My mother asked me a few weeks ago if I would make a contribution to her newest book. She was writing a piece about wind for it, and she remembered that I had once fictionalized an experience my family had with a tornado. I sent her what I had written—it’s actually the prologue of my …
Books
For my birthday last year, a friend gave me a book, one that I probably would not have bought for myself because it’s a memoir. I don’t tend to read memoirs. But I loved the title: All the Way to the Tigers. Who wouldn’t be intrigued? And the author’s name rang a bell—Mary Morris. I …
For most of my life, I never went anywhere without a book. I was always a great reader, as were my brothers, and on trips, silence frequently reigned in the backseat as we all read. This habit held me in good stead in college, where as an English major I had to read thousands of …
A few decades ago, I read a publishing-industry report about how many times a paperback book was sold and resold and resold again. All those readers, yet the author only earned royalties for one sale. After that, I was careful about books that I bought secondhand—only authors who had sufficient sales and income, or books …
I seem to be caught in a time warp with what I’m reading these days. It began with my interest in women detectives. A couple of months ago I searched Google for fictional women detectives, looking particularly for books set in the earlier part of the twentieth century. Among others, I found The Beekeeper’s Apprentice by Laurie King, first published in 1994. I read it, loved it, and mentioned it to a few friends who also read mysteries. They all nodded and said, Oh, yes, they knew it, and they’d read it … oh, about twenty years ago. How did I miss this marvelous series for twenty years?
Late last Wednesday night, I finished the book I was currently reading: A Spool of Blue Thread by Anne Tyler. I read it quickly, mesmerized as I always am with how she presents the largely ordinary lives of largely ordinary people (they do have their quirks, their exaggerations, as all good fictional characters do) in …
The bookstore in Portsmouth, NH, RiverRun Books, has a publishing side to it called Piscataqua Press. I know a few people who have published through Piscataqua Press–Martha Barron Barrett (aka Mom) with Slow Travel and Barbara Hesselman Kautz with When I Die I’m Going to Heaven ‘Cause I Spent My Time in Hell–and people who …
I read a lot. Not just a lot of books, but many different kinds of book. The photo here is of the books that decorated my nightstand during May, except for one that I already loaned to a friend. That was Every Contact Leaves a Trace by Elanor Dymott. The back cover led me to …
My mother has written three books–two novels, one nonfiction–and numerous newspaper columns and magazine articles. And now she has published a new book, a marvelous travel memoir of the three winters she and her partner spent chasing the sun. She and Sandy traveled, in successive winters, to New Zealand, South Africa and Spain, and Argentina …
Finding good books to read when you’re an editor is difficult. You read with a pencil mentally in hand, fixing and rewriting as you read, and wondering was it the author or the editor who made that egregious error. After thirty years in the publishing business, though, I’ve learned how to give my mental editor …