Equitable travel is essential for accessing library services

I'm listening to That Librarian as an audio-book that is narrated by author Amanda Jones. It’s a compelling story about Jones’s efforts to combat attempts at book censorship, and to challenge hateful people who subjected her to cyber-bullying.

This is off-topic to the main focus of That Librarian but I was deeply concerned about something that Jones said about teens being able to access the Livingston Parish Library in Louisiana: “Kids younger than sixteen cannot drive alone. They wouldn’t be in the library unaccompanied anyway unless they were dropped off.”

I live in a metropolitan area where I take for granted that I can just walk or take the bus to my public library. And being unfamiliar with the Livingston Parish area, I wondered about options other than travel by car for being able to access Livingston Parish libraries.

What I’m reading in Summer 2026

What books do people have on their reading lists? Here’s a look at some of the books I’m reading during Summer 2026.

End of school year, 2025-2026

What an amazing final week of school at Santa Rosa Charter School for the Arts: with a Pride celebration that united our community, followed the very next day by a Promotion Ceremony for our departing eighth-graders.
https://youtu.be/dGNPPg2g1NE

H.R. 2616, another tool for censorship

Among worrying legislation at the federal level, H.R. 2616 recently passed in the U.S. House of Representatives. It’s troubling enough that, under certain circumstances, schools would be forced to “out” trans students to their parents, but I’m concerned about Section 3’s prohibition against “teaching or advancing gender ideology.”

Endlessly Ever After by Laurel Snyder and Dan Santat

Ever since the arrival in my library of Endlessly Ever After by Laurel Snyder and Dan Santat, I’ve looked forward to featuring it as a read-aloud. It features choose-your-own-adventure storytelling similar to the mass-market books I used to devour as a young person: except that Endlessly Ever After is a beautiful example of the picture-book format with its lavish, full-color, and evocative illustrations. This week, I debuted it with my school’s two third-grade classes; each class experienced a very different outcome as determined by the choices they voted upon each step along the way. Endlessly Ever After was the winner, in 2026, of the California Young Reader Medal in its “Primary” category.