ByGD
This spring it felt like every bookish social media account I follow was raving about The Kiss Quotient, the debut novel by Helen Hoang. The premise was charming – a gender-flipped Pretty Woman starring a mixed-race man and an autistic woman. The backstory (you know how I can’t resist a good backstory) involved the author locating herself on the spectrum through research for the novel. It was only a matter of time until I read it. Read More
ByGD
Adult-Choose-Your-Own-Adventure
I have continued to wander the wrong side of the literary tracks with an exploration of choose-your-own-adventure e-books, a genre I discovered in a Wall Street Journal article about e-book data collection. I was simultaneously thrilled and creeped out by the data that Amazon can now collect on the reading habits of its customers – on my reading habits.
More frightening than the loss of privacy (which is really inevitable at this point) was the potential influence of that data on the creative process. It’s not at all challenging to imagine a future world where books are focus-grouped in a process that would have prevented most of literature’s greatest works from ever seeing the light of day had they been subjected to it. Read More