We all love reading. Or at least we hope you do if you’re holding this newspaper in your hands or hanging out on our website. But it can be challenging to slice out space in our overly busy lives to read, especially to sit down with a long read like a book.

We tell ourselves we’ll get around to it on our summer beach vacations, but even then many of us will look back and realize the minutes slipped away as we stared at our phones, yelled after the kids or drifted off to sleep in the midday sun.

But we want to read more. We long for authors to take us to lands we wouldn’t otherwise visit, to worlds we wouldn’t otherwise imagine or to decipher the landscape around us. So with such little time on our hands and such a strong desire to read more good books, it makes sense for someone to compile a list, complete with summaries and analysis, of which books are worth your fleeting free moments.

We chose books with local ties — either the writer, publisher or subject — many of them from our own backyard.

That’s just the sort of paper we are.

Whether you’re looking for a hilarious romp alongside a fictional female DJ, a guide to creating social change, a primer on voting rights or an insightful and true wilderness trek tale, there’s something here for you. The authors range from a Greensboro native with a fashion career to the president of High Point University to the winner of a Winston-Salem publisher’s fiction award.

And if there isn’t something in here that grabs your interest, we’re pretty sure you don’t like reading anyway.

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We believe that reporting can save the world.

The TCB First Amendment Society recognizes the vital role of a free, unfettered press with a bundling of local experiences designed to build community, and unique engagements with our newsroom that will help you understand, and shape, local journalism’s critical role in uplifting the people in our cities.

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