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The Reading Rabbit, Cape Coral, FL (2026)

06/18/2026

I need to talk about a book that cracked me up real good till I was rolling on my sides, it contains, in no particular order: a magical talking squirrel, a dead deer carcass, several turkeys mistaken for quails, a smuggled Cuban alligator, and a marriage held together almost entirely by furious Post-it notes.

Welcome to "Let's Pretend This Never Happened" by Jenny Lawson, aka The Bloggess — a memoir that reads less like a polished literary journey and more like your most unhinged friend telling you a story at 1am while you both pretend you're not crying-laughing in a Waffle House parking lot.

Lawson grew up in rural Texas with a taxidermist father, which already tells you everything and nothing about what you're in for. She recalls a childhood involving running into a partially cleaned deer, poisonous tap water, and an assortment of pet wild animals, because apparently normal pets were never really on the table. At one point her father hid a dead squirrel in a Ritz cracker box and used it like a puppet to convince his daughters it was magic. A literal squirrel co**se, repurposed as family entertainment. And somehow this is one of the tamer anecdotes.

From there, the book just keeps escalating. She smuggled a dead Cuban alligator onto an airplane at one point, the way some people smuggle snacks. Her childhood adventures included catching armadillos for her dad to race and, somehow, inseminating a cow — a sentence I did not expect to type today, and yet here we are.

Then there's Victor, her husband, who I have decided deserves a medal, a parade, and possibly hazard pay. Their relationship is punctuated by passive-aggressive Post-it notes, the kind of domestic warfare every long relationship secretly understands. One reads: "If you leave wet towels on the ground again I will stab you." Romantic? No. Relatable? Devastatingly so.

What actually surprised me, though, is that underneath the chaos and the dead wildlife, this book has real heart. Lawson weaves in her experiences with anorexia, PTSD, and generalized anxiety disorder, and somehow does it without ever asking you to feel sorry for her. She just lets you laugh and feel something tender at the exact same time, which is a much harder trick to pull off than people give her credit for.

Is the book a little scattered? Sure. It reads more like a series of loosely connected short stories than one cohesive arc, so don't go in expecting a tidy narrative throughline. But honestly? Neither is life. And that's kind of the whole point.

If you've ever done something so embarrassing you swore you'd take it to your grave, and then years later realized it was actually the funniest thing that ever happened to you — this book was written for you. Reading it feels like being handed permission to stop hiding your weirdest stories and start telling them at parties instead.

Fair warning: you will laugh out loud in public. People will look at you. Let them. You're reading about a haunted squirrel puppet and a furious cow insemination incident. They could never understand.

06/18/2026

When Sam Hill was born in 1957, his own father took one look at him and gasped a phrase that would haunt the boy for the rest of his childhood. His eyes weren't blue, or brown, or green. They were red. A rare condition called ocular albinism had colored his irises the shade of something most people associate with fire, or warning signs, or the devil himself.

And that's exactly what the other children decided to call him.

The story begins with two completely different interpretations of the same pair of eyes. To his classmates at Our Lady of Mercy, a strict Catholic school in the 1960s, Sam's eyes made him a target. "Devil Boy." Cruelty disguised as nicknames, the kind kids hand out without understanding how long they'll stick. To his mother, those same eyes meant something entirely different. She believed, with the kind of unshakeable faith only a devout mother can carry, that Sam's condition was not an accident or a defect. It was God's will. She told him, again and again, that he was destined for an extraordinary life.

Sam didn't feel destined for anything except more bullying.

He grew up inside a Catholic school system that offered him little protection and even less compassion. There was a particular nun, Sister Beatrice, whose harshness toward Sam became just another daily obstacle he had to find a way to survive. And there was one boy in particular, David Bateman, who made it his personal mission to torment Sam at every opportunity — the kind of childhood cruelty that doesn't fade quietly into memory, but calcifies into something a person carries for decades.

