Books Read in 2019
How do you discover new books to read?
As my circle of friends who actively read fiction shrinks to near non-existence, I can no longer rely on the magic that comes when a friend, deeply impacted by a book, insists you must read it too. For a large part of my life such exchanges expanded my reading horizons, exposing me to many books I would not have picked up otherwise—or even known existed. These recommendations have been particularly helpful for discovering titles outside of horror/weird fiction. And now, as I enter the latter half of my forties, this street has gone dark, the readers having largely closed up shop. This trend has been noticeable to me for several years but this is the first year I’ve found myself simply stuck to find my next read on multiple occasions. Even worse than being stuck is the lack of passionate personal connections one shares over a book recommendation.
I've always been a reader whose taste in fiction ranges far and wide. Because I read heavily as well as write in the horror/weird genre, I'm able to stay abreast of new authors and new works via a number of channels that I actively monitor and participate in. But for anything outside of horror/weird, this is not a viable approach--it simply takes more time than I have available. In the last year, discoverability has become a real issue. I'm not looking for current bestsellers or books that are a part of the current pop culture zeitgeist (a pretty rare occasion these days)--those are easy enough to find. But the midlist books, the indie and self-publishers, where fine rare stones lie buried under piles of uninspiring debris? I know I am missing out on a lot of great work available in these venues—work that doesn’t have the highest visibility and won’t appear in discussions of horror/weird.
I want to be surprised. I want to be overwhelmed and moved. I want to be inspired to think. You can't run online searches with those phrases and expect to get results that will speak to the uniqueness that is you. Something more contextual is required. So what to do?
I utilize Goodreads "others who read this read" suggestions but these are tricky because I'm not looking to replicate an experience I already had. As often as not these lists are full of the same ol' classics and bestsellers (and as often as not, I've already read many of them.) And I'm not going to be so crass as to suggest Amazon's "New for You" or "Related to Items You've Viewed" suggestions are anything more than the most bland reach for one's wallet. Algorithms don't have taste, and Amazon’s are designed to make sure you stay in your echo chamber, comfortably numb.
So I find myself doing odd online searches like "underrated novels of 2013" or "atmospheric novels with psychological element 2000s." It can be fun to crack open a beer, dream up strange search strings and see what they pull out of the drek of the internet. Once in a while such searches will turn up a gem, but it's definitely a lot more silt than gold. Such an approach has a built-in limiting factor; it is very easy to wind up defining the experience before you even read the book. If your search is too generic, you'll just find more of the same ol' same ol'. If it's too specific, well, you probably aren't going to find anything at all. And even if you hit the sweet spot, you aren't likely to have the element of surprise; you dreamed up the searches, after all. Parameters will exist before the first page is turned.
There is so much being published today. Four, five years ago self-publishing still had a huge stigma, primarily being seen as little more than vanity press. Today, some of the very best work out there is self-published. These books rarely have any marketing behind them, making discoverability a real challenge, especially if the author does not already have a following. As you will see in my overview below, 2019 was the first year that self-published work became a significant part of my reading life, yet almost all of it was in the weird/horror genre...because that's the one genre I have decent awareness of. (And even still, I know there is a lot of interesting work I never hear of.) Awesome work is being done in the small presses as well, and even the big five publishing houses still put out the occasional gem. It pains me to think of how much of it I'm missing. I finish a book, realize I don't know what to read next, and then can't figure out how to find my next read. I don't know what I'm in the mood for, and you can't create your own surprises. Or at least, I haven't figured out how...
Like all of you, I have many commitments and I can't spend endless hours searching for my next book. Do you wrestle with this same issue? What strategies do you use? I would love to hear them.
Despite this I clearly still found a few books to read this past year and so I would like to welcome you to my overview of the books I read in 2019. This is the…sixth? year I've done this. I've brought over 2017 and 2018 to the website and prior years are still available on my old blog, at least until I get around to taking it down. There is nothing scientific, academic or any other -ic about this. I picture it as the two of us spending an afternoon in the pub, chatting about books. Thank you for reading, and I hope you enjoy.
