Putting on my earphones and turning up the volume on glorious narration is one of my favourite means of escape. I love getting lost in fictional stories that excite me with their premise and move me with their emotion. I also love listening to marginalized voices, to step out of my skin and see things from underrepresented perspectives. I want to share my experiences of escape with you through this list of audiobooks....
The list is made of five fiction and five nonfiction titles and is as follows: Checkout 19 by Claire-Louise Bennett Demon Copperhead by Barbara Kingsolver The Furrows by Namwali Serpell Trust by Hernan Diaz Stay True: A Memoir by Hua Hsu Strangers to Ourselves: Unsettled Minds and the Stories That Make Us by Rachel Aviv Under the Skin: The Hidden Toll of Racism on American Lives and on the Health of Our Nation by Linda Villarosa We Don’t Know Ourselves by Fintan O’Toole Find more news and stories of interest from the book world in Breaking in Books....
Midnight Ink had two of those nominations, including a win for Kellye Garrett’s debut, Hollywood Homicide. Also picking up a nomination was Nadine Nettmann’s sophomore effort in her Sommelier Mystery series, Uncorking a Lie. Dig deeper in Midnight Ink’s shelves and you find Isabella Maldonado’s Veranda Cruz mysteries (cartel thrillers Blood’s Echo and Phoenix Burning), which showcase watertight plots and a badass homicide detective. Lefty Award winner Gigi Pandian also spends at least part of her time at Midnight Ink with the Accidental Alchemist books, pairing a reformed alchemist with a gargoyle (which is every bit as fun as that sounds)....
These skills don’t come naturally to me and inevitably, when I tried to make things, the things I made did not come out looking anything like the thing they were based on. Sadly, this kept me from following through on my urges to sew curtains and paint furniture and embroider dainty napkins. Then I turned 40 and this switch magically flipped in my brain and all of a sudden I was like, “Wait, why do I care of I’m ‘good’ at things?...
Born October 16, 1925, in London, England, Lansbury moved to New York in 1940 to escape the Blitz. She studied acting for two years before moving to Hollywood. Her first three roles were Gaslight (adapted from the play by Patrick Hamilton), National Velvet (adapted from the novel by Enid Bagnold), and The Picture of Dorian Gray (Oscar Wilde). She rounded out the 1940s with roles in The Harvey Girls (Samuel Hopkins Adams), If Winter Comes (A....
If you have been living in one or if you are traveling to one, you won’t have much access to the bookish stuff offered to much of the rest of the world. Below are some bookish things I wish developing nations had access to, to develop and improve their reading culture. What’s more, you can also find plenty of book accessories there that are not simply available elsewhere. OverDrive-Powered Digital Libraries While some publishers from developing countries have partnerships with book lending platforms, the content the libraries offer is so meager....
But: enemies to lovers! One or both of the characters don’t even like one another at the outset of the novel, or they’re not supposed to like each other. Although they are sometimes already lusting. Readers witness the entire progression of feelings from hate to maybe like to sometimes friendship to lust and then to love. (Not that things necessarily happen in that order). Sometimes the lovers are enemies simply because they have met and don’t like each other....
I started to listen to radio dramas even before audiobooks; actually, radio dramas were the bridge I needed to cross to start appreciating audiobooks, and I’m immensely grateful that they have taught me to pay attention when listening seemed like a secondary task to me, something that I did while doing something else. Granted, to this day I still find it hard to just sit and listen, I usually go through my audiobooks, podcasts, or radio dramas while doing chores, or crafts, but while this seems like no big deal, being able to listen even while keeping myself busy was a battle won, as my mind always had a tendency to wander....
Though I read many books written by authors from my community, this cozy culinary mystery somehow stirred up emotions in me different from what I usually experience. There aren’t as many books published as there should in the United States that draw attention to the traditions and cultures of marginalized groups. There are even fewer Filipino American books that do. The last book that made me feel this way was America Is Not the Heart by Elaine Castillo, which I read way back in 2018....
