The “Best Books of 2016”? Pul-eeze. Unless one has a universally agreed-upon metric that can be applied to every single book published in any given year, there can be no anointing “the best”. Most popular, sure. Best seller, most prestigious, highest lauded, yup. But “Best”? As if. Ah, but “Favorite”! Anyone can share their favorite [….]
Gimbling in the Wabe – Tis the Season (for me to give suggestions for the science fiction and fantasy readers on your gift list)
Published on :It’s that time of year again, when thoughts turn towards warm and cozy, hearth and home, and the giving of gifts to those we love and appreciate. I toyed with the idea of putting up a list of books to recommend for holiday reading and gift-giving, but finally I decided to concentrate on two single [….]
LitStack Rec: How to Read a Sentence… & The Butcher of Anderson Station
Published on :How to Read a Sentence and How to Write One, by Stanley Fish The sentence is the coin of the realm, the catch that keeps a reader securely in a story, and Stanley Fish wrote a book just about sentences. A professor of law and dean emeritus at the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences [….]
Gimbling in the Wabe – A Baker’s Dozen of My Favorite Books of 2014
Published on :If tasked with assembling a single shelf of books from 2014 that I most wanted to keep close by, these would be the books that made the cut. They aren’t necessarily the “best” books of 2014 – they aren’t all award winning or critically acclaimed or best sellers. What they are, though, are the books [….]
Gimbling in the Wabe – Giving Us the Stars
Published on :I think it’s fairly obvious that I love reading. More often than not, I read books that have me delighting in the quality of the writing or the cleverness of the story. But sometimes I come across a passage that truly stands out, where I stop and say to myself, “Whoa”. Such a wonderful moment [….]
Gimbling in the Wabe – What’s In a Name?
Published on :Book titles tend to be one of two things: a verbatim description of the tale contained within, or else wildly evocative of some more ephemeral aspect of the writing (often grabbed from a cryptic quote towards the end of the narrative or tipped off by a free standing quote or two from another work or [….]
LitStack Rec: Far from the Madding Crowd & Caliban’s War
Published on :Far From the Madding Crowd, by Thomas Hardy Hardy’s novel of romantic entanglements and farming rural life, set in fictional nineteenth-century county Wessex is the perfect book for a summer read. This tale of Bathsheba Everdene and Gabriel Oak, first published in 1874, takes its time, and let’s the reader settle into time and place. [….]
LitStack Recs: Pushcart Prize 38 & Leviathan Wakes
Published on :Pushcart Prize 38: Best of the Small Presses, ed. by Bill Henderson Now in its thirty-eighth year, the Pushcart Prize is the annual selection of important stories, poems essays and memoirs. Culled each year from nominations made by hundreds of publications, the series has become the standard for contemporary prose and poetry—featuring both established and [….]