What saved Sam, in those early years, were two unlikely friendships. Ernie Cantwell was the only Black student in their class, carrying his own version of being singled out simply for existing differently than everyone around him. Mickie Kennedy was a force entirely her own — fierce, rule-breaking, uninterested in the boundaries Catholic school tried to draw between how boys and girls were supposed to behave. The three of them became each other's protection in a world that wasn't built to protect any of them. Sam, in his own quiet way, came to believe these friendships weren't coincidences either. He believed God had placed Ernie and Mickie in his life on purpose, the same way his mother believed his eyes were placed there on purpose.

As Sam grew older, his fascination with his own eyes turned into something more constructive — he became deeply interested in vision itself, in how eyes work, in what could and couldn't be fixed. That curiosity eventually carried him through college and into a career as an optometrist. He went on to spend time on mission trips, traveling the world to treat children with vision problems they had no resources to fix on their own — in many ways, becoming for other kids the kind of help he had once desperately needed for himself.

But adulthood didn't erase what happened to him as a boy. It just buried it.
A tragedy from his past — one tied directly to his childhood friendships and the wounds Sam never fully processed — eventually causes him to turn his back on the friends, the hometown, and the version of himself he had spent so long building. He walks away from nearly everything that shaped his "extraordinary life," carrying an unresolved grief that follows him quietly into middle age.

As an adult, Sam is forced to return and finally confront the past he's been avoiding — the bullying, the loss, the faith he gave up on somewhere along the way, and the question that has trailed him since childhood: was any of it really God's design, or was he just a boy who got unlucky and somehow had to make peace with it anyway?

By the end, Sam arrives somewhere quieter than triumphant. He's not certain anymore that everything in his life happened by some grand design. But he has made peace with the people who loved him through it — his mother's unshakable faith, his father's steady practicality, and the two misfit friends who turned out to be the realest, most extraordinary part of an otherwise ordinary, painful childhood.
This is a story about a boy who was called the devil before he ever did anything to earn it, and who spent the rest of his life slowly proving — to everyone, and eventually to himself — that being different was never the same thing as being broken.

Sometimes that's what an extraordinary life actually looks like. Not magic. Not certainty. Just survival, friendship, and the long, difficult work of finding your way back to yourself.

06/17/2026

There is a grandfather in this story who compares his own mind to a dying star.

He explains it to his grandson, Noah, on a bench they share in a small, strange square that exists somewhere between memory and imagination. When a star begins to die, he says, its light keeps traveling for a long time before anyone on Earth even notices it's gone. That is what is happening to him. Somewhere inside, he already knows the truth. The rest of him is still catching up, still walking around in the old light, not yet aware of how much has already gone dark.

That single image is, to me, the whole devastating heart of "And Every Morning the Way Home Gets Longer and Longer" by Fredrik Backman.

The story follows Grandpa and his grandson Noah — he calls him Noahnoah, because he loves him twice as much as anyone else — as Grandpa's dementia slowly takes hold.

"Noahnoah, I have to tell you something, and I need you to listen carefully, because I might not remember telling you tomorrow.

My brain is fading. Like a star. Did I teach you about that? When a star starts to die, its light keeps traveling for a long, long time before anyone on Earth even notices it's gone. That's what's happening to me. Some part of me already knows the truth, but the rest of me is still catching up, still walking around in the old light, not yet aware of how much has already gone dark.

We're sitting on our bench right now, in our square. You know the one — it has my old work desk, and the dragon I gave you when you were small enough to still believe a stuffed animal could breathe fire, and your grandmother's hyacinths, the ones she could never stop planting no matter how many times I told her they wouldn't survive the frost. The square used to be enormous, Noahnoah. We used to need a compass just to find our way to the bench. Now look at it. It's barely big enough to hold a desk and a memory.

It keeps getting smaller every day. And some mornings I wake up and the walk back to myself is longer than it was the morning before. Longer than it has any right to be.

