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Books

BOOKTUBE: Brutal Youth Review

I have made my first foray into Booktube! Check out my video review of Anthony Breznican’s Brutal Youth, a fiction book on teenage bullying from all angles. Let me know if you’ve read this book and what you think of it. I gave it 4 stars and would recommend it.

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Book Title, Cover, and Synopsis Revealed

THE DAY HAS COME! NaNoWriMo has begun and I’m off to a satisfying start. I was nervous my novel writing skills would be too rusty to do as well as I hoped, but today is proving to me that I’ve still got it – I just have to dust it off. I think this novel […]

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Why Bel Canto is a Lesson in Good Writing

I recently read the novel Bel Canto by Ann Patchett. It’s not something I would normally read as the storyline parallels a real-life terrorist event, the 1996 Lima Crisis. The basis of this book, however, is not terrorism. There’s much more to it than that, which is what makes it such a good read. From a […]

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New Book Review: The Flowers

I just posted a new book review in my Writer as Reader series. The book is called The Flowers by Dagoberto Gilb and is a peek into the life of a high school age boy who lives in a city wracked with racial hatred, violence, and sexual scandal. Read more about this excellent novel here, […]

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WWW Wednesdays!

To play along, just answer the following three (3) questions… • What are you currently reading? • What did you recently finish reading? • What do you think you’ll read next? What are you currently reading? The Edible Woman by Margaret Atwood (novel); Black Woods by Laura Wright LaRoche (novel); “A Horse and Two Goats” […]

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eBooks vs. Print Books vs. Audio Books

Instead of preferring one format of book over another, I read all three formats of books for different kinds of literature: Print Books: I read print books most of the time. I use them for research because I like being able to flip through the pages, but most of all, I love owning classic literature as […]

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Cultural Writing: Why the Author Matters

I am a huge fan of writings from other cultures, whether written in English or translated into English from the original language. My favorite cultural literature is Asian; the cultural history is extraordinary and unique in every category (family, fashion, women’s rights, etc.), and the style of writing is very distinctive, even if translated into English. In fact, […]

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Tangents and Pedantic Tendencies in Classic Literature

I’ve noticed that in many pieces of classic literature, the authors tend to go off on long tangents and/or repeat things far too often. Moby Dick has entire chapters that go off on tangents, i.e. chapter 24, “The Advocate” (Ishmael makes his very long case for being a whale-hunter) and chapter 25, “Postscript” (Ishmael continues to […]

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Do You Write What You Read?

At some point during my writing career, I realized that my writing is completely unrelated to what I read. This seems very strange to me since it would make more sense if I wrote genres and styles in which I had reading experience. But I am quite the opposite. The only similarity between my writings […]

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Almost Literature…But Not Quite

Did you ever read a book which was very close to achieving the elusive “literature” title, but didn’t quite make it? I find that there’s nothing quite as frustrating as that. I found that was the case in the book What She Saw by Lucinda Rosenfeld. Just on the cusp of becoming literature, it lacked the […]

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