Mary Daniels Brown

Mary Daniels Brown learned at an early age how to read people, and she’s been doing that ever since. Combining advanced education in both literature and psychology, she reads and reviews novels that explore identity, the search for meaning and purpose in life, and the varieties of human experience. She’s been blogging about books at Notes in the Margin for more than 25 years. Mary believes that her focus on Life Stories in Literature has made her both a more astute reader and a happier, more human person.

Best Books 2011: The Top Ten — Library Journal Reviews

Best Books 2011: The Top Ten — Library Journal Reviews. Library Journal weighs in with its best books lists. The list linked here is of the all-around top 10, but the right sidebar contains links to these other lists: More of the Best Mystery Thrillers SF/Fantasy Romance Street Lit Historical Fiction Christian Fiction Women’s Fiction

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National Book Awards Go to Lai, Finney, Greenblatt, and Ward

The 62nd National Book Awards were held at Cipriani’s on Wall Street on Wednesday night, with the awards going to Thanhha Lai for Inside Out & Back Again (Young People’s Literature), Nikky Finney for Head Off & Split (Poetry), Stephen Greenblatt for The Swerve: How the World Became Modern (Nonfiction), and Jesmyn Ward for Salvage

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I Need a New Challenge. . .

During the 6 years while I was back in grad school, the practice of reading challenges blossomed. Often I’d see a challenge that looked so interesting, but I just didn’t have time to participate.  I guess my doctoral program was itself a 6-year reading challenge. Anyway, since I finally got my degree this past summer,

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Introducing Wednesday Wildcard

Most of the posts on this blog are at least loosely related to the topics of literature, books, and reading. But every now and then I come across some issue, incident, or anecdote that’s just too good to pass up passing on. To indulge my desire to pontificate, I’m creating a new post category: Wednesday

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Monday Miscellany

Publishing Words: The Future of Books Writing in The Harvard Crimson, Sofie C. Brooks discusses how the rise of ebooks may change the publishing industry: What the publishing industry faces right now is a customer base that demands a digital product even as the technology that makes these products possible is still in its early

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Why is it so hard to review mediocre books?

It’s easy to talk about books that are either amazingly good or blatantly bad; we usually have no trouble articulating the points that we either love or loathe. But it’s often hard to find much of anything to say about a book that we think is just so-so, mediocre, ordinary—perhaps the nicest term is unremarkable.

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Amazon.com: 2011 Best Books of the Year

Amazon.com: 2011 Best Books of the Year. Amazon has offers several lists here. The first one is “Best Books of 2011,” of which the top ten are: The Art of Fielding by Chad Harbach 1Q84 by Haruki Murakami What It Is Like to Go to War by Karl Marlantes In the Garden of Beasts by

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