The Overstory, Richard Powers
The Egg: Stories, Michael Gira
From Here to Eternity: Traveling the World to Find the Good Death, Caitlin Doughty
Daemon Voices, Philip Pullman
The Largesse of the Sea Maiden, Denis Johnson
The Odyssey, Homer, translated by Emily Wilson
Sub Pop USA: The Subterraneanan Pop Music Anthology, 1980–1988, Bruce Pavitt
England's Hidden Reverse: A Secret History of the Esoteric Underground, David Keenan
The Dark Dark: Stories, Samantha Hunt
The Cabin at the End of the World, Paul Tremblay
Thinking Horror Volume 2: The Horror Boom, various
Circe, Madeline Miller
Nothing is Everything, Simon Strantzas
Paradise Rot: A Novel, Jenny Hval
Flowers of Perversion: The Delirious Cinema of Jesus Franco, Stephen Thrower
Desperation, Stephen King
Mapping the Interior, Stephen Graham Jones
The Varieties of Scientific Experience: A Personal View of the Search for God, Carl Sagan and Ann Druyan
Hidden Folk: Strange Stories, C.M. Muller
Mouthful of Birds, Samantha Schweblin
The Secret of Ventriloquism, Jon Padgett
Fall, or Dodge in Hell, Neal Stephenson
Growing Things and Other Stories, Paul Tremblay
The Ones That Got Away, Stephen Graham Jones
The Luminous Dead, Caitlin Starling
Claire of the Sea Light, Edwidge Danticat
Idaho, Emily Ruskovich
The Secret History of Twin Peaks, Mark Frost
Twin Peaks: The Final Dossier, Mark Frost
The House on the Borderland, William Hope Hodgson
The Institute, Stephen King
Demons by Daylight, Ramsey Campbell
Full Throttle: Stories, Joe Hill
Bird Box, Josh Malerman
Stirring the Sheets, Chad Lutzke
Come Closer, Sara Gran
The Hellbound Heart, Clive Barker
Heavy Duty: Days and Nights in Judas Priest, K.K. Downing
Easy Riders, Raging Bulls, Peter Biskind
Naomi’s Room, Jonathan Aycliffe
Dark Black and Blue: The Soundgarden Story, Greg Prato
Cry Your Way Home, Damien Angelica Walters
Soft Teeth Vol. 1, S.J. Bagley
Sing Your Sadness Deep, Laura Mauro
The Bride Wore Black, Cornell Woolrich
For Small Creatures Such as We: Rituals for Finding Meaning in Our Unlikely World, Sasha Sagan
Let’s start with the most ancient book on the list. I read The Iliad in my early twenties and I struggled with it. I’d go so far as to say I slogged through it, finishing it out of a sense of obligation but not connecting with it at all. I’ve read plenty of foundational literature (my teen years were consumed with reading every classic Russian novel I could lay my hands on) but my experience with The Iliad turned me away from attempting The Odyssey. This changed when my lovely wife—far more knowledgeable about mythology and Greek culture than I—wanted to read Emily Wilson’s translation and got us each a copy from Christmas last year so we could read it at roughly the same pace and discuss as we went. Well, that was the plan but instead I tore through this easily approachable translation, utterly enthralled with the story and the cadence of the language with which it is told. It’s a truly astounding translation. I was prepared to spend several months reading The Odyssey, instead it took only a couple of weeks and I’m pretty certain I will read it again. Academia is not my world and I have only a vague awareness of the controversy Wilson’s translation has generated in some quarters, but anytime a translation opens up a major work to the casual reader—especially in our current Twitter culture—it is an important, and impressive, achievement. I wouldn’t hesitate to recommend this translation of The Odyssey to a reader who is fearful of the classics. The first book I read this year and none of those that followed (great as many of them are) equaled its impact…
On the subject of Greek mythology I also read Madeline Miller’s Circe and had the pleasure of attending a reading of the same. I read Circe about a month after The Odyssey , while I was still very much basking in its afterglow. Circe is a near perfect book, imaginative and imbued with the rich history of Greek mythology, yet never anything less than approachable. You need no background in Circe’s mythology to enjoy this book, and while having The Odyssey fresh in my mind allowed for some interesting musing on the different presentations of Circe as a character, the story stands strongly on its own. It was also a great pleasure to hear Madeline Miller read and discourse on various facets of the story and what went into creating it; an hour and a half was too short and I would have gladly listened to her for a lot longer. Highly recommended…
Weird Tales: Once again it was an incredibly strong year for weird/dark/horror fiction collections. Not all of the following were published this year, but most were within the last couple of years and drive home just what an incredible period this is for dark tales of a weird bent. It’s truly an embarrassment of riches. Let’s start with Cry Your Way Home by Damien Angelica Walters. Along with Kristi DeMeester, Walters is probably my favorite current writer in the genre and Cry is another triumph of originality and power. The tales frequently take the rich tapestry of the fairy tale and weave it into something new, an approach that reminds me of Angela Carter but Walters is no mere imitation, her imagery is rich yet never overbearing or pretentious. The final tale in the collection, “In the