Every good writer is first a voracious reader. These posts celebrate the reading life — the books that shape a writer, the joy of reading widely, and why time spent reading is never time wasted.
Personal StoryI write books for a living, and I haven't finished reading one in about five years. The shelf behind me on video calls is set dressing, and the reading I do now comes in pieces, a chapter at a time,…
Ancient RomeThe Jewish War by Josephus is one of my favorite books, and the translation you pick decides whether you finish it. Josephus wrote for the Romans who spared him, so trust his map and doubt his numbers.
Book ReviewsBook two of Deanna Bennett's Anna Immigration Trilogy takes fifteen-year-old Anna through Ellis Island and onto a train to Chicago, where she learns how people fear and prey on immigrants. A tribute and a review.
Book ReviewsThe final book of Deanna Bennett's Anna Immigration Trilogy follows Anna through war, the great influenza epidemic and the temperance fight, as a Lithuanian girl builds an American life between 1914 and 1919. A tribute and a review.
Book ReviewsDeanna Bennett's memoir of the first year after her husband Tom died, holiday by holiday, from the depths of sorrow to the start of a new life. A tribute and a review.
Book ReviewsThe memoir Helen Dragunas began and her daughter Deanna Bennett finished: growing up the daughter of Lithuanian immigrants through the 1920s and the Depression, and what happened to the real Anna. A tribute and a review.
Book ReviewsBook one of Deanna Bennett's Anna Immigration Trilogy follows a fifteen-year-old Lithuanian girl and her stern mother across Europe by rail and across the Atlantic in steerage in 1914. A tribute and a review.
Artificial IntelligenceA student writes a program designed to stay alive, then abandons it. The program does not stop. Thomas J. Ryan described a computer worm years before anyone had the word.
AdaptationA Christmas Carol was published on 19 December 1843, sold out in five days, and made its author almost nothing because he had paid for it himself and specified expensive materials. He then sued a publisher who pirated it, won…
AmericaWhitman self-published Leaves of Grass in 1855 with no author name on the cover, set some of the type himself, wrote anonymous reviews praising his own book, and then revised it for the next thirty-seven years across six editions. He…
FaithEaster can fall anywhere across a thirty-five day window, and the rule that decides it involves a fictional moon. The calculation occupied European mathematics for centuries, it is the reason Orthodox and Western Easter usually differ, and it causes genuine…
Fantasy FictionLe Guin grew up in a house of anthropologists and applied their central question to places that did not exist: not what a society has, but why it arranged itself that way. That order of operations is why her worlds…
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