Booked

A newsletter about reading and other pleasurable pastimes

I’ve been many things in life: teacher, traveller, Wall Street and classical-music- world alumna, newspaper and magazine writer, Central Park gardener, cater-waiter.

Above all else, I have been a reader. Although I have forgotten much during the course of my life, I have never forgotten (or doubted) the pure pleasure of a great read. Nor have I forgotten my best reading spots: often beds, including my canopied childhood one at 40 Bowers Road, and later, a 1930s double bed on West 94th Street; a hammock on a 13th floor urban balcony in Taiwan; and countless late afternoons in a beach chair, feet baking in warm Atlantic Ocean sand or soaking atop slippery rocks lapped gently by Long Island Sound. Books have taken me to all the best places and introduced me to unforgettable people, both real and imaginary.

Welcome to Booked by me, Sheila Callahan, a New Jersey-born reader, writer, and lover of music, film, and the great outdoors. I spent most of my adult life on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, followed by four years in Warsaw, Poland, and two in Kaohsiung, Taiwan, I am currently based outside Washington, D.C. This newsletter will focus on reading and other pleasurable pastimes.

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