ByGD
It’s probably a little out of character for me that I rarely attend authorial events. I’m not sure why I buy plane tickets and concert tickets but never buy speaker tickets, but there it is. And I’m discovering that it’s an unfortunate habit, because this winter I have twice been the grateful recipient of speaker tickets from thoughtful friends. Read More
ByGD
I may have mentioned that I receive more unsolicited books than I can actually review. Let me pause and savor that for a minute….Okay. So often I read the back cover blurb or the press insert and think, “Yeah, I’d like to read that.” I add it to the stack and life goes on. So a few weeks ago my sixth-grader came home talking about the awesome book she was reading in Language Arts. It sounded sort of familiar. She showed me the book. It looked familiar. I dug through my stack of unread ARCs and there it was. I had been saving it for over a year intending to pre-read it for my daughter, but her English teacher had saved me the trouble and assigned it. So I gave her (my daughter, not the teacher) my copy and promised to buy her the next book in the series if she would review it for my blog. So here we are.
ByGD
No, I’m not talking about the Stranger Blog, although I’m sure it’s very nice. I’m talking about the lengthy, challenging book that you slog through, sometimes grimly determined to reach the end whether you like it or not. The slog is out of fashion. The internet is littered with guides for determining when to give up on a book; it’s coated in essays justifying the practice. My own writing partner, a librarian, rolls her eyes at me when I complain that I haven’t read books that have been recommended to me because I am still slogging through the same dry, heavy tome I was reading when we checked in months before. She subscribes to the following popular argument (and it is a good one): Read More
ByGD
I don’t remember where I first read about New Old World by Pallavi Aiyar, but I do remember that I stopped reading and immediately put a hold on the book at the library. And I’m so glad I did because it might be the best book I’ve read all year. New Old World was eye opening in the same way that the novel The Life of Octavian Nothing was for me – it changed my perspective on something I thought I already knew, and I will never look at it the same way again. Read More
ByGD
In the two months since my last Mailbag post, I’ve received a lot of new ARCs, and as usual, I haven’t deserved them. Although there were a couple of books that could have been thoughtful gifts from people who know me well, most of them were merely tangential to my interests, and a couple were completely random. Since I’m not going to read them all and do them justice with a thoughtful review, the least I can do to is shine a light on their existence in the hopes that one of you will find something interesting to read this month. Read More