As is typical of a holiday week, this is a short post. Less to distract you from your Saturday reading, right?

Odds ‘n ends about books and reading that caught my eye this week. You’ve probably seen some/most/all of them, but just in case:
bullet This is Why Book Marketing Doesn’t Work
bullet ‘Really I just want to stay home and make art about my dog’: An interview with Sara Varon—I’m pretty sure I’ve never run across Varon before, but this interview makes me interested in checking out her stuff.
bullet 7 Thrillers With Shocking Twists
bullet 10 Must-Read Authors for Fans of First-Person Adult Urban Fantasy—This is a very narrow category…but can’t argue with most of this picks.
bullet Tough Questions with Left on the Shelf—the latest in the Tough Questions series

To help talk about backlist titles (and just for fun), What Was I Talking About 10 Years Ago Week? (not much, really)
bullet Don’t Hurt People and Don’t Take Their Stuff: A Libertarian Manifesto by Matt Kibbe
bullet I noted the release of Premonitions by Jamie Schultz and Artful by Peter David

This Week’s New Releases that I’m Excited About and/or You’ll Probably See Here Soon:
bullet Broiler by Eli Cranor—I dunno…it’s by Cranor, isn’t that enough? It’s about revenge, power, economic disparity in the most American of places—a chicken processing plant.
bullet Dog Day Afternoon by David Rosenfelt—Marcus asks Andy for a favor and gets him to represent a suspected mass-shooter. I really enjoyed this one, as I said recently.
bullet Breaking the Dark: A Jessica Jones Marvel Crime Novel by Lisa Jewell—Jessica Jones travels to England to investigate some teens who are too-perfect. It’s hard to explain in a phrase or two…but these are creepy kids and something has to be making them that way.
bullet Boise Longpig Hunting Club by Nick Kolakowski—the new edition of this explosive thriller
bullet The Night Ends with Fire by K. X. Song—a new retelling of the story of Mulan.
bullet Junkyard Roadhouse by Faith Hunter—Shining Smith is neck-deep in trouble—that’s nothing new, sure, but it’s a different kind of trouble.

For books are not absolutely dead things, but do contain a potency of life in them to be as active as that soul was whose progeny they are; nay, they do preserve as in a vial the purest efficacy and extraction of that living intellect that bred them. - John Milton