I'm frightened, if I'm honest with you. Not of dying — I've made my peace with that part, mostly. I'm frightened of forgetting your grandmother's face before I get to say a proper goodbye to it. I'm frightened of looking at your father one day and seeing a stranger instead of the boy I should have spent more time with when he was small and wanted nothing from me except my attention. I gave him so little of it then. I don't know why. I was busy being important, I think, which is a foolish thing to have been busy with.

I'm frightened, most of all, of looking at you — you, Noahnoah, who I love twice as much as anyone else, which is why I say your name twice — and not knowing who you are.

But here is what I need you to understand, and I need you to hold onto this even after I can't.

The forgetting doesn't undo the loving. Whatever this disease takes from me, it cannot reach backward and erase the years we already had. It cannot uninvent the hours on this bench, the maps we drew, the jokes only the two of us understood. Even if I look at you one day and don't know your name, some part of me, somewhere underneath the fading, will still recognize the feeling of you. Love doesn't always need a name to survive. Sometimes it just needs a hand to hold.

Your father and I never said the things we should have said to each other. We let the years pass in silence, each of us waiting for the other to go first. Don't you do that, Noahnoah. Don't wait. Say the things now, while you can still be understood, and while the people you love can still understand you back.

One day you'll have a family of your own. Maybe a daughter who loves words more than numbers, the way your father always did, the way I was too stubborn for too long to appreciate. When that day comes, I want you to remember this bench. Remember that I was here once, frightened and fading, and that none of it frightened me more than the thought of you forgetting how much I loved you.

You won't, though. I know you won't.

Because Noahnoah — the way home might be getting longer and longer every morning for me. But you. You will always know exactly how to find your way back."

06/17/2026

I caught my kid lying to my face last month. And the scariest part wasn't the lie. It was how good they were at it.

That moment sent me down a spiral I wasn't prepared for — not "is my child a sociopath" but am I accidentally raising someone I wouldn't want to be friends with as an adult?

That question is exactly what led me to *How to Raise Kids Who Aren't As****es* by Melinda Wenner Moyer. And I need to tell you — this book did not let me off easy. It held me accountable to my own parenting before it ever got around to talking about my kid's behavior, and that was humbling in a way I wasn't expecting.

Moyer is a science journalist, not a parenting guru with a personal brand to protect. She went digging through the actual research — not opinions, not trends, real developmental psychology — to answer a question most of us are too afraid to ask out loud: why do some kids grow into kind, empathetic, decent humans, while others grow into the kind of adults we actively try to avoid at parties?

The answer, again and again, traced back to us. Not our love. Not our intentions. Our daily, ordinary choices.

Here are 5 lessons from this book that genuinely changed how I parent:

1. TALKING ABOUT FEELINGS ISN'T SOFT — IT'S THE WHOLE FOUNDATION
I used to think "how does that make you feel" conversations were a bit much. Moyer's research says otherwise. Kids who regularly talk through emotions — theirs and other people's — develop something psychologists call theory of mind, the ability to actually imagine what someone else might be feeling. That one skill is directly linked to less bullying, more empathy, and better relationships down the line. It's not soft. It's the entire operating system underneath kindness.

2. PRAISING "SMART" CAN BACKFIRE BADLY
This one stung because I say it constantly. "You're so smart!" feels harmless, even generous. But the research Moyer cites shows that praising innate ability instead of effort makes kids more obsessed with protecting their image than actually growing. They start avoiding hard things because failing would threaten the "smart" label. Praise the effort, the persistence, the trying again after getting it wrong — that's what builds kids who keep going instead of kids who quietly give up to stay comfortable.

3. LET THEM STRUGGLE — RESCUING ISN'T LOVE, IT'S A SHORTCUT THAT COSTS THEM LATER
Moyer is blunt about this: constantly cushioning kids from frustration and failure doesn't protect them, it weakens them. Kids need to feel hard things and survive them in order to trust themselves later. Every time we swoop in to fix what they could have handled, we're quietly telling them they couldn't have done it without us.

