dany's reading adventures!

Young adult author Randy Ribay is Filipino American and says his latest book Patron Saints Of Nothing is dedicated to people like him: “The Hyphenated,” he calls them. And not just Filipino Americans, Ribay tells NPR’s Noel King, but also anyone else who would consider themselves more than one thing.

“The difficulty with a dual identity is just trying to figure out what does it mean to be more than one thing in a world where people want you to be one thing,” he says.

Check out the full conversation here.

In his stump speeches, Ronald Reagan used to talk about a woman in Chicago who’d scammed hundreds of thousands of dollars of public money and spent it on fancy cars and homes – the “welfare queen” became a stereotype applied to countless women, but it turns out there really was one strange, singular woman in Chicago behind the stories. Josh Levin examines her strange, troubled life in The Queen – check out our review here.

This is SUCH a cool story –  five hundred years ago, a son of Christopher Columbus assembled one of the greatest libraries the world has ever known. The volumes inside were mostly lost to history. Now, a precious book summarizing the contents of the library has turned up in a manuscript collection in Denmark. Edward Wilson-Lee, author of The Catalogue of Shipwrecked Books, a biography of Columbus’ son Hernando, calls it “an absolutely gorgeous thing.” Check out his conversation with NPR’s Ari Shapiro here.

Happy Easter to those who celevrate. And your recommended Easter read is the newest entry of the Frozen in time blog, dedicated to skaters who became unfairly forgoten by most long-time fans or simply uknown to the newer fans.

This latest entry is about Ilia Klimkin and it makes for a fascinating read. Klimkin is, indeed, a great talent that was unfortunately wasted. During his career he experienced bad luck, unfortunate timing, serious injuries, lack of support from his own federation, and personal tragedies. It all resulted in a talented skater not fully utilizing his abilities and realizing his potential. If you want to know more, check out the entry.

Congratulations to this year’s Pulitzer Prize winners! There was so much great journalism honored this year – but this being the Books tumblr, we’re gonna focus on this year’s winning fiction, nonfiction and poetry writers – check out our full coverage here, and find Lynn Neary’s lovely conversation with fiction winner Richard Powers here.

Joan Biskupic has written four biographies of sitting Supreme Court justices, and she says the charming yet enigmatic Chief Justice John Roberts was her “toughest subject, start to finish.” Our own Nina Totenberg breaks down the book for us – check it out here.

There was a time in Summer Brennan’s life when she wore high heels almost every day — when she was working at the United Nations. It was a place, as she describes it, of “suits and ties, skirts and silk blouses … freshly shined wingtips and yes, high heels.”

The heels were critical, as Brennan saw it, to being the kind of woman — professional, feminine, poised — who marched those halls of power with confidence. Brennan is now a writer, and she explores all this in her new book, High Heel. She talked to NPR’s Mary Louise Kelly about beauty, power, expectations and of course high heels – find their conversation here.