I’ve been meaning to read this one for the past few months, since my daughter had to read it for school, but I have been unable to keep up with her reading (as her speed has increased and my duty as a reading mother has gotten a little out of hand). When we chatted about…
Every once in awhile, I get out of the habit of reading on a regular, usually daily, basis. Often this is the indirect fault of media–TV or internet–but sometimes it’s because I haven’t encountered a good book in awhile so I start dragging my feet. This time, I think it was a combination of free…
There are a few people I will take book recommendations from and they are mostly in my writing group. This particular recommendation, for The Turner House, came not only as a title scribbled on my writing notes, but as a book pressed into my hand by someone else who had just finished it. “It reminded…
Yes, this book is part of a series, but since I only read the first one, I can speak only to that book. As of 2017, there are six books in the series: My Big Fat Zombie Goldfish The SeaQuel Fins of Fury Any Fin Is Possible Live and Let Swim Jurassic Carp Why didn’t…
I must have been writing this review in my head while reading this book, because I feel like I already wrote it. I looked on the blog, I looked in the blog drafts, and I even searched through my Word file. Nothing. Must have been in my head. Why? Because this book is so surprising.…
In my daughter’s sixth grade class for the recent semester, the kids had to read one of four selections that their teacher presented. My daughter did the first read and turned in the assignment, then decided to read the other three before the semester was through. She has always said this teacher had a great…
I bumped the Miss Peregrine series up on my TBR for two very good reasons. First, Tim Burton was working on the movie. I lurve Tim Burton and I see all the movies he makes. Second, I have a friend who was high school buddies with Ransom Riggs and who recommended that I read the…
When I saw the charming movie preview for the newest The Little Prince adaptation, I knew it was time to add it to the summer reading list. I like to read a book, timing it with an exciting movie release. Plus, I had been meaning to read The Little Prince for years and years. It’s…
You are about to be introduced to my favorite cookbook author. It is not Bobby Flay. It is not Nigella Lawson, or Julia Child, or Deborah Madison, though I love them all. It is none other than the lately underappreciated Bert Greene. He, my friend, was a real cookbook author. He was born into creativity…
I would like to apologize for the lack of new content on The Starving Artist in the past couple weeks, and I would like to offer a little explanation. We are in the middle of a new construction debacle, in which we have no internet and are not sure when we will have internet. Turns…
This is a continuation of my reviews of books by Arnold and Anita Lobel. I broke the long list into groups, and this is the group of four Early Readers that I read with my son. For the record, I have recommended a few of the Lobel books for the Best Of list, including Frog…
Goosebumps, the movie, released in 2015 by Sony Pictures. There are a few things that I need to say before I get to this movie. The first is that I do not allow my kids to read Goosebumps or watch the show, because they are too scary (and possibly I have some other reasons). That…
The Henry Huggins series of books by Beverly Cleary. They are, in chronological order, Henry Huggins (1950), Henry and Beezus (1952), Henry and Ribsy (1954), Henry and the Paper Route (1957), Henry and the Clubhouse (1962), and Ribsy. The Henry Huggins series contains the Ribsy series and meshes with the Ramona series. For our second–and…
Enter to win a copy of “The Night of One Hundred Thieves” by Devon Trevarrow Flaherty. Like, Share, or Comment to be entered to win one of three e-book copies. Contest ends April 12, so get your Like, Share, or Comment in before then! Also, check out all the launch day festivities right here on…
I have to admit, I sort of annoy myself sometimes with all this hyphenate self-indie-artisanal publishing thing. I mean, which is it? Of course, the main problem here is that that the publishing world is quickly shifting, and that lots of this is new. So one person might call something one thing, and another, another.…
Magnificent Principia (2013), by Colin Pask, as a way to read–without actually reading–Isaac Newton’s The Principia, or more correctly, Philosophiæ Naturalis Principia Mathematica or Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy, 1687 (last edition, 1726). Magnificent contains important chunks of Principia, although what percentage I am not at all clear on, and it digests those chunks for…
Basically, I was away from my life and from my work from mid-June to mid-August. That means that July was not a month for a lot of progress on books or book sales, and yet there were some things happening. I had one guest appearance on a blog while I was away and, by the…
Fortress of Solitude, by Jonathan Lethem, the National Bestseller published in 2003 by Vintage Books. In 2003, I was no longer in college, nor was I writing full time yet. In fact, I was working as a receptionist at an inner city junior high, crying on my drive home, recuperating in the evenings listening to…
One of the things I have learned about writing while writing is that it often takes writing to learn about writing. Make sense? You know, I like to read about writing, everything from plotting journals to autobiographies of writers (and magazines, oodles of magazines). But in some ways, there is nothing like writing, and then…
Yes, yes. I am overseas helping orphans. And yet here I am, giving you a June media synopsis. Chalk it up to the amazing power of scheduling blog entries. Or the universality of the internet. Which one is it? You may never know… Nothing going on this month much with Benevolent. I have won a…
the starving artist 