Karl Edward Wagner

Goodreads Monday: March 25, 2024

/ E.A. Hoffmann / Leave a comment

Goodreads Monday is hosted by Budget Tales Book Blog. “Goodreads Monday allows you to post about what books are on your “to read” lists, the progress you have made on your current books and reading challenge, and any other Goodreads news!”

Books I Finished In the Past 2 Weeks:

Quozl by Alan Dean Foster

Rabbitlike aliens from outer space colonize Earth during humankind’s Second World War in a delightfully funny and thought-provoking science fiction adventure The Quozl just need somewhere to call home. A gentle race of extraterrestrial rabbits, they have a propensity for reproduction that has left their home planet, Quozlene, dangerously overpopulated, and in their search for greener and less-crowded pastures, they have discovered the perfect place to start the third planet away from a healthy, warming sun. What they don’t realize is that this world they call Shiraz is already inhabited by a species of violent sentient creatures known as humans.   But there’s no going back now. In the midst of the brutal and helpfully distracting global conflict the Shirazians call World War II, the colony ship lands undetected, and the space rabbits immediately go into hiding. But a secret like the Quozl can be concealed for only so long, especially when their numbers start to increase and certain rebellious members of the long-eared society decide the time is ripe to claim their place in a world they believe is rightfully theirs.   One of the most admired and prolific authors in the science fiction arena, Alan Dean Foster will delight readers who hunger for something different with this funny, thoughtful, and wildly inventive novel of first contact and coexistence. Once you meet the Quozl, you will never forget them.

See my review of this book here.

Crash Course by Julie Whipple

On a cold winter night, a passenger jet with 189 aboard crash landed, out of fuel, in a suburban neighborhood in Portland, Oregon. Ten people died. The pilot was blamed and stripped of his career, and a sweeping transformation of flight-crew training took place that made United Flight 173 (in)famous worldwide as the model for failure and change. That was only the half of it.

Hiding in plain sight for years in an attorney’s file boxes, the forgotten truths of the landmark air disaster reveal much more: an emotional journey tethered to the disgraced pilot and a three-year-old girl who survived the crash and became an unlikely hero for justice and public safety in the dramatic legal battle that followed.

Crash Course, by award-winning journalist Julie Whipple, is the long-overdue, true story of a misunderstood airline tragedy that changed more about our daily lives than most people know. Here is why we’re safer today, how we’re not, and what we can do about it.

Death’s End by Cixin Liu

With The Three-Body Problem, English-speaking readers got their first chance to read China’s most beloved science fiction author, Cixin Liu. The Three-Body Problem was released to great acclaim, including coverage in The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal and reading list picks by Barack Obama and Mark Zuckerberg. It also won the Hugo and Nebula Awards, making it the first translated novel to win a major SF award.

Now, this epic trilogy concludes with Death’s End. Half a century after the Doomsday Battle, the uneasy balance of Dark Forest Deterrence keeps the Trisolaran invaders at bay. Earth enjoys unprecedented prosperity due to the infusion of Trisolaran knowledge. With human science advancing daily and the Trisolarans adopting Earth culture, it seems that the two civilizations will soon be able to co-exist peacefully as equals without the terrible threat of mutually assured annihilation. But the peace has also made humanity complacent.

Cheng Xin, an aerospace engineer from the early twenty-first century, awakens from hibernation in this new age. She brings with her knowledge of a long-forgotten program dating from the beginning of the Trisolar Crisis, and her very presence may upset the delicate balance between two worlds. Will humanity reach for the stars or die in its cradle?

In A Lonely Place by Karl Edward Wagner

Karl Edward Wagner (1945-1994) has earned a reputation as one of the finest horror writers of the modern era, but his work has been out of print and nearly unobtainable for many years. His seminal volume In a Lonely Place collects eight of his best tales, including “In the Pines,” a classic ghost story evocatively set in the Tennessee woods, “Beyond Any Measure,” an original take on the vampire story, “River of Night’s Dreaming,” a surreal and nightmarish masterpiece inspired by The King in Yellow, and the author’s most famous tale, “Sticks,” a disturbing story thought by many to have been the basis for The Blair Witch Project.
​
This new edition includes all the stories from the original 1983 edition, plus an additional rare tale and the author’s afterword from the Scream/Press limited edition, and features a new introduction by Ramsey Campbell.