Spaces Where You Once Lived,” somehow fuses fantastical cosmic horror and real-life dementia into a haunting tale that is high on my list of favorite things I read this year. I can’t recommend enough…The Dark Dark was my introduction to Samantha Hunt and…wow. When I finished it in February I said if I read a story better than “A Love Story” all year I’d be surprised. I’m not sure I did. The best of the stories transcend genre boundaries and take you into a world that is close to but not quite our own. Emotions ring deep and true. Wonderful…Sing Your Sadness Deep, the debut collection by Laura Mauro, is strong collection of tales that are very different from each other, yet all hang together through the strength of the author’s voice. “Looking for Laika” and “The Pain-Eater’s Daughter” are particularly effective and reward rereads. One of Mauro’s strengths is painting a vivid picture; the paragraphs are sometimes lengthy with description but they never slog, the writing itself is crisp and clean. Great stuff…
Forever haunted by my adolescent reading of One Hundred Years of Solitude, I am constantly searching for books with a strong sense of magical realism and this year the quest brought two books my way. The first was Samantha Schweblin’s collection Mouthful of Birds. These stories are all about blurring boundaries, a tricky undertaking at which Schweblin largely succeeds. As this collection is translated from Spanish, I do wonder if certain subtleties get lost, but if so I can’t say the stories appear to be much affected. An up and down collection, but the stories that click carry power…The other title, which I came across on one my random weird internet searches referred to above, was Claire of the Sea Light by Edwidge Danticat. This slim tale—it could be read in a single sitting—is at its best and most poetic when grappling with themes of grief and loneliness. The images are like a short film, and while I’m not convinced the ending worked, the characters are well-developed and there are a number of strong passages throughout the book…Shifting gears, I found myself curious about Josh Malerman’s Bird Box after all the chatter over the Netflix adaptation, which I have not watched. This was my first Malerman novel, and man did it fly by! One of those books that just drops you into its world and lets you run. There were times I thought the story could have stood to be more fleshed out—Malerman is an economical writer, something I generally value, but he could stand to do a little bit more description or a tad more world building. Overall though, I thought it was a fun read and it didn’t feel turgid as so much post-apocalyptic fiction does…
Literary novels. Does that term mean anything today? Did it ever? I confess I kinda hate the phrase but still find myself using it sometimes as a shorthand descriptor for those books that don’t fit in any one genre, are likely kind of long and use lots of big words, inspire “the critics” to pontificate about Very Important Cultural Subjects, and aren’t the first thing you grab when you want a “beach read” or to “just escape” for a bit. Think Pynchon (whom I love) or David Foster Wallace (whose fiction has never done anything for me.) The one book I read this year to which I’d apply this descriptor is The Overstory by Richard Powers, an occasionally muddled but endlessly fascinating book that shuns all irony to say Important Things, all of which essentially boil down to a single point: The trees are talking to us, if we would just listen. It may sound like I’m being snarky, but I’m not, and let me state unequivocally: I LOVE THIS BOOK FOR WHAT IT IS SAYING AND WHAT IT IS ATTEMPTING TO DO. We can argue until we are blue if it succeeds, if it could ever reach the audience that needs to hear stories like this, if it even “matters” in any sense—but the book puts forth a valiant effort and in my world there is always room for brave books like this. Seriously, if I gave you a synopsis, you’d laugh me out of the room and the snarkiness and snide comments would easily flow…and I might very well do the same because I’m a product of these times too. It’s not my place to preach, nor do I want to read preachy writing. I don’t think The Overstory is preachy, but it is obvious and ambitious and unapologetic. That approach may not be for you, but for me it was a book that gained in importance the further I read, and by the end inspired a lot of reflection and, for want of a better way of putting it, serious thinking. Months later I’m still grappling with it. YMMV…
