skimmed the books and took these photos in March 2025

my mom first read Kit Saves the Day aloud to me when I was 6. my dad’s cousin gave me the whole collection when I was 7 and I read it over and over. I’m not sure if it’s truly great, enduring children’s literature, but no character has shaped me more. it was a little amazing to read last year and consider all the parallels and through lines.

the illustrations are perfect; I would absolutely buy prints of so many of them.

love that Tripp made the villain of the series an anti-New Deal conservative. he does soften and give Kit her flowers at the end, somehow, if I’m remembering right.

will organize this later

“To students, to colleagues, and to basically anybody who has found outsized nourishment in a book, I like to offer a different reminder, half-polemic and half statement of the blindingly obvious. It's just this: whatever its other graces, serious work in English prepares its participants, as I think almost nothing else can, for the perplexities, anguishes, and errant joys of being alive in the world. What does work in the humanities testify to, if not the painful wonder of being a person, being human, among other persons? Spend time with them and you'll come to find there's a strange and potent magic in things like novels and poems. They won't offer you a ready-made blueprint for a world less ruinous, alas; that's really not their remit. But reading them, investing our imaginations in them, fighting about them, puzzling through them in collaboration with colleagues and comrades and students and friends—this, I think, does an awful lot to adhere us to life, to fortify our attachments to one another and thus to the world itself, even in its bleakest configurations.” — Memos of blood and fire

Tripp: “For all the metaphorical reasons, it was very important that it was on a river. The constant flow, the constant movement and change.”