Tag: Reading
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An appreciation of Jane Austen…
I recently completed reading all of Jane Austen’s finished novels, a pleasant and rewarding project. Although her body of work was not large, there is not a single clunker in the bunch. The same cannot be said for many other novelists. The person, be it gentleman or lady, who has not pleasure in a good…
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Rebecca Solnit, fast becoming my new hero
Rebecca Solnit on books no woman should read: “The list made me think there should be another, with some of the same books, called 80 Books No Woman Should Read, though of course I believe everyone should read anything they want. I just think some books are instructions on why women are dirt or hardly…
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The Love Story Behind “Carol”
I’ve recently rediscovered Patricia Highsmith, and I read The Price of Salt, her only lesbian novel, this year. This essay about the novel and the new movie coming out based on it (Carol) helped inform my understanding of the book. How Patricia Highsmith turned her erotic obsession with two women into literary art. Source: The Love Story Behind “Carol”…
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No Boys Allowed…
Shannon Hale shares her experiences doing school visits as a woman writer. Please encourage the young readers in your life to read all kinds of books. Don’t fall into the trap of segregating books by gender.
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The long and short of it…
I used to love long books. I liked getting sucked into a fictional world and really getting to know a large cast of characters. The absorbing sweep and breadth of an epic is hard to beat. Some of my favorite long books include: East of Eden by John Steinbeck; The Stand by Stephen King; Lonesome Dove by Larry McMurtry; Sea of Poppies by…
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Recommended Reading: What Makes This Book So Great
What Makes This Book So Great is a compendium of blog posts about Jo Walton’s rereads of books, not necessarily all science fiction and fantasy. These are blog posts originally published on Tor.com, so they are short, breezy, and quick to read. Walton is such a prodigious reader, averaging a book or more a day (I wonder…
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Links for readers…
Some interesting links I’ve stumbled across lately: On annotating books (BookRiot): I personally cannot mark up a paper book, which is another reason why I like my Kindle–it makes highlighting painless. More marginalia (New York Review of Books). A book is a heart that only beats in the chest of another (Brain Pickings). What’s reading…
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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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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…
Shannon Turlington 