Phew! Alrighty then! How about something lighter? How about Fall, or Dodge in Hell by Neal Stephenson…oh dammit, that’s not a shift away from ambition and serious thoughts at all. Ok, it is a funnier book, and Stephenson writes in a more approachable manner (but damn his books are looooong.) Fall was a whiplash experience for me. There were parts I thought were brilliant, where I couldn’t put the book down, and parts that just freaking dragged, where I wasn’t engaged at all. Such experiences can be deeply frustrating, but I expect it with Stephenson, and given his ideas are often both audacious and intriguing I’m willing to work through parts that might otherwise cause me to give up on the book. And I loved, loved much of the first two-thirds or so of Fall , its exploration of digital life after death and how the Internet itself might evolve. As for the last third of the book, does Stephenson retelling The Lord of the Rings sound interesting to you? If so, you’ll love it. I didn’t find it engaging at all. I still rate the experience as positive and thought-provoking overall, but if you skip the last third, you’d be none the poorer…A book that falls somewhere between sci-fi and horror (honestly, I think it’s more the latter) is Caitlin Starling’s debut novel The Luminous Dead. I discovered this book thanks to an author interview on the wonderful This Is Horror podcast, which I can’t recommend highly enough. The book was a thoroughly enjoyable read, very well developed for a first novel, and I’m really curious to see what Caitlin’s next book will be like. An intense psychological trip, I’m very grateful this one came across my radar…
King of the Hill, 2019 edition: Joe Hill’s 2005 collection 20th Century Ghosts is my favorite short-story collection of the century thus far, so it’s fair to say I had high hopes and was nervous in October when Full Throttle, his second collection. dropped. If it ultimately doesn’t compare to 20th Century, well, that’s because nothing can. But it’s a great collection on its own terms. Several of the stories take experimental approaches, and every story is different in tone and feel yet the collection does not feel disjointed. Yes, there are two collaborations with his famous father, of which the title story is the best. But it’s Joe’s own strong, unique storytelling ability in tales like “All I Care About Is You,” “Twittering from the Circus of the Dead,” and “Dark Carousel” that make this an exceptional collection. A book I’m destined to re-read many a time…As to Mr. King himself, his sole new novel of the year, The Institute is a throwback novel in a good way—the voice of King we Constant Readers have treasured all these years. It’s one of his stronger works of the young century; not at the level of Lisey’s Story or 11/22/63 but not that far removed either. The throwback vibe is so strong that at times it can be a jarring read (despite nods to the present day with iPhones, etc.) If one was uncharitable, you could call it a relic from a bygone era, but I think it has more going for it than that, with typically great characterization and emotions that ring true…While it’s true I’ve been a Constant Reader since the fateful afternoon in fifth grade where I discovered Christine, there was a roughly seven-year period in the nineties where I stopped reading new King works altogether. There are still a couple of novels from this era I haven’t read, but now Desperation can be crossed off that list. I guess I’m neutral on it; by no means a bad King book, this still seems to have been a fallow period for him and parts of the novel simply didn’t age well. Glad I read it, but I don’t see it as one I’m likely to revisit…
Keeping with the genre titans theme, I finally read Ramsey Campbell’s Demons by Daylight collection this year, a goal I’ve had since first hearing of it in my middle school years. Campbell is as important to the horror genre as any other author in the last 50 years and Demons is clearly the work of a young author who hasn’t mastered all the tricks yet but has found his own voice and is just starting to realize the possibilities of what that voice can do. Not where I’d start with Campbell, but worthy once you are a fan…Despite the fact that Hellraiser is one of my all-time favorite horror movies and despite the fact that I’ve read nearly all classic Clive Barker, I’d somehow never read The Hellbound Heart, the novella on which the movie is based. This oversight has been corrected. It’s a fun, almost breezy (so far as Barker goes, anyway) read that is pretty much impossible to discuss critically in 2019 given how influential it and the movie have been over the last 30-odd years. Required reading if you have any interest in the genre at all and I’m glad I can wipe away my secret shame…
Here’s an entire essay on how awesome I think Paul Tremblay’s last three novels are, written before his collection Growing Things was published this summer. Growing Things is the first short fiction of his I’ve read, and while it can’t compare to “the triptych,” I got a lot of enjoyment from the stories and I would like to explore more of his short fiction. Simply one of our best living writers, genre be damned…