Books I am Currently Reading:

If the Universe Is Teeming with Aliens … WHERE IS EVERYBODY? by Stephen Webb

Given the fact that there are perhaps 400 billion stars in our Galaxy alone, and perhaps
400 billion galaxies in the Universe, it stands to reason that somewhere out there, in the
14-billion-year-old cosmos, there is or once was a civilization at least as advanced as our
own. The sheer enormity of the numbers almost demands that we accept the truth of this
hypothesis. Why, then, have we encountered no evidence, no messages, no artifacts of
these extraterrestrials? 
In this second, significantly revised and expanded edition of his widely popular book,
Webb discusses in detail the (for now!) 75 most cogent and intriguing solutions to
Fermi’s famous paradox: If the numbers strongly point to the existence of extraterrestrial
civilizations, why have we found no evidence of them?

Progress: page 176 of 434. (Jan 6, 155, Jan 15, 164, Jan 29, 171, Feb 5, 176)

How to Market a Book: Overperform in a Crowded Market by Ricardo Fayet

Writing a book is hard. Marketing it can be even harder.

Marketing a book in 2021 can seem like a full-time job, what with the crazy number of things authors seem to be expected to do: social media, blog tours, advertising, price promotions, mailing lists, giveaways, you name it.

But here’s a little secret: you don’t need to do all those things to successfully set your book on the path to success. What you need is a solid plan to find the one or two tactics that will work, and start to drive sales… in a minimum amount of time. And that’s exactly what you’ll find in this book.

Instead of drowning you in information or inundating you with hundreds of different tactics and strategies that eventually prove fruitless, this book will guide you through a step-by-step framework to find the ones that actually work for you and your book, so that you can start marketing more efficiently.

In particular, you’ll learn:

• How to change your mindset and sell more books with less effort.;
• How to write books that guarantee a lasting, profitable career;
• How to get Amazon’s Kindle Store to market your book for you;
• How to get thousands of readers into your mailing list before you even release the book;
• How to propel your book to the top of the charts at launch; and
• How to automate your marketing so that you can spend less time marketing and more time writing,

After helping over 150,000 authors crack the marketing code through a popular weekly newsletter, Reedsy’s Co-founder Ricardo Fayet is sharing everything he’s learned over the past few years in this beginner-friendly, jargon-free guide to book marketing.

Progress: Kindle Book 48% (Feb 5, 9%, Mar 4, 45%)

Leave the World Behind by Rumaan Alam

A magnetic novel about two families, strangers to each other, who are forced together on a long weekend gone terribly wrong

Amanda and Clay head to a remote corner of Long Island expecting a a quiet reprieve from life in New York City, quality time with their teenage son and daughter and a taste of the good life in the luxurious home they’ve rented for the week. But with a late-night knock on the door, the spell is broken. Ruth and G. H., an older couple who claim to own the home, have arrived there in a panic. These strangers say that a sudden power outage has swept the city, and – with nowhere else to turn – they have come to the country in search of shelter.

But with the TV and internet down, and no phone service, the facts are unknowable. Should Amanda and Clay trust this couple – and vice versa? What has happened back in New York? Is the holiday home, isolated from civilisation, a truly safe place for their families? And are they safe from one another?

Progress: page 104 of 241 (March 11, 34)

Elsie’s Tune: One Last Song to Overcome by Jonathan Watson

“She took the record out and put it on. As it started to play, she simply didn’t know if good memories would come back. Maybe bad memories would overtake them. Whichever way she felt, she just knew that it was ‘absolutely necessary’ to purely have it play.”