The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo is about Monique, a young journalist surprised to be selected by the iconic but enigmatic Golden Age actress Evelyn Hugo to pen her memoir. What follows is a dual narrative of Monique’s complicated personal life and her unraveling of Evelyn’s long and tumultuous Hollywood career, her many husbands, and a forbidden love she’s speaking publicly about for the first time. The show’s currently in development, and if it goes to series will air on cable network Freeform....
I have always been a reader who prefers epics that are published in volumes and look a lot like bricks. It is one of the only aspects of my life in which I prefer the journey over the destination, and if a series has either a dragon or an “adventurer” on the cover and “volume 1” on the spine, it is guaranteed that I will at least give it a go....
Would it be easier if I sent my son to school? Sure, maybe. It would give me more time, without a doubt. But for a variety of reasons, we homeschool. And especially right now, for us, it’s a non-negotiable. So how do I find the motivation to plan, to search for materials and curricula, to prepare, when I have a bajillion other things competing for my time? Well…like with most things, I turn to books....
Bridget Clancy started off as a running gag. In early issues of Nightwing, Dick Grayson moved from Gotham City to the neighboring city of Blüdhaven, which is like Gotham but less cheerful. He moved into an apartment building run by a woman with a very sexy Irish accent — and whose face is always hidden behind boxes or under the sink. After spending several issues fantasizing about how his landlady must surely be a smokin’ hot redhead, Dick finds out she’s…Asian....
I have tried to keep plot details vagueish, because I would hate to spoil this novel for anyone. But I also think that Eden is such an experience—the tone, the imagery, the adrenaline—that even if you read a detailed plot synopsis you’d still never know what it’s like to actually read this book. Better safe than spoiled, though! In a near future marred by climate change, a dying earth has designated 13 regions of the planet as Virgin Zones, so called because they are massive swathes of land that have been emptied of human habitation and interference and left to nature....
Sheriff of Babylon #1 by Tom King and Mitch Gerads Dave Says: To say Tom King is the writer to watch for in 2016 may just be an understatement. Over in Marvel’s The Vision, he’s out-Vertigo-ing half the Vertigo titles. So, I was absolutely excited to read Sheriff of Babylon. And you know what? The book did not let me down. First, I just want to say something about the craft: I read this book twice....
I’ve organized my bookshelves like this for the last decade or so. I love having my library be a thing of visual beauty. But lately, it’s started getting overwhelming to not easily know which of my many books were unread. Sitting on the couch across from my rainbow bookshelves, I’d often try counting how many I’d read, just to get a ballpark idea, but I am a visual person. I have my Goodreads stats, sure, but seeing 200 owned and unread books as a stat versus a physical thing just didn’t work for my brain....
Grab your broomstick, your wand, or your crown, and experience magic on the page. You can come back here for new YA Fantasy content as it goes up each day this week:
50 audio downloads of THE FLIGHT GIRLS by Noelle Salazar are up for grabs! For fans of The Lost Girls of Paris and Hidden Figures comes THE FLIGHT GIRLS by Noelle Salazar – an outstanding historical women’s fiction debut about the little-known Women’ Airforce Service Pilots (WASP) program and the heroic role women played in training military pilots who were being deployed to fight during World War II. Flawlessly performed by Xe Sands, don’t miss this chance to win the audio edition of a book #1 New York Times bestselling author Debbie Macomber called “unputdownable....
Here, we try to find some common traits between these books and decipher these elements by collecting some opinions from Book Riot contributors. Time, accessible writing, talent, marketing, and advertising are a few things we can agree on, but please keep reading and let us know what you think. Elements That Make a Bestseller: Time So much of a bestseller’s success relies on time. Think of all the vampire novels that came out a few months after Twilight’s big break....
A Brief History of Adult Coloring Books One of the earliest memories I have of childhood is coloring. I wasn’t coloring princesses or dragons, though, I was shading in spleens and quadriceps, clumsily navigating arteries and finger bones. In what I can only guess was an effort to keep me quiet, my mother had let me play in her anatomy coloring books that she used during nursing school, a useful kinesthetic tool she used for memorization....
