Author: Shannon Turlington
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A caution against self-publishing, with links…
I have a side job right now where I review “indie” books, which mostly means self-published books, although some small-press books are also thrown into the mix. Reading on average one self-published book a week for the past several months has made me very pessimistic about the quality of self-published books in general. In fact, it’s…
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Women writing — some links
For my yearly reading project in 2015, I have been focusing on women writers, specifically of speculative fiction. This project has led me down lots of wonderful side alleys discovering new writers, revisiting old favorites, and thinking about what they have to say. It’s also helped me understand the bias that women writers continue to…
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Recommended Reading: Annihilation by Jeff VanderMeer
Annihilation by Jeff VanderMeer is everything I liked about Lost, but much better executed. An expedition of four unnamed female scientists ventures into the mysterious Area X, and bad things happen. Area X, like the island in Lost, is a weird, unsettling, indefinable place where disquieting things happen that cannot be explained. Those who venture into it are irrevocably…
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Amanda Palmer on radical empathy…
A beautifully written piece by Amanda Palmer: Playing the Hitler Card: “We live in an age of endless, foaming outrage. The only answer is to try to feel empathy for other people, no matter who they are.”
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Are women-only book prizes necessary?
Maybe for a century or more to come, we’ll continue to need cultural spaces in which “women’s writing” is protected and encouraged to flourish as something separate from “men’s.” But that same small part of me fears that the gated-off arena can too easily become a prison. There’s something ironic, and a little depressing, in…
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Recommended Reading: A Tale for the Time Being by Ruth Ozeki
I absolutely loved A Tale for the Time Being by Ruth Ozeki. A writer living on a remote island off the coast of British Columbia finds a package washed ashore from Japan containing a diary and becomes obsessed with finding out what happened to the teenage girl who wrote it. This novel has all the elements I enjoy,…
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Become a friend of your library
Following on my last post, I agree with Neil Gaiman that libraries are of vital importance to our society. Like many readers, I grew up in a library, basically, quickly graduating from the kids’ section to the adult books. I remember systematically reading my way through every Agatha Christie (she wrote something like 85 of…
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Neil Gaiman’s manifesto on reading
“I’m going to tell you that libraries are important. I’m going to suggest that reading fiction, that reading for pleasure, is one of the most important things one can do. I’m going to make an impassioned plea for people to understand what libraries and librarians are, and to preserve both of these things.” This was…
Shannon Turlington 