Category: Book Reviews

On the Ethics of Negative Book Reviews

A friend once asked me to review on Goodreads a book she was planning to indie publish in a few weeks. Like a shmuck, I said, “Sure, I’d love to” with no further details. I had briefly workshopped stuff with this friend (before dropping out because I had no energy to write at that point in my life). Her stuff had been mostly fantasy YA, and I had enjoyed it. I was sure I would have no problems reviewing this book positively.

person holding white and brown newspaper
Photo by Ekrulila on Pexels.com

I was so wrong. The book turned out not to be SFF but a romance novella. For me, romance is like salt. I don’t mind a little in my books. Occasionally, it really hits the spot like a good salted caramel. But would I ever eat a pile of salt? Nope.

Not only that, but it turned out that the book was, well, just okay. Like, if my friend was still workshopping the book, I would have had lots of questions and feedback. But my friend was ready to ship the book and just looking for some reviews to get the ball rolling. I had no idea what to do.

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Reading on Vacation: Two Books Set in Idaho

Like many readers, I consider reading a way to relax from my everyday life. Whether it’s escaping to a fantasy world or learning about a new idea, reading improves my mood and gives me a break from the practicalities of life. Reading kept my brain moving during the years when my life was mostly filled with changing diapers, trips to the park, and knocking down block towers for the hundredth time today.

When I go on vacation, I like to take a break from my normal reading routine by finding something related to the place we are visiting. It makes me feel even more grounded in someplace new, even when as a family with small kids, the things we do on vacation are largely the same things we do at home: visiting parks, going hiking, visiting kid-friendly museums, and eating at kid-friendly restaurants. When we went to Disneyland, I read Creativity Inc. When we were in Japan, I read A Tale for the Time Being.

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Missing Myself: Scattered Thoughts on Reading and Homeschooling

I’m not sure exactly what I want to write about today.

Cover of I Miss You When I Blink

I could write about the book I just read: I Miss You When I Blink by Mary Laura Philpott. I don’t read personal essays as often as I should. In college, I went on a 8-week, life-changing study abroad, hiking all over England and writing personal essays. It’s the genre I still feel the most comfortable writing in. Yet I rarely turn to books of essays for pleasure. I can’t explain why this is, except that when I read, I tend to be more plot driven than I am when I write.

I picked up I Miss You When I Blink because it was recommended on Modern Mrs. Darcy’s Summer Reading Guide and I was trying to expand my reading beyond my usual non-fiction or speculative fiction.

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Truly Fantastic Fiction: A Review of Writers of the Future Vol 36

Cover for Writers of the Future volume 36

 Either I’m getting better at reading short stories, or the Writers of the Future contest for 2019 had truly epic submissions, because I found almost every story in volume 36 compelling. I am not usually a short story reader, but I am trying to become one to expose myself to more ideas in my limited reading time. Volumes like this give me great motivation to continue in that endeavor.

Notes on individual stories, attempting to be spoiler free:

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Writing Lessons from Reading Ray Bradbury

Observations from reading a collection of stories by a science fiction master

Confession: I haven’t read short stories since graduating from college.

This is probably not much of a shock to you. Unless you are a writing professional, you probably don’t read short fiction either. Novels really are the prevailing art of the day. But I’ve been trying to get back into them because they let you see a whole idea very quickly. I will never be able to read as many books as I wish I could, especially since I read so many genres. But with short stories, I can at least get a taste of what an author is like.

A great tool for this has been the LeVar Burton Reads podcast. I recommend it to everyone. It’s like Reading Rainbow but for grownups! And the vast majority of the stories fall into the SFF genre, so I’m getting exposed to a lot of authors I wouldn’t have time for otherwise.

But I set a goal to read one whole collection by a classic SFF author this winter. I wanted to really understand what one author was about without having to spend a year reading their whole backlist. I picked Ray Bradbury merely because I was looking for authors who had written about time travel, and his story “A Sound of Thunder” is, as far as I know, the origin of the butterfly effect as used in fiction.

Well, turns out most of his other stories are not about time travel, but I did enjoy reading A Sound of Thunder and Other Stories by Ray Bradbury. Some of my observations from the collection:

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