I just returned from a glorious trip to the beach that gave me plenty of time to catch up on my reading. (OK, some of my reading was done while waiting out flight delays, but I refuse to dwell on that.) My time off allowed me to finish Early Warning and Golden Age, the second and third installments in Jane Smiley’s Last Hundred Years…
What did I do at the 2016 Dallas Book Festival? Exactly what everyone else did! I listened to authors speak and then hurried out to the bookstore The Wild Detectives set up in the lobby to buy books and get them signed. I’m not going to tip my hand on what I bought, because some of those books are gifts. I will say…
Hello, 2016. I’m back at work on Boys I Have Dated and some other exciting projects. (More about that later…) But in the meantime, I wanted to share a source of great reads. The 2016 Tournament of Books kicked off today. I always discover new authors in the TOB, so if you’re looking to add to your To-Read pile, be sure to check…
When I heard Alice Munro had won the Nobel Prize for literature, I pulled my copy of The View From Castle Rock off the shelf, thinking I might open it and find the perfect quote to post. What I found instead, was this: A bookmark made by daughters of a good friend, a fellow reader with whom I traded many books back in…
Numpty. I’m sure I’ve read the word before, but I fell in love with it recently when I heard David Tennant’s character utter it on the BBC mystery “Broadchurch.”* (What? You haven’t watched “Broadchurch?” Stop reading and put it in your Netflix queue or, if you have access to BBC America, see if you can get the first seven episodes on demand and…
Identity is starting to pick up some buzz out there in the book blog world. Here are the latest developments: Know a voracious reader on a super-tight budget? Send them to Momma Says Read, where Identity is part of the May book giveaway. So far, 89 people have entered for a chance to win a digital copy of the book. The contest runs through…
Sharlah Webb, the protagonist of my novel Identity, is a big reader living on a tiny paycheck. She’s an avid user of her local public library. It’s not an exaggeration to say that the library opens her eyes to possibilities she couldn’t have imagined and changes the course of her life. That’s one of the reasons I was so excited to find out recently…
Do you have indelible memories of reading a certain book in a certain place? Geraldine Brooks’ People of the Book anchored me to my couch for an entire day. I could not put it down. In fact, I resented having to stop reading long enough to turn on the lamp when the daylight faded. I read The Lovely Bones, by Alice Sebold, on a flight from…
I’ve been thinking lately about the word “brave.” A few weeks ago, I read a book called Drunk on Sports, written by my former Dallas Morning News co-worker Tim Cowlishaw. The book chronicles the role alcohol played in his life, how it nearly killed him, and Tim’s decision to stop drinking. When I finished the book, I tweeted that it was “brave and…
Tonight is the NCAA men’s basketball championship game. After talking up a few baseball reads yesterday, it seems as though today I should discuss a few books about my favorite sport, basketball. (Even though my Jayhawks did not make the Final Four and basketball is kinda-sorta dead to me right now. I’ll get over it by the time practice starts in October. I…