Back in January I put together My Reading Plan for 2018. My follow-through has been mixed: I overly fulfilled some intentions but failed woefully in others. Reading Challenges Goodreads Challenge I crushed my Goodreads challenge to read 45 books by knocking off 63. Here, according to Goodreads, are my additional statistics for 2018: I read […]
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Here’s a short entry for this busy holiday week. In Fiction, It Was the Year of the Woman An interesting look at the bulk of novels published this year: They didn’t launch any franchises — no “girl”-titled blockbusters and probably no future Jennifer Lawrence vehicles — but collectively, they dominated a shrunken literary ecosystem. Each
The Best Books of 2018 Amazon got us started off back in early November with its many best books lists. This page is the portal on which you’ll find links to lists of best books in many different categories. Best Books of 2018 This is The Washington Post ’s portal into its lists of books
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How are you doing on your reading challenges or goals now that the end of 2018 is quickly approaching? If you still have spots to tick off on your challenge or need to pad your statistics, here are some books that can be read in one day or less. And Every Morning the Way Home
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Five Writing Tips from Tana French I usually stay away from tips aimed specifically at writers, but I found some of French’s tips here useful for readers as well as writers, especially what she has to say about characters: There’s no such thing as ‘men’ or ‘women.’ There’s only the individual character you’re writing… .
8 Tips For Overcoming ’Reader’s Block’ I can’t remember ever encountering reader’s block. My own problem is usually the opposite: other life duties that prevent me from spending as much time as I’d like to spend reading. Nevertheless, Emily Petsko asserts: “Reader’s block” is a well-documented problem, and even avid readers occasionally suffer from it.
THE SIMPLE JOY OF REREADING TO BREAK A READING SLUMP Julia Rittenberg has a confession to make: I used to have a great deal of anxiety around keeping up with others’ reading paces. Social media heightened my awareness of reading habits, and worries that my own were woefully behind. I would be unable to choose
OCTAVIA BUTLER AND AMERICA AS ONLY BLACK WOMEN SEE IT It is a rare writer who can use sci-fi not simply to chart an escape from reality, but as a pointed reflection of the most minute and magnified experiences that frame and determine the lives of those who live in black skin. Octavia E. Butler
Show Us Your Tsundoku! Loosely translated as the practice of piling up books you might never read, the Japanese word tsundoku seems to be everywhere right now. In recent months, The New York Times, the BBC, Forbes, and plenty of others have reported on the phenomenon. Here’s the feature’s subtitle: “We want to see your
The Oxford Book of Footnotes* If you’ve ever waded through a large academic tome wrangling with a sequence of footnotes at the bottom of nearly every page, you’ll appreciate this piece by Bruce McCall in The New Yorker. How Doctors Use Poetry A Harvard medical student describes how he is learning to both treat and
