books

"Anything can happen in life, especially nothing" Michel Houellebecq

https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/good-riddance-to-literary-fiction/

A lot of interesting points arising in this... https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-14497979/Russell-Brand-sued-failing-write-two-self-help-books-sex-abuse.html

Writers often like to talk about how intuitive the writing process is, but in truth, building a book is a remarkably unintuitive task. Or, to put it more accurately, you need a lot more than intuition. You need plot and characters. You need a setting. You need a theme that is relevant and...

The to-read pile is more than just a physical stack of books: it's a tower of ambitions failed, hopes unrealised, good intentions unfulfilled. Worse still, it's a cold hard reminder of mortality. Already, I have intentions to read more books than I can hope to manage in a normal lifetime. How...

The Verge has the story: Personally, it doesn’t really impact me since I’ve fallen out of love with my Kindle. I find reading on it is a soulless experience. But for others, this may be important.

I'm looking for books to read that have good examples of Father/daughter relationships, moral dilemmas; the boundaries between doing the right thing and doing the legal thing (not always the same). Stories that look at the parental dilemma when they find their child is guilty of a crime, and/or...

New blog post by Claire G What Came First, the Chicken or the Egg? Bear With Me! Okay, this is probably a weird analogy but this is how my (bird-brained!) mind works. So, in terms of the title question, I’ve thought long and hard about this and, with my limited scientific knowledge, I’ve...

It sure looks like Meta stole a lot of books to build its AI. By James Folta January 14, 2025, 1:12pm It’s a grim week for Meta. The company formerly known as Facebook, and before that Facemash, “designed to evaluate the attractiveness of female Harvard students,” now encompasses Facebook...

New blog post by AgentPete The Joys of a Book Table About a year ago I was visiting at a friend’s house and noticed they had a book table. It’s literally what it says – a table of any size you happen to have, on which you throw a random assortment of ancient dog-eared friends, shiny new...

“It seems incredible, the ease with which we sink through books quite out of sight, pass clamorous pages into soundless dreams.” William H. Gass

New blog post by Rachel McCarron My Resolution (Or a List of Books) As the old year comes to a close, I think about things I am grateful for and about fostering good habits for the new year ahead. Which is ridiculous, I know. Why should the day after the thirty-first of December have any...

New blog post by Vagabond Heart WTF, Will! sonnets + summary My reading of The Complete Works of Shakespeare was almost at an end. The book (only a paperback) had weighed in at 1250g, and the font was tiny, so this really felt like an achievement. It was now so mauled-looking that Will had...

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We cannot simply sit and stare at our wounds forever. Haruki Murakami

We read in bed because reading is halfway between life and dreaming, our own consciousness in someone else's mind. Anna Quindlen

New blog post by Robinne Weiss – discussions in this thread, please --- My sort of marketing I recently participated in ALLi’s SelfPubCon, which focused on the business side of writing. There were sessions on using social media, monetising YouTube, website design, using AI for marketing … I...

I have written 20 books, and each one is like having a baby. Writing is not easy; some people want to write books but just can't put a story together. I can put together a story that interests both me and my readers. Jackie Collins

Irish book publishers do accept submissions from unagented writers, but the bar is high. Not so much for the romance/ women's fiction genre-but children's books. The competition is tough. Very impressed by this list of books for the Halloween season. I had to order one immediately. For my...