4. YOUR KID IS WATCHING WHAT YOU DO, NOT WHAT YOU SAY
We can lecture kindness all day long, but Moyer's research keeps circling back to the same uncomfortable truth: modeling beats moralizing every time. The way you treat a rude waiter. The way you talk about your neighbor behind their back. The way you handle losing an argument. Kids absorb all of it, far more than they absorb our actual lectures about being good people.

5. SELF-ESTEEM AND NARCISSISM ARE NOT THE SAME THING — AND CONFUSING THEM IS DANGEROUS
This distinction wrecked me a little. Moyer separates healthy self-worth — unconditional self-acceptance — from narcissism, which is a constant hunger for admiration and a belief in your own superiority. Overemphasizing achievement and constant external praise can accidentally raise the second one while we think we're building the first. The goal isn't a kid who feels like they're the best. It's a kid who feels secure enough that they don't need to be.

06/17/2026

What happened to you is part of your story, but it doesn't get to write the ending. You do. Every single day, in small and unglamorous ways — the boundary you finally set, the kindness you choose even when you've been hurt, the version of yourself you keep showing up as even when it would be easier not to — you are actively writing who you become.

Your past explains some things about you. It doesn't get to limit everything you still get to be.

Whoever you're becoming right now, on purpose, despite everything — I hope you're proud of them.

06/17/2026

There is a Japanese phrase I cannot stop thinking about since I read "Wabi Sabi"

Wabi sabi. It doesn't translate cleanly into English, which is, in itself, the whole point. Roughly, it means finding beauty in imperfection. In the cracked bowl. In the fading flower. In the wrinkle, the flaw, the thing that didn't go according to plan. But the more I sat with it, the more I realized it isn't really a design philosophy at all. It's a permission slip. One most of us have been waiting our entire lives for someone to hand us.

We live in a culture obsessed with the finished version of things. The filtered photo. The highlight reel. The body before the "after." We are taught, almost from childhood, that worth is something you earn once you arrive somewhere — once the project is complete, the body is toned, the career has peaked, the relationship looks the way it's supposed to on paper. Imperfection, in that world, isn't just unfortunate. It's treated like a problem to be hidden until it can be fixed.

Wabi sabi looks at all of that and quietly disagrees.

Kempton writes about a particular Japanese art form called kintsugi, where broken pottery is repaired with gold. Not hidden. Not disguised. Gilded. The crack doesn't get erased — it gets illuminated. The bowl becomes more valuable after it has broken, not less, because now it carries a visible history. It survived something. And instead of treating that survival as a flaw to conceal, the philosophy treats it as the most beautiful part of the object.

I think about how differently we treat our own cracks.

How many of us are still trying to hide the place where we broke. The divorce. The diagnosis. The year everything fell apart. The body that doesn't look the way it used to. The dream that didn't happen the way we planned. We treat these moments like they disqualify us from being whole — when wabi sabi suggests the opposite. That the break, witnessed honestly and held with care, is where the gold goes. Not despite the crack. Because of it.

There is another piece of this philosophy that quietly stayed with me — the idea of impermanence. Wabi sabi asks you to notice that nothing, not a single thing, was ever built to last forever. Not the cherry blossom, not the relationship, not your own body, not this exact version of your life. And instead of treating that truth as something frightening, it asks you to let it soften you. To stop demanding permanence from things that were only ever meant to be temporary. To let yourself enjoy a season — a friendship, a job, a chapter — without needing it to last forever in order for it to have mattered.

And then there's simplicity — not as a minimalist aesthetic, but as an actual relief. Kempton writes about wabi as a kind of stillness, a rising above the mundane scramble most of us live inside. Wabi is about finding beauty in simplicity, and a spiritual richness and serenity in detaching from the material world. It is not about owning less for the sake of a tidy Instagram aesthetic. It's about realizing how much energy we spend chasing more, when what we actually crave is enough.

