This explains everything

“Many researchers now believe, to varying degrees, that each of us is a community of competing selves, with the happiness of one often causing the misery of another.” [read the rest here]
Or read Matt Ruff’s awesome Set This House in Order. Sometimes I really wish I had a Maledicta.

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Free goose bumps

As a Halloween treat, Juno Books is offering a free download of five ghost stories by women.

Let Loose, by Mary Cholmondeley (1890)
The Striding-Place, by Gertrude Atherton (1896)
The Lost Ghost, by Mary E. Wilkins Freeman (1903)
Kerfol, by Edith Wharton (1916)
Spunk, by Zora Neale Hurston (1925)

I admit that I haven’t heard of the first three authors, but [...]

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I HAVE to read this book

“One morning Ricky Rice, a former heroin addict, receives a mysterious letter at his job. Inside are a one-way bus ticket and an invitation to travel north, to a remote location in Vermont. When he arrives he finds a secret society of black folks, calling themselves the Washburn Library, tucked deep in the backwoods…”
Read the [...]

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What Scotland looks like, part 2

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Audiobooks, part 2 (narrators)

I’ve heard it said on librarian discussion groups (yes, it’s true, your librarian does talk about you, but only in the nicest way) that many patrons make their audiobook choices based solely on the narrator.
Before I listened to a lot of audiobooks, I thought this was dumb. Sure, a wretched reader could screw up a [...]

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What Scotland looks like, part 1

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Audiobooks, part 1 (criteria)

I use audiobooks to help me get through the hateful hour that is exercise, and I have specific criteria for what kinds of books I’m allowed to listen to:

Must not be boring
Must not be too good
Must not be funny
Must not be action thing with male narrator

Boring is self-explanatory–Audiobooks are supposed to take my mind off [...]

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One more for funny women

I just started reading Miriam Toews’ ‘The Flying Troutmans.’
Marc…was heading off to an ashram in India anyway and said we could communicate telepathically. I tried it a couple of days before he left. I love you, don’t go, I said silently, without moving my lips. He was standing next to me, trying to photograph a [...]

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Woooo!

Ahem.
My short story “Parvati and the Snake” has been published in the September issue of the excellent online magazine Les Bonnes Fees.
I got the idea for “Parvati” when I was working on a longer story. I was trying to explain the roots of a modern family’s repetitive disfunctionality through the story a grandmother tells her [...]

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Adrian and I are in love! It is official!

Re: September 17th’s post on unfunny women–How could I possibly have forgotten?
The Secret Diary of Adrian Mole Aged 13 3/4, by Sue Townsend.
I found this in the adult fiction section of the Adams County Public Library when I was about 13 3/4 myself. I read it and then I read it again. I must have [...]

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