I have deep admiration for Stephen Graham Jones, one of the most consistent writers on this list. Mapping the Interior is a strange little haunted house (actually, mobile home) novella. The material poverty of the character’s lives, while not the central component of the story, struck the deepest, most haunting chords with this reader…The Ones That Got Away, meanwhile, is an earlier collection (2010) that lacks some of the finesse of After the People Lights Have Gone Off but more than makes up for it with intensity and a rawness that makes these tales less something written than something brutally yanked from the void. And not to look too far ahead, but I cannot wait for his next novel, The Only Good Indians, due to be published in May 2020…Another discovery via the This Is Horror Podcast, Chad Lutzke’s novella Stirring the Sheets is one of two (along with the previously mentioned short story “In the Spaces Where You Once Lived,” by Damien Angelica Walters) horror/weird tales I read this year exploring the inevitability of aging. Sheets is deeply melancholioc yet it ends on a sweet, uplifting note that I loved. Lutzke is a prime example of the great work being self-published today. Need to check more of his stuff out…C.M. Muller, purveyor of the wonderful publication Nightscript, has authored a fine collection of subtle, dark tales entitled Hidden Folk that I recommend with no reservations. In a genre that can be mighty loud, there is a grace to these small, strange stories that I loved…I’ll wrap up this overview of weird/horror short work by mentioning that while the shadow of Thomas Ligotti looms large over Jon Padgett’s The Secrets of Ventriloquism, he has his own weird (and quite unsettling) voice. Not every tale worked for me, but the ones that did hit overwhelmingly horrific notes, like a bad LSD trip that just won’t end. I read roughly half of this collection while sitting in the DMV office, which seems somehow appropriate…
Thinking Horror: A Journal of Horror Philosophy is essential reading for those who like to muse on various aspects of horror literature. Volume 2 was published earlier this year and while it ostensibly focuses on the horror boom of the eighties, the actual content is wide-ranging. More than twice the size of Volume 1 (which I also highly recommend), not every article may be to your interest, but I found much to chew on and the interviews with Steve Rasnic Tem, Lisa Tuttle and John Skipp are required reading…Thinking Horror’s editor s.j bagely also put out an excellent zine this year, Soft Teeth Vol. 1. Poetry and images collide to paint an overwhelmingly despairing vision that rings emotionally true. I found it both devastating and inspiring…Thinking Horror’s associate editor Simon Strantzas’s 2018 collection Nothing is Everything is a solid collection of strange tales. These tales feels like they are beginning to stretch outside of even the flexible boundaries of the weird into something new and unique. Really curious to see where he goes from here…
Returning to the theme of aging, memory and identity loss, Idaho by Emily Ruskovich explores the reverberations of a tragic event in the woods of Idaho over the following decades. This book—which I discovered via one of my random Internet searches—is the poster child for the type of book that I would never have stumbled onto otherwise. It utilizes multiple viewpoints to tell the story, liberally skipping around time periods. This can be a confusing approach—like reading a half dozen stories at once—but I thought it neatly dovetailed with the novel’s thematic concerns regarding memory and identity loss. I found the story deeply moving, even if questioning at times whether the pieces truly fit. This is the kind of book—genre-less, serious, “literary,” subtle, nuanced, moving to its own slow internal pace and letting the reader determine answers and resolutions on their own—that I worry will never find its audience, that we risk losing in these fragmented, niche-driven times. Idaho demands a level of reflection, both during and after reading, and is very much a quiet tale. Is there still room for such novels in our loud, militant, chaotic 280-character world?…
Something I struggle with when writing this overview every year is what, if anything, to say about books that didn’t work for me or that I didn’t care for. My book discussions are obviously not formalized critical essays (please take me out behind the shed and put me out of my misery if one of these ever veers in that direction) and I have a firmly held belief that art is subjective—just because it didn’t float my boat doesn’t mean it won’t float yours. The older I get, the less I have any desire to say unkind things about artists and their art. But if I completely ignore these books, then I’m not providing an honest overview of my reading journey. So…let’s just say that Come Closer by Sara Gran and Naomi’s Room by Jonathan Aycliffe ultimately didn’t work for me. The components of Come Closer—plot, characterization, tone—just never clicked. Naomi’s Room is truly chilling throughout the first half, but the direction the plot eventually took didn’t work for me and I was uneasy with an underlying misogyny that may have not been intentional but really soured the second half of the book. You may have an entirely different experience…
