If you are going to write, say, fantasy – stop reading fantasy. You’ve already read too much. Read other things; read westerns, read history, read anything that seems interesting, because if you only read fantasy and then you start to write fantasy, all you’re going to do is recycle the same old stuff and move it around a bit. –… Read more
Love the cat, the hat, the coffee, the French brasserie in the background…but the scarf is a teensy bit twee for my tastes. Read more
“Lock up your libraries if you like; but there is no gate, no lock, no bolt that you can set upon the freedom of my mind.” – Virginia Woolf, British modernist author Read more
I can never have too much Tom Hardy, especially with a book Read more
And the latest from my mailbag, The Last Summer at Chelsea Beach by Pam Jenoff: Young Adelia Montforte flees fascist Italy for America, where she is whisked away to the shore by her well-meaning aunt and uncle. Here, she meets and falls for Charlie Connally, the eldest of the four Irish-Catholic boys next door. But all hopes for a future together… Read more
As soon as I read the description of James Rollins’ The 6th Extinction, I was hooked… A military research station buried in the remote Sierra Nevada Mountains of Northern California broadcasts a frantic distress call that ends with a chilling order: “This is sierra, victor, whiskey. There’s been a breach. Fail-safe initiated. No matter the outcome: Kill us … kill us… Read more
Let’s start the week with a new book! From the weekend’s mail bag, I’ve got All That Followed by Gabriel Urza: A psychologically twisting novel about a politically-charged act of violence that echoes through a small Spanish town; a dazzling debut in the tradition of Daniel Alarcón and Mohsin Hamid It’s 2004 in Muriga, a quiet town in Spain’s northern Basque… Read more
“Whatever the cost of our libraries, the price is cheap compared to that of an ignorant nation.” – Walter Cronkite, American broadcast journalist Read more
When I saw “a novel of the first dog,” I was thinking something totally different – this is Presidential politics season, after all – but this looks really interesting! Set against the most dramatic time in our species’ history, The Dog Master: A Novel of the First Dog tells the story of one tribe’s struggle for survival and one extraordinary… Read more