reading

How Keeping Track of My Reading Has Helped Me

Some of you might recall I set a goal back at the beginning of the year to keep track of my reading habits. (I know. Me and goals? What a surprise. /sarcasm) The purpose at the time was to help kick myself in the pants and start reading more than I had been. A librarian and an author, and I was barely getting a book a month in. Pitiful, right? So I started that spreadsheet, and I’ve dutifully been tracking my reading all year. After the first 8 months, I’ve already read 28 books. Over 12,000 pages of reading. Now, […]

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Ten Books That Have Stayed with Me

Several of my friends have tagged me on Facebook the past week or so, which means I’m supposed to list the top ten books that have stayed with me over the years. I’m not very good at doing top ten lists, because I hate picking the best of anything. So don’t consider this list a definitive answer. Look at it as more of a list of the first ten books that seemed important enough to Bryce when he was tagged to do this assignment. Fair enough? Oh–and I’m going for fiction only on this list. Because that’s how I roll,

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What are Some of Your Plot Pet Peeves?

I’m in the middle of the second book of The Powder Mage trilogy (The Crimson Campaign, by Brian McClellan), and I’m really enjoying it. High military fantasy action and adventure, with a great sprawling plot and less incest than George RR. Highly recommended. However, one of the plot lines is bugging me–and in a good way, I suppose. I mean, anytime an author is writing characters well enough that I start to get mad at the characters for what’s happening, you can tell the author is doing something right. But at the same time, it’s something I don’t think I

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We Need Diverse Books Because

Some of you following my Facebook or Twitter feeds probably saw me post about the #WeNeedDiverseBooks campaign yesterday. I’ve been really pleased to see so many people retweeting the topic and spreading the word. As an author of a book published by Tu Books (an imprint of Lee and Low, one of the publishing leaders in diversity), I’ve watched the conversation about diverse books with no small amount of interest over the last few years. I’m not particularly good at coming up with pithy statements that can summed up in a photograph–lengthy blog posts are more my cuppa. So going

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The Top 100 Novels Ever Written. In 1898.

I came across this article the other day, providing the list of the top 100 novels of all time, as picked by a critic in 1898. One novel per author, and every author had to be dead. (Pretty harsh requirements there. But still.) The list is absolutely fascinating. Yes, it’s just one critic’s opinion, but I still feel like it highlights some really interesting points. Les Mis is only #85? Dickens doesn’t pop up until #63. But what’s really interesting to me is how many of these novels I’ve just never even heard of. I don’t consider myself your average

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