For some reason I find it hard to say much about my non-fiction reads. The music-related books I read each year usually are only of interest to someone already interested in the band/scene. I mean, I will gladly talk your ear off all afternoon about how important and subversive bands like Coil and Current 93 are, but you aren’t likely to get much out of England’s Hidden Reverse unless you are already familiar with/interested in those bands. The book doesn’t do a very good job of contextualizing and exists more to justify the author’s theories about what their music was about/represented (which is painfully obvious in the material new to this edition, covering the later years of said bands.) That all said, there are many interesting tidbits for Coil, Current 93 and Nurse with Wound fans…Switching to film, in 2019 the always excellent Stephen Thrower completed his deep dive into the career of Spanish filmmaker Jesus Franco. Flowers of Perversion covers the second half of Franco’s career, and that Thrower somehow managed to track down and view all films and then provide comprehensive reviews is nothing short of incredible—Franco made over 160 films in his career and suffered, like many exploitation filmmakers of the period, from having multiple versions with different titles and content of any given film (this was often done without the filmmaker’s input.) So that Thrower somehow sorted through all of this and then created this beautiful encyclopedia is incredible. It took a decade but it was worth it and along with the first volume, Murderous Passions, this is a deeply treasured title on my film book shelf. A true labor of love…
Short takes: The Bride Wore Black by Cornell Woolrich is classic noir. The plot avoids red herrings but then at the end of the book utilizes a deus ex machina, hardly unusual in classic pulp fiction but a tad disappointing nonetheless. Still a fun read…Speaking of classics, I finally read The House on the Borderland, William Hope Hodgson’s foundational cosmic horror novel. I enjoyed the first half, but the wildly fantastical second half, which was undoubtedly mind-blowing in 1908 I found nearly impossible to read in 2019. Still an important read for those interested in the roots of cosmic horror…Jenny Hval is better known to American audiences as a musician but she is a talented writer as well. Paradise Rot is a damp, queasy tale of awakening and dissociation that I liked a great deal. Short but not slight…Also far better known for his music as the driving force behind Swans, Michael Gira’s The Egg is twisting, occasionally harrowing collection of prose pieces in the vein of his 90’s classic The Consumer; while it lacks that collection’s nearly unbearable visceral power, there’s a maturity in his work now that gives it a different sense of space. Still uncompromising, and I can’t conclude this little blurb without mentioning that Swans are one of the most important bands in my life and have been since I discovered them in the 80s; their work is true expression that knows no boundaries—unsettling, powerful, beautiful and cosmic…
I’ve spent two weeks trying to figure out how to state the importance and impact Carl Sagan and Ann Druyan have had in my life and I simply cannot come up with words that do justice. Books like Pale Blue Dot, The Demon-Haunted World, and Cosmos (which would easily be in the top five most important books of my life, were I to ever make that mythical list) inspire me, comfort me, challenge me and dare me to dream. When my opinion of humanity sinks and I am overwhelmed at our cruelty, destructiveness and narcissism, a passage from any of Sagan/Druyan’s works opens a crack to let the light in. Reminding me that it is always better to light a candle than curse the darkness. Somehow I missed that back in 2006 a series of Sagan’s lectures covering his detailed thoughts on the relationship between science and religion as well as his personal search to understand the sacred in the context of the cosmos was published under the title The Varieties of Scientific Experience: A Personal View of the Search for God. I would not rank this book as high on the list of essentials as the titles mentioned above, but simply having any new work from Sagan/Druyan is a gift and one I treasure greatly. The themes of Varieties grow more meaningful to me as the years continue to add up, and the empathy and compassion mixed with clear-eyed realism of these lectures is not only hugely important to me personally, it’s something I think our wounded world needs now more than ever…And what a joy to discover that the same empathy, compassion and realism is present in Sagan and Druyan’s daughter Sasha’s first book, For Small Creatures Such as We: Rituals for Finding Meaning in Our Unlikely World. Ritual is just as important for those of us who identify as secular, and Small Creatures is an open-hearted, personal meditation on creating rituals that reflect the awe and wonder of the cosmos. Sasha has her own voice, so when I say I hear echoes of her parents in the book it’s only to say that the apple does not fall so far from the tree. I am grateful that this book exists and that her voice is out there. I do hope she publishes more in the future…
One last thing before I close—if any of these books interest you, please consider purchasing if you are able, especially those from small presses and self-publishers. Writing is a labor of love for many authors, most of whom make little to no money from their work. Yes, the ease of publishing books has grown with technology in the last decade, but none of this is free. Not even close. And support libraries too! Libraries are awesome and wonderful and all of those superlatives—something I would imagine that, if you’ve read this far, I don’t really need to say.
Thank you for joining me. It’s been a pleasure. May your days be long and full of wonderful stories.
Book stack image courtesy of Marian Stolp. Thank you sweetheart!