I read Bunny by Mona Awad because I was about to attend an event with the author. Out of the books available by the featured authors, Bunny was one that I already intended to read since many people over the past year had mentioned it, especially in conjunction with Yellowface (R. F. Kuang), another book…
A Family Matter by Claire Lynch will be published in June in both England and America. (There is a giveaway on GoodReads, if you want to enter.) I expect it to be well-received. It is a beautiful, poignant, and pacific book with strong currents of pain, injustice, and joy beneath that carefully considered surface of…
In one of my book clubs, we watch a movie based on a book each year. Last year we watched All of Us Strangers. Because Taichi Yamada’s book of the same name was not on my radar, I did not read the book first. But I ended up watching the movie twice. (I thought I…
While I read Whiteout by a bunch of authors, I was unimpressed. It probably didn’t help that I didn’t understand what I was reading until much later. But as the book went by, I was charmed by the idea of it as well as the spirit of it. And some sections were written better than…
The Astronomer by Brian Biswas is several things. It is a magical realism-verging-on-speculative novel, though it is comprised of short stories that have been strung together and bracketed with other short stories that give a Victorian-style faux-outsider perspective. The story (which contains everything from Greek mythology to existential considerations) is told in short bursts that…
I kinda wish The Truth About Horses by Christy Cashman wasn’t titled The Truth About Horses. And I also wish the cover were different. Though it almost looks self-pubbed and the title is lackluster and maybe even cheesy, the book is pretty solid. Despite some rather specific things I will find to complain about, overall…
I have been looking for an agent, which is a blog post for another day. As part of this process, I have had to cozy up to agents with a remark or two in each query, indicating that I understood who they were and why I have picked them out of the thousands of agents,…
How many times have you heard someone say, “If you have nothing nice to say, don’t say anything at all”? For the most part, I actually believe in the truth of this advice. You see, I used to have anger management issues, which manifested largely when dealing with other drivers, customer service, and my kids.…
Inevitably, when someone asks me a writer- or reader-question in real life, it is going to end up on the blog. This used to happen with my food blog. The thing is, if someone has taken the time and effort to ask a serious question, there are probably other people wondering the same thing. Plus,…
Anna Karenina, by Leo Tolstoy, the translation by Joel Carmichael published by Bantam Books in 1981. The original was published in 1877. This is a solid book. It’s one of those real classics that fully deserves to be a classic. And, amazingly, it’s pretty great reading for the modern reader, as well. You do get…
With NaNoWriMo, I honesty haven’t been taking in too much to entertainment, even reading (which is like half-entertainment, half-work). My plan for these last two months was several books, but I haven’t even finished one all month (unless you count the first book of Parade’s End, which I guess we should). We did, early on,…
I have started in a writing group, this month. (See “It Could Have Been Worse.”) I have entered another contest. I have been rejected by the establishment as a self-publisher. (To be addressed in a future blog, titled “The Rejection of the Nuances.”) I have signed up for NaNoWriMo, National Novel Writing Month. (See the…
“A Doll’s House,” by Henrik Ibsen (1879), read from Oxford World’s Classics Henrik Ibsen: Four Major Plays (1981), transl. by James McFarlane and Jens Arup. Also, “Ghosts” (1881), “Hedda Gabler” (1890), and “The Master Builder” (1892). I can’t say that I enjoyed these plays too much. Ibsen and I diverge too much in our basic…
With Kevin now graduated from nursing school, this has been a big month for us and the entertainment industry and catching up. We have spent a majority of our May evenings tucking the kids in and then slumping onto the couch to watch our newest favorite thing. We haven’t had a life like this in…
Lately I have heard and re-heard some very old writerly advice. It is this: Read. In other words, if you want to be a good writer, you need to read, and read a lot. Now, I have a little bit of a superstition of sorts about this. Actually, I guess it’s not really a superstition,…
I’m going to jump the gun a little bit on my Christmas books and other entertainment list, since the holiday season is extended enough to allow you to actually check them all out. Here are my recommendations for books, movies and music to get you in the holiday spirit (and avoid further replays of Mariah…
Here is a list of my top twelve favorite books, out of the small fraction of total books in the world that I have actually read. I am an avid reader, but I just don’t have tons of time to sit around and read. Plus, there are plenty of books I have enjoyed, but they…
the starving artist 