Tag: Miscellany Page 136 of 175

No intro today — no time for love, Doctor Jones — so let’s cut to it: 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:

• Don’t @ Me: Authors have a good case against people who bad-mouth their books on Twitter, then drag them into the conversation — how is this something we have to say again?
• For Sale: Letters and Illustrations From Dr. Seuss — a collection from 1957 — the year of How the Grinch Stole Christmas and The Cat in the Hat. Now I can’t imagine anyone reading this will be in the market for things like this, but you might want to read about it.
• William Goldman’s Strange, Sad, Captivating Children’s Book About a Girl and Her Blanket — I know I haven’t read everything by Goldman, but I thought I’d heard of almost all of it. Not this one though, would be fun to read.
• How Elan Mastai time-warped his way to a debut novel — if you haven’t read All Our Wrong Todays yet, what is wrong with you? Go read this — maybe this will convince you.
• The Dark and Dreamy Noir of The Great Gatsby: A Crime Reading of Fitzgerald’s Classic — huh
• How Many Books Will You Read Before You Die?
• The Evolution of Harry Bosch — another great Crime Reads piece
• Benedict Jacka has revealed the cover of Fallen, the 10th Alex Verus book. More colors than the first 9. I dig it.
• You Know Your Friends are Readers When… — BookRiot’s list is cute but too short.
• Steve Cavanagh talks about his new book on Ireland AM

This Week’s New Releases I’m Excited About and/or You’ll Probably See Here Soon:
• Here and Now and Then by Mike Chen — One of my favorite of 2019 (which isn’t saying much, I realize, as early as we are) — I can’t stop talking about this one, here’s how I started talking about it on the blog — and if you’re silly enough to talk to me in Real Life, you’ll hear a lot more about it.

Lastly, I’d like to say hi and extend a warm welcome to editorbtg and lollyrugs for following the blog this week.

I almost had this one up in time — but like two other nights this week, I woke up hours after I started a sentence to read utter gibberish on my screen. Maybe next week? (and yes, I’m probably the only one who cares about the time this posts, I realize.)

This week’s list is light on news-y posts and primarily features authors I greatly appreciate sounding off about interesting topics and updates for their fans/readers/etc. Honestly, I prefer weeks like this — a lot of stuff to think about/debate. Some good 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:

• Book clinic: what contemporary literary fiction is uplifting? — on the one hand, I’m not sure I need my literature to be “uplifting” — but I do like the idea of it. Regardless, some interesting looking reads here.
• The Pressure to Continue the Story After the Story — some good stuff from typical font of good stuff, Harry Connolly
• I Write Fiction About Border Crime, But Unlike Trump I Tell the Truth. — The political stuff in this piece by Don Winslow is easy to ignore (I’m not suggesting you should ignore it, but for the purposes of this blog, we’re going to focus on other bits).
• While reading the above, I saw this: If I Hate Violence So Much, Why Do I Love Writing About It? by Adam Sternbergh. I’ve loved his novels — which do feature a lot of violence, so I had to read this (although I could’ve guessed almost everything he said about himself — but still, the “why” is intriguing).
• Lots of Lee Coming Your Way — some updates from one of the favorites around here, Lee Goldberg.
• Exciting news to share on publication day! — M. W. Craven, a new favorite since last summer, has a lot of good news to share on the day his The Puppet Show (which featured prominently on my 2018 wrap up posts) came out in paperback (at least in the UK).
• Ranking Jonathan Tropper’s Novels — Matthew Hanover discusses and ranks Jonathan Tropper’s novels. I could feel Tropper’s influence in Hanover’s work, so this was in my sweet spot (am hoping to do a Tropper re-read later this year, btw). I’d argue about #4’s place on the list, but I think Hanover could convince me to keep it that high. However, he’s dead wrong about #1 and #2 and should flip them after publicly repenting. No sackcloth and ashes required, but . . .

Somehow no books were published this week that piqued my interest. At least not that I saw. Good. Catch up time.

