is an author, award-winning journalist and a recovering lawyer. Born and raised in New Jersey, she now lives in Bryn Mawr, PA with her husband and two sons. Ashton’s the editor-in-chief at nonprofit news outlet 'Prism,' and her nonfiction writing has also appeared in the Washington Post, Slate, CNN, and Essence.
All We Were Promised is her debut novel. Set in volatile pre-Civil War Philadelphia, the story centers on a housemaid with a dangerous family secret who conspires with a wealthy young abolitionist to help an enslaved girl escape.
Ashton would love to hear from you Reach out via https://ashtonlattimore.com/contact/
Please welcome to the book club, Ashton Lattimore….
Lately, I find myself longing for a set of encyclopedias. Not because there's something specific I want to look up--quite the opposite, actually. I crave the feeling of cracking open a big
reference book, not looking for anything in particular, and just letting my curiosity guide me. Maybe I'd grab the "M" volume and dive headlong into mammals, Mars, Mesopotamia, or minerals. No matter the letter, I'd find a hodgepodge of history and science, geography and mythology, all held together only by the loose thread of alphabetization, and I'd come away having learned something new.
Growing up, my family had a set of World Books. When my parents bought them, it felt like a very big deal. In 1990s middle class life, encyclopedias seemed as much a status symbol as a reference. I understood my parents' pride in them--the volumes looked so majestic on the living room bookshelf, bound in tasteful shades of forest green and cream, with gold-embossed letters along the spine. They were surprisingly heavy to my ten-year-old arms, but their heft only added to the air of sophistication. The volumes were a treasure trove for me then, and not only for school projects. Most of the time I just flipped through at random, picking up little gems of trivia that I'd carry around in my pocket for a rainy day.
Now, in the age of Google and Wikis, I've realized there's something so wonderfully limited about a set of encyclopedias. They're a snapshot of human knowledge, frozen at one moment in time, and maybe already outdated by the time they hit the shelves. But you can reckon with them--there's no looking up "Ancient Egypt" and turning up hundreds of thousands of hits. There's a single entry, and maybe it cross-references a few more, but each offers a manageable place to start piecing together a foundation of knowledge. And they're reliable: we trust that some well-educated people, somewhere, researched and vetted the facts in each volume. That sense of officialdom often feels like it's in short supply.
As my own children grow into curious readers, I wonder if they'd delight in a set of "old school" encyclopedias just as I did. In a house already overflowing with books, it feels tough to justify devoting scarce shelf space to volumes filled with information easily found online. But in an age filled with more content than any of us can ever hope to consume, the curated grace and simplicity of a set of leather-bound, alphabetized references might just feel like a gift.
-- Ashton Lattimore
https://ashtonlattimore.com/contact/
Thanks for reading with me. It's so good to read with friends.
Suzanne Beecher
[email protected]
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