What this is.
Late Nite Reader is a quiet reading journal. I write it in the hours between 11pm and 2am, which is when I do my own reading, and when the rest of my life is asleep. The house is quiet. The phone is in another room. I have a book, a mug of tea, and the particular permission that the night gives.
The journal covers, broadly, four kinds of reading: dark romance and its various subgenres; serialized fiction, meaning the chapter-by-chapter novels that have quietly become the most interesting popular literary form of the decade; gothic and slow-burn novels, the books designed to be read in the silent hours; and the occasional piece on relationship and life books, because the line between what you read and who you become is thinner than most readers admit.
Who I am.
I am a book editor by day, at a small press in Portland. I've worked in publishing for about twelve years, three at a large New York imprint, the rest here, where I can walk to work and where the rain gives me cover to stay home and read. The day job pays the rent. This journal is the reading life I've been carrying on, parallel to the day job, for as long as I can remember.
I am not, for the record, a serious critic. I've published maybe six book reviews in actual magazines, all of them for friends who asked. Most of what I think about books, I've thought about alone, in a chair, at 1am, without any expectation that anyone else would read it. This journal is the slightly strange project of making some of those private thoughts public, in a form that hopefully doesn't embarrass me too much.
What you won't find here.
Hot takes. Coverage of bestsellers. The books everyone is already talking about. I'm deliberately slow. I want to write about the books that haven't made the front pages, or that have made them but haven't been read carefully. If you're looking for the next big thing, there are faster places to go. If you want a quiet weekly dispatch about the books a single, patient reader is actually spending time with, you're in the right place.
Write me a letter.
If you've read something here that interested you, or if you have a recommendation you think I'd like, I read every email that arrives at letters@latenitereader.com. I reply to most of them, eventually.