Saturday Miscellany—12/14/19

Shorter list this week, with less of the other stuff than usual. Hope I’m not missing anything, and that it’s just the end-of-the-year-blahs. I can understand not a lot of things being put out there in the world this week—you likely noticed that I was pretty quiet. I had big, semi-ambitious (yet attainable) goals for the week and hit none of them. I did get three posts partially written, however, so . . . yeah. That’s pretty lame, actually. Non-blog life was just weird this week and the results (or lack thereof) were plainly visible in my posting. Onward and upward though.

Anyway, here are the odds ‘n ends over the week about books and reading that caught my eye. You’ve probably seen some/most/all of them, but just in case:

• BBNYA – The Book Bloggers’ Novel of The Year Award – Coming in 2020—A few weeks back, I shared a post announcing the BBNYA, but here’s another one — a bit more detailed.
• 30 Seconds With Your Favorite Author: Book Signing Conversation Tips—Tips that could come in handy (I could’ve used them at least once)
• 7 Things Crime Readers Will No Longer Tolerate: Crime fiction is getting harder to write—and that’s a good thing.—I’m not so sure I’m as intolerant as Christopher Fowler thinks I should be, but . . .
• NPR had some good articles lately: Not A Regular Reader? 4 Strategies To Make Reading A Habit and How To Read More Books
• Hopepunk and Solarpunk: On Climate Narratives That Go Beyond the Apocalypse: Alyssa Hull Tries to Find Optimism in Teaching Cli-Fi to Terrified Students—While I wouldn’t necessarily agree with a lot of what’s said here, I’m intrigued by the ideas of Hopepunk and Solarpunk (particularly the former)
• Black Orchids 2019 , plus a Nero and a BONA—The Wolfe Pack (a society for the appreciation of Rex Stout’s Nero Wolfe/Archie Goodwin series) gave out the Nero Award and the Black Orchid Novella Award
• 2020 – Hot New Books – January – March—Compulsive Readers has put together a list of first quarter releases that could probably fill a schedule by itself.
• The 78 Best Book Covers of 2019: As Chosen by the Experts, the Designers Themselves—LitHub assembled some designers to compile this list of very eye-catching covers.
• My Visit To Harper Collins—Must have been a blast.
• My Top Five Book Blogging Omissions—Reading this makes me think Stephen is Wiser than I am.
• The Books I Gift Most Often—Better than “Who’s your favorite author?”/”What’s your favorite book?” Ramona Mead answers “What books do you give the most?” (which is also easier than the others).

Also, I’d like to say hi and extend a warm welcome to Maya’s Musings, David W, Rain Alchemist, alittlebookproblem, forwarddog and Tim Onayemi for following the blog this week. Don’t be a stranger, and use that comment box, would you?