Lastly, I’d like to say hi and extend a warm welcome to allmyheroesareweirdos, ladolceamara, William J. Fulton, Shawn P. B. Robinson, Davida Chazan, wanderingminds2019 and Elle for following the blog this week (I think this is my biggest week ever — thanks, guys & gals!).

Remember when this was posted at about the same time every week? Yeah, me neither. On the other hand, I slept well last night. Even if that started well before I was ready/aware of it.

Oh, btw, the whole “Block Editor” thing that WordPress is trying to get me to use — I don’t see the point and man, there’d better be a whole lotta very accessible help files ready to go when they impose this on us w/o the option to go back to the Classic Editor.

With no further ado or delay, 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:

• 7 Reasons Why Reading as a Kid Was the Best: Adult-free reading nooks, never-ending series, school book fairs. What could be better? — this made me think of a comment I saw on a recent post where someone said that as a kid they’d read “all the books in X series” several times as a kid. I couldn’t help thinking — that series started in the 50’s, was still being published in the 80’s (when I “grew out of” them). Yeah, you may have read several — but not the whole series. Kinda miss those kind of series (he says, until he whines about Stephanie Plum again . . . )
• Book Sales Are Soaring—And Not Just the Digital Kind
• The Villainous Bitch Has Become the Most Boring Trend in Literature — I think this has a lot of good things to say, but I don’t quite buy it. What do you think?
• Do you trust bloggers who don’t post negative reviews? — the topic that never dies
• Staying Quirky With Quirk Books — a nice profile of the niche-y publisher
• The Edgar Awards Revisited: The Long Goodbye by Raymond Chandler (Best Novel; 1955) — I’ve mentioned Criminal Element’s new series recently — this is a great example of the value of the series (even if this particular author wasn’t quite as enamored of the book as he “should” have been).
• Michael Connelly’s Five Favorite Crime Novels of All Time — I honestly forgot that Connelly mentioned The Long Goodbye until this moment. A good list, regardless.
• Five Favourite Finished Fantasy Series — good grief — another post from The Tattooed Book Geek this week?
• Friday Favorite Five: Urban Fantasy Series
• 19 Kinds of Reading I’ve Done (that You’ve Done, Too) — blah

This Week’s New Releases I’m Excited About and/or You’ll Probably See Here Soon:
• Back Door To Hell by Paul Gadsby — a couple of amateurs try to steal from a crime lord to start their lives. Am thinking the title gives a hint about how that goes.
• Marked by S Andrew Swann– what a fantastic premise — click the link to read it. A detective, magic, time travel and extra-dimensional bad guys.
• Tear It Down by Nick Petrie — my goal of catching up on the Peter Ash series this year just got 384 pages harder.
• Night School: A Reader for Grownups by Zsófia Bán — Click the link to read the description, I can’t do it justice. I’ve only heard good things about this and can easily see it living up to the hype.

Lastly, I’d like to say hi and extend a warm welcome to Dalindcy Koolhoven and ailishsinclair for following the blog this week.

Just a few 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:

• Lin-Manuel Miranda buys bookshop to save it from closure — sweet little story.
• The Art of the Pan: What’s the Point of a Bad Review in 2019? — Not technically about books/reading — but anyone looking at this space thinks about reviews in general at least a little bit.
• I somehow at various points of the week stumbled onto a theme. We’ll start with: On the Heartbreaking Difficulty of Getting Rid of Books: Summer Brennan Attempts Marie Kondo’s Approach to Tidying Up Her Library — I may have actually shared this back in 2016, I’m too lazy to check.
• What we gain from keeping books – and why it doesn’t need to be ‘joy’ — Anakana Schofield had a very different reaction to Kondo’s advice.
• And finally — try not to get jealous at some of these pics: 10 Famous Book Hoarders — another one I might have shared before, but I ran across it this week again.
• Seanan McGuire‏ prompted fans to hit her up with Toby Daye characters brought to life by memes from The Good Place, which was very fun.

