As with other posts in this series, these #booksread2022 posts go anywhere from a few weeks to a month after I’ve read them. I read this particular book last week, though!  Stolen Focus is a book about something a lot of us have been struggling with for years, but which a lot of people I know have found surging to the fore during the pandemic: a growing sense of difficulty paying attention, reading, and disengaging from the digital world. We all seem to be well aware of this problem—google the word “doomscroll” for one indicator of how powerless and trapped …

As with other posts in this series, these #booksread2022 posts go anywhere from a few weeks to a month after I’ve read them. I read this particular book last week, though!  This is a book I’ve had for ages, but from which I only read a little bit. I figured I’d resolve that, and… quickly remembered why I had never read much of it. Anna Brownell Jameson was long-winded in the way of many people from her era—she was born late in the late 1700s, and this book is an account of her travel to Canada in the 1830s.  Notably, …