I used to treat unfinished books like failures. A spine half-cracked. A chapter abandoned on a long-haul flight. The quiet shame of seeing it weeks later, unopened. I’d shelve them out of sight, like evidence of a promise I hadn’t kept. It wasn’t just guilt. It was identity. Was I really an avid reader if […]

These days, reading often looks like performance. A stack of annotated hardcovers. A screenshot from Goodreads. A “just finished this” post on TikTok, tagged #amreading and lit by soft afternoon light. We share what we read to signal who we are. But finishing a book, even a good one, doesn’t mean it changed us. Some […]

When I hit issue #150 of Words Into Works last week, I didn’t feel triumphant. I felt surprised. Not because I thought I’d quit. But because I had never stopped long enough to imagine what it would feel like to arrive here. There was no grand vision. No carefully plotted roadmap. No long-term strategy to […]