What I Learned from COVID-19 I keep reading things like “I can’t wait to be done with 2020 and move on to 2021.” Do most people truly believe that merely taking one calendar off the wall and hanging up another one is going to change their day-to-day existence? Such magical thinking. Reality doesn’t work that […]
My Reading & Writing Goals for 2021 Read More »
Related Post: My Reading Plan for 2020 I just went back and reread my reading plan for 2020. Then I had a good laugh. I did relatively well with Part I: Specific Challenges and Goals. I didn’t meet most of the goals, but I’m being gentle with myself in evaluating how well I did under
Did I Fulfill My Reading Plan for 2020? Read More »
Book Club Spotlight: How This 20-Year-Old Book Club Connects Virtually The group of 15 ladies successfully transitioned from over 20 years of dinner and monthly meetings at the Rancho Santa Margarita City Hall to a virtual format — and were even able to welcome back a few members! Most recently, the club held its annual
We Need More Dark Stories with Hopeful Endings Author Les Edgerton believes that dark novels needn’t have completely dark endings: “To endure page after page of never-ending pain and sorrow and to culminate in the same morass of tragedy would only be nihilism, and the best books don’t end like that.” Here he lists some
Starting today, we’ll be counting down the 50 biggest literary stories of the year, so you can remember the good (yes, there was some!), the bad, and the Zoom book launch. Join us, won’t you, on this very special journey. Source: The Biggest Literary Stories of the Year: 50 to 31 | Literary Hub
The Biggest Literary Stories of the Year: 50 to 31 | Literary Hub Read More »
I must read five books in December to complete my Goodreads Challenge, so I’m turning to the list of books that can be read in one day. Here are some titles I’ve collected throughout 2020 because I knew I’d probably end up needing them when I turned the calendar page to December. The books in
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How Crime Writers Use Unreliable Narrators to Add Suspense Emily Martin uses the categories that William Riggan explores in his book Pícaros, Madmen, Naifs, and Clowns: The Unreliable First-Person Narrator to look at ways crime writers employ them to build suspense. The 2021 Tournament of Books Long List Next March’s Tournament of Books, something that
See What the World’s Reading Habits Look Like in 2020 The editing and proofreading service Global English Editing gathered statistics from various sources, including Pew Research and Amazon’s bestsellers page, that demonstrate how the world’s reading habits changed over the course of 2020: “35 percent of web users worldwide reported reading more during the pandemic,
The 50 Greatest Apocalypse Novels “Apropos of . . . Nothing” I’m including this list here because, really, how could I not? How many of these have you read? I’ve read five, and I have two more on the top of my TBR pile. I think that’s pretty good, given that I usually avoid most
Mixing Genres Is All About Messing with Structure “Knowing what people are expecting allows you to subvert the trope. Expectation is its own red herring, built right into your reader.” Stuart Turton, author of the brilliant The 7½ Deaths of Evelyn Hardcastle and newly released The Devil and The Dark Water, admits, “I’m obsessed by