This Week’s New Releases I’m Excited About and/or You’ll Probably See Here Soon:
• In an Absent Dream by Seanan McGuire — the 4th Wayward Children novella, a wonderful story about a very serious girl. I gushed about it a little earlier this week.
• The Burglar by Thomas Perry — a young burglar stumbles onto a murder scene and ends up running for her life. A heckuva thrill-ride. I talked about it last fall a bit.
• The Fall of Io by Wesley Chu — we finally get to return to the war between Prophus and Genjix via Ella and Io. I need to find time to read this soon.

Lastly, I’d like to say hi and extend a warm welcome to Hannah, workwithlapo and salmanalfarisi for following the blog this week.

I seem to be having one of those weeks: I’m reading a fantastic book and — to make deadlines — a pretty good book and one I haven’t decided about yet. And I feel like I’m getting nowhere with any of them (the bookmarks keep moving, so I know that’s not the case). It’s pretty frustrating. Especially with library due dates and other deadlines looming. I tell ya, the reader’s life is hard, yo.

Anyway, I haven’t spent that much time web/social media surfing this week. But I do have a small list of odds ‘n ends over the week about books and reading that caught my eye to share with you. You’ve probably seen some/most/all of them, but just in case:

• Audiobooks, inclusivity and #MeToo … how books changed in 2018 — I’d differ a bit with some of the analysis in this piece from The Guardian, but I still liked the overview as a whole
• A Massive Number of Iconic Works Will Enter the Public Domain on New Year’s Eve — I’m not convinced it’ll be all that good for creativity, but it’ll be handy for ease of access.
• Old favorites, outdated attitudes: Can entertainment expire? — I’m not sure Antony gets anywhere with this question, but it’s something I keep running into.
• How to Read Even More in 2019: 12 Tips on How to Maximize Your Reading This Year — I’ve seen this shared a lot. Unlike most years where I see a variety on the same theme, it’s like everyone just decided to use this from Strand Bookstore.
• 25 Books Hitting the Screen in 2019 — Some items on this list seem like a bad idea, few really excite me. What about you?
• The Real Book Spy’s 2019 Reading Guide: Every Thriller We Know About So Far
• Starting yesterday, “and continuing every Friday moving forward,” Criminal Element “will be revisiting every Edgar Award winner for Best Novel.” — Which looks like a dynamite series.
• Raymond Chandler and a Meditation on Nero Wolfe and His Orchids

Lastly, I’d like to say hi and extend a warm welcome to Asha Seth, rosemikeals42, nikkit321, andrayachristine and Solid lover of poetry for following the blog this week.

Sure, local/state governments had problems, small businesses were hurt, 911 centers weren’t able to operate, but the real victim of the CenturyLink outage was my blogging plans for the week. Well, okay, maybe not. But it sure seemed terribly inconvenient at the time. While it was a slow posting week, I did get a lot of reading done — I should wrap up work on my last reading challenge for 2018 today (knocked off another one yesterday), and nailed down a lot of plans for the next few weeks (I somehow have found myself committed to 8 books in January. Which isn’t that many, really, but it seems daunting). Hope your [insert preferred holiday name] week was good in whatever way you spent it.

Here’s the smattering of 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:

• Instagram is helping save the indie bookstore
• Best Reads of 2018: Speculative Fiction — the third (and final, I think) installment of Paul’s Picks Best of 2018 — added one from this to my TBR pile (maybe will come back for more).
• Favorite Crime Fiction of 2018 — The Rap Sheet’s produced (and tracked) a few lists — I think I’ve link one of these, but I’m not sure. Here’s a link to them all for your browsing pleasure.
• 14 Books for Grammar Nerds — I started one of these (and wish I hadn’t run out of time to finish) and have another on my shelves. Those numbers should rise by the end of 2019.

Lastly, I’d like to say hi and extend a warm welcome to february87 and Ontheminds for following the blog this week.