I must read five books in December to complete my Goodreads Challenge, so I’m turning to the list of books that can be read in one day. Here are some titles I’ve collected throughout 2020 because I knew I’d probably end up needing them when I turned the calendar page to December. The books in […]
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Mixing Genres Is All About Messing with Structure “Knowing what people are expecting allows you to subvert the trope. Expectation is its own red herring, built right into your reader.” Stuart Turton, author of the brilliant The 7½ Deaths of Evelyn Hardcastle and newly released The Devil and The Dark Water, admits, “I’m obsessed by
Because I was having trouble cranking up much enthusiasm for Halloween this year, here’s a collection of items I’ve collected. I hope you’ll find something here to help you get into this weekend’s holiday spirit. Read What You Need: 9 Gothic Novels for Every Mood This is the one that first inspired me. Did you
One of the reasons why we read is to practice life, to look at particular circumstances and wonder what we’d do if we found ourselves in them. For example, I don’t think I’d ever kidnap a child. But what if someone called me and told me she had kidnapped my daughter, and to get my
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This October marks the ninth year of Star Wars Reads, a month-long celebration of Star Wars and reading. Source: Star Wars Reads Begins Today!
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Why a Campaign to ‘Reclaim’ Women Writers’ Names Is So Controversial “Critics say Reclaim Her Name fails to reflect the array of reasons authors chose to publish under male pseudonyms” Nora McGreevy reports in Smithsonian Magazine about the Reclaim Her Name project recently launched by the Women’s Prize for Fiction in conjunction with Baileys (of Irish
Many writers say they can actually hear the voices of their characters – here’s why I don’t write fiction, but I read a lot about and talk with people who do. I’m always fascinated when fiction writers say that a character either appeared and demanded to be written about or appeared to object when the
Time Is Not Real: Books That Play with the Art of Time Vivienne Woodward looks at some books that manipulate our sense of time. The inspiration for this essay is the way COVID-19 lockdown has affected her perception of time: One of the things reading fiction makes clear is how many ways there are to
Murder, He Wrote When Charles Dickens dropped dead on 9 June 1850, he was hard at work on his latest novel, The Mystery of Edwin Drood. Readers who had already devoured the first three instalments of the story were left to solve its central mystery without the author’s help. On the 150th anniversary of Dickens’s
‘Killing People in Fiction Was Fun’: Mysteries That Have Stood the Test of Time Like many of us, Sarah Weinman initially thought that the coronavirus lockdown would allow her to read, read, read. And also like many of us, she soon discovered that “Focus has evaporated. The cognitive load of living through the coronavirus has
