"Reading is the creative center of a writer's life." — Stephen King
2015 has been a wonderful year for publishers and readers. My “Best of 2015” list consists of the books that I am most likely to read again. In the memoir category, Norway’s Karl Ove Knausgaard’s fourth volume of My Struggle is part of a series that I believe will be … Read More
They didn’t invite Anders Breivik to see their pets because they knew that he tortured his pet rats by poking them with pencils. One of Us: The Story of Anders Breivik and the Massacre in Norway provides layers of details about the man who killed 77 people in Norway in … Read More
So often, I see my students take an adversarial stance when they sit down to write. They use phrases such as “grinding it out” and “forcing it” to describe how they work. Sometimes that’s been my experience, too. But does it have to be? What if we looked at the … Read More
This book aims to answer that question by outlining a “sustainable, cost-effective way to support faculty who want to improve college teaching” (1). The lead author is Gail O. Mellow, president of LaGuardia Community College, who helped developed a system that is based on self-reflection, a peer-based dialogic process, … Read More
A Beijing taxi driver is stalked by someone who claims to have been his soul mate in five of his past lives during the last 1300 years. It’s an interesting premise for this novel, which has received rave reviews from critics around the world. This wildly ambitious rollick … Read More