Hello! How did it get to be Labor Day 2023? How did it get to be 2023? Well, clearly I'm just way behind. But as you may or may not know, Labor Day is one of my very favorite holidays (no war, no church, no gifts, no family get-togethers), and reading about labor is one of my very favorite things to do. This year marks my 11th year of offering a round-up of the job-related nonfiction and fiction I've read the previous year (links to each previous year's list are at the bottom of this post); I hope you enjoy. Apologies for the shorter list; my reading time has, for various reasons, taken a real ..read more

Sometimes when I am writing for The Progressive I find I am learning more than I really wanted to know. Over the last few months, a story has been developing about a twenty-one-year-old Massachusetts man named Jack Teixeira, who, it has been found, has been leaking classified documents online for some time. Teixeira is now in jail and is being charged under the Espionage Act for revealing top-secret documents that he first accessed in his work as an Air National Guard member. This is another one of those news stories that will come and go and which won't even register with many people. Let's f ..read more

I recently had the pleasure of being contacted by a teacher who let me know that he works with a group of students in a history club, in which said students did research and presentations about different aspects and types of history. One of his groups focused on historical fiction, and they wanted to let me know that they had found a certain page here at Citizen Reader useful for their research: https://www.citizenreader.com/citizen/links/  Now, that's a little embarrassing for me, because if you click on that link, the first paragraph is all about the historical fiction series Poldark (b ..read more

Hello, I know I have been shamefully neglecting Citizen Reader. I do mean to come back one of these days; I've been reading some great (if depressing--all about tech bros, health care, a biography of former GE CEO Jack Welch--bleah) nonfiction. Part of the reason I've not been here is because I've been working on other things, and sometimes in your 40s you just give up, realize there are only so many hours in the day, and you need your sleep more than you need to talk books. (GASP. Appalling but true.) But today I'm pleased to share, here is one of those projects!! Please welcome to my tiny "C ..read more

Yesterday I got another book review published at The Progressive. This one was of Jenn Budd's memoir Against the Wall: My Journey from Border Patrol Agent to Immigrant Rights Activist. You really need to read this book. I cover most of the reasons why you should read it in the review, but let me just say on a personal note that Budd's book made me learn and think about a lot of our national immigration "policies" that I hadn't previously. Did you know, for instance, that the Border Patrol reserves the right to patrol any territory 100 miles from any land or maritime border? Look that up. That ..read more

Labor Day weekend snuck up on me. So I was thinking about Labor Day, my favorite holiday ever (no family gatherings, no war celebrating, no religious component), and realized, D'OH! I have been shamefully neglecting the labor of updating Citizen Reader. So I thought, I need to put up my annual list of my favorite nonfiction books about work for the holiday, and then I paused. It literally seems like I JUST did that. I don't know where the time is going any more.  But, without further ado, my favorite nonfiction books about work from the past year: Talking to the Girls: Intimate and Politi ..read more

First off, many thanks to Ann and the McFarland Public Library for hosting my talk titled "How to Read True Crime and Still Sleep at Night"! It wasn't hugely attended, but we had a lot of fun and we talked over a lot of books, so that makes for a very successful evening in my opinion. That said, if you'd like to share any great True Crime titles you've been reading or have read, please share them in the comments! In other news, I also taped a YouTube segment for the library, about the different gardening books that I read in a year. This was my first experience recording anything for YouTube ..read more

Good morning! If anybody who reads this blog is anywhere near McFarland, Wisconsin, you are cordially invited to attend my presentation there, titled "How to Read True Crime and Still Sleep at Night."* Mr. CR thinks it is totally weird how much True Crime I read, but I gotta tell you, I like True Crime because it is honest. I don't think we will ever conquer our cultural love of violence until we look at it more often and much more analytically. I firmly believe the first way to make a problem bigger is to ignore the problem. Reading True Crime is one way I feel I am trying to look at one of s ..read more

won't keep the doctor away, or anything, but I still say a daily essay can make your life better. How handy there is a website called "Essay Daily" to help you get your fix! Over at Essay Daily, they periodically run a feature called "The Midwessay," featuring essays set in the Midwest, and I am extremely excited to say that they published an essay of mine last week: You Can't Go Home Again. I've read a lot of the other Midwessays there, and they all provide a slightly different look at a region that doesn't often get a lot of love. The entire site is highly recommended ..read more

"On Saturday, March 25, 1911, at 4:40 p.m., as the workers prepared to leave with their pay in hand, an alarm bell sounded at the Triangle Waist Company...The factory was located on the eighth, ninth, and tenth floors of the modern Asch Building (now the Brown Buildings). Workers produced shirtwaists, an iconic item of clothing for the 'new' American woman inspired by the Gibson Girl, created by illustrator Charles Dana Gibson..." This is a fairly sedate introduction to the Triangle Fire in 1911 New York City that wound up killing 146 workers, the vast majority of them women, and a lot of them ..read more