I keep coming back to this question the book left me with. What would change in your life if you stopped treating your unfinished, uneven, imperfect self as a draft waiting to be corrected — and started treating it as something already worth witnessing?

Not once you lose the weight. Not once the relationship is repaired. Not once the career finally looks the way you pictured it. Now. Mid-crack. Mid-repair. Gold still being poured into the broken places.

Don't stop growing or stop wanting things to be different. Just stop withholding your own tenderness until you've earned some imaginary version of whole.

You are not a finished piece of pottery. You never were supposed to be.

You are allowed to be beautiful exactly as cracked as you currently are.

06/16/2026

Margareta Magnusson passed away this past March, at 91 years old.

And when her daughter Jane went to do what most of us dread doing for the people we love — sort through a lifetime of their belongings after they're gone — she found something almost unbelievable. The attic was empty. The basement was empty. Her mother had already done it. All of it. Years before she died.

That single detail is, to me, the entire soul of The Gentle Art of Swedish Death Cleaning.

Magnusson wrote this book in her eighties, after she had already done the heavy, heartbreaking work of cleaning out the homes of her own parents, and later her husband. She knew that particular grief intimately — standing in a house full of someone else's whole life, trying to decide what mattered enough to keep and what could finally be let go, all while missing them so much you can barely see straight.

And she decided, with real Scandinavian bluntness and humor, that she wasn't going to leave that burden behind for her own children.

The Swedish word is döstädning. Dö, meaning death. Städning, meaning cleaning. It sounds heavy, almost cold, when you say it plainly like that. But the book itself is the opposite of cold. It's playful. It's tender. It's full of her own stories — a life lived across Sweden, Singapore, the United States — woven in between practical instructions on what to keep and what to release.

How many families have stood in a garage, a closet, an attic, overwhelmed by decisions they never wanted to make, grieving and exhausted at the same time, surrounded by things they don't know whether to keep or release — because the person who loved those things never told them what mattered and what didn't.

Magnusson wanted to spare her own children exactly that. And by the time she died this year, she had succeeded completely.

I think that's the real lesson hiding underneath all the practical advice about sorting drawers and letting go of unworn coats. This book was never really about cleaning. It was about love expressed in an unusual, unsentimental, deeply Swedish way — the love of not leaving a mess behind. The love of making your eventual absence a little softer for the people who will grieve you.

We spend so much energy thinking about what we'll leave behind for the people we love — inheritances, photographs, stories, lessons. Magnusson asks a more uncomfortable question. What will you leave behind for them to deal with?

Her answer was simple. As little as possible. So that what remains, in the end, isn't a mountain of decisions — it's just the memory of you, light enough to carry.

Rest well, Margareta. You cleaned up after yourself beautifully.

06/16/2026

There are two sisters at the heart of "The Nightingale" by Kristin Hannah, and I think about them differently every time I revisit this story.

Vianne is the one who stays. Quiet, careful, dutiful. A wife and mother in a small French village who watches her husband leave for war and then watches her entire world get occupied — her home requisitioned by a German officer, her food rationed, her choices narrowed down to almost nothing. Vianne doesn't see herself as brave. She sees herself as someone simply trying to survive, trying to keep her daughter fed and safe, trying not to draw attention in a world where attention gets people killed.

And then there is Isabelle. Younger, fierce, impossible to contain. The sister who can't stay quiet, who joins the resistance, who walks downed Allied airmen across the Pyrenees on foot, risking her life again and again under a code name — the Nightingale — because staying silent while her country burned was never going to be an option for her.

For most of the book, you think you know which sister is the hero.

And that's the part that undoes me every time I think about this story. Because by the end, you realize Hannah was never asking you to choose. She was asking you to understand that both kinds of courage are real. The loud, visible kind that runs toward danger. And the quiet, invisible kind that simply gets up every day in an impossible situation and keeps choosing to protect the people in front of you, even when no one will ever know what it cost.

Vianne does something in this story that I won't spoil, but it is the kind of choice that asks everything of a person and gives them nothing in return except the knowledge that they did it anyway. No medals. No recognition. Just a quiet act of love performed under unbearable pressure, repeated, over and over, because it was the only thing she could do.

What stays with me most is how long Vianne carries her own story in silence afterward. Decades of silence. Because some kinds of survival come with so much guilt and grief tangled inside them that talking about them feels impossible. She doesn't see her own actions as remarkable. She just sees what she lost, and what it cost her to keep going.

I think about that often — how many quiet acts of courage are sitting unspoken inside the people around us. How many people we know carry a Vianne inside them. Someone who did something extraordinary simply by refusing to give up, and never once thought to call it brave.

Hannah wrote this story to honor the thousands of unnamed women who did exactly what Isabelle and Vianne did during the war — women whose names never made it into textbooks, whose courage looked like motherhood, like resistance, like simply refusing to let evil have the last word in their small corner of the world.

If you read this book, you won't just remember the history. You'll remember what it asks of you. To notice the quiet kind of bravery in the people around you. To stop assuming that courage only looks like headlines and medals. And to consider, honestly, what you would do — what you are capable of — if everything you loved depended on it.

Some stories you finish. This one you carry.

06/16/2026

Success isn't always loud.

06/15/2026

Can we talk about how much of your life you've spent doing things you don't actually care about?

The office "optional" team-building event. Your cousin's third destination wedding this year. Pretending you're "so busy lately" instead of just saying "I don't want to." Feeling guilty about skipping the gym, then feeling MORE guilty about feeling guilty.

Enter Sarah Knight and *The Life-Changing Magic of Not Giving a F*ck* — the unofficial sequel to Marie Kondo, except instead of folding your socks into little burritos, you're folding up all the obligations that are quietly ruining your peace and tossing them in the bin. No spark joy required. Just: does this annoy me? Cool, bye.

Her whole method is genuinely two steps:

Decide what you don't give a f*ck about and Stop giving a f*ck about it.

1. YOUR F*CKS ARE A LIMITED RESOURCE — SPEND THEM LIKE IT
Knight treats your time, energy, and money like a budget. Every time you say yes to something you don't care about, you're overdrawing an account that should be funding things you actually enjoy. You're not a bottomless well of enthusiasm. You're a person with a finite number of Saturdays. Spend accordingly.

2. "BUSY" IS A LIE WE'VE ALL AGREED TO TELL
How often have you said "ugh I'm SO busy" when really you mean "I don't want to do this and also don't want to seem like a bad person"? Knight calls this out. Decide what you don't care about — then just... don't do it. No fake busy. No elaborate excuses. Just a clean, calm no.

3. START SMALL — PRACTICE ON THE STUFF THAT DOESN'T MATTER
You don't go from "yes to everything" to "no to your mother-in-law's birthday" overnight. Start with the bed you don't make, the book club you secretly hate, the gym class you only attend out of guilt. Build your no-muscle on the small stuff before you take it into the big leagues.

4. YOU DON'T OWE ANYONE A TED TALK ABOUT YOUR DECISIONS
One "no, thank you" is a complete sentence. You do not need to provide a notarized affidavit explaining why you're skipping the company happy hour. The more you explain, the more you invite debate. Decline politely, decline briefly, and let the silence do the rest.

5. NOT GIVING A F*CK ABOUT EVERYTHING MEANS YOU CAN GIVE A F*CK ABOUT WHAT MATTERS
Here's the twist nobody expects — this isn't a book about becoming numb or selfish. It's the opposite. By clearing out the obligations, guilt, and "shoulds" that drain you, you free up actual energy for the people and things you genuinely love. Less noise. More room for the good stuff.

The Reading Rabbit

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