Elsie Ragusin started out in life with everything laid out. She was passionate about God, music, and her family. However, life would soon test her in the most unimaginable ways. She would realize that during the worst atrocities that human history has ever witnessed, she had to rely completely on her Christian faith to get by. Some days, she never ate or felt too weak to work in the concentration camps. Her mental strength in using music and the hope of getting back to her family helped her get through it in 1945. Yet, those haunting memories are what she still has to overcome. Will she use the talents that God has given her to show her present family that one can truly overcome anything? Listen and follow along with Elsie’s Tune. 

Progress: page 124 of 334 (March 11, 60)

“My Husband’s Trying to Kill Me!”: A True Story of Money, Marriage, and Murderous Intent by Jim Schutze

From an award-winning journalist, this “grippingly suspenseful true-crime tale details the foiling of a wealthy Texan’s plot to have his wife murdered”(Publishers Weekly).

To the world, Linda DeSilva’s marriage to Robert Edelman was perfect. He was her college boyfriend turned wealthy and successful husband, and the father of her children. But what friends and family didn’t know was that the Texas real estate tycoon who set her up with a luxurious life in Dallas was also her abuser. When she asked him for a divorce, the violence against her only escalated, until the shocking moment she learned her husband had hired an assassin to take her life. 

From acclaimed journalist and author Jim Schutze, “My Husband’s Trying to Kill Me!” is the riveting true-crime account of how Linda DeSilva worked with the FBI to trap her husband before he could act on his murderous intentions—and how the sting operation nearly got her killed instead. A shocking and sensational story of a wife and mother’s escape from the marriage that went from American dream to every woman’s worst nightmare.

Progress: Audiobook 39%

Book I Will Read:

Title: Of Ants and Dinosaurs

Author: Cixin Liu

Published: 2003

Pages: 256

Genres: Fiction, Science Fiction, Novella

Goodreads Synopsis: The alliance between ants and dinosaurs created a veritable Age of Wonder! But such magnificent industry comes at a price – a price paid first by Earth’s biosphere, and then by all those dependent on it. A satirical fable and ecological warning.

A satirical fable, a political allegory and an ecological warning from the author of The Three-Body Problem. In a sunlit clearing in central Gondwana, on an otherwise ordinary day in the late Cretaceous, the seeds of Earth’s first and greatest civilization were sown in the grisly aftermath of a Tyrannosaurus’ lunch.

Throughout the universe, intelligence is a rare and fragile commodity – a fleeting glimmer in the long night of cosmic history. That Earth should harbour not just one but two intelligent species at the same time, defies the odds. That these species, so unalike – and yet so complementary – should forge an alliance that kindled a civilization defies logic. But time is endless and everything comes to pass eventually…

The alliance between ants and dinosaurs, was of course, based on dentistry. Yet from such humble beginnings came writing, mathematics, computers, fusion, antimatter and even space travel – a veritable Age of Wonder! But such magnificent industry comes at a price – a price paid first by Earth’s biosphere, and then by all those dependent on it.

And yet the Dinosaurs refused to heed the Ants’ warning of impending ecological collapse, leaving the Ant Federation facing a single dilemma: destroy the dinosaurs, destroy a civilization… or perish alongside them?

BOOK REVIEW: In a Lonely Place by Karl Edward Wagner

/ E.A. Hoffmann / 1 Comment

Book Length: 260 pages

Rating: 5 out of 5 stars

Genre: Fiction, Horror, Short Stories, Gothic, Anthologies

Read Start Date: February 2, 2024

Read Finish Date: March 19, 2024

Goodreads’ Synopsis: One of the most important horror collections of modern times, back in print at last!

Karl Edward Wagner (1945-1994) has earned a reputation as one of the finest horror writers of the modern era, but his work has been out of print and nearly unobtainable for many years. His seminal volume In a Lonely Place collects eight of his best tales, including “In the Pines,” a classic ghost story evocatively set in the Tennessee woods, “Beyond Any Measure,” an original take on the vampire story, “River of Night’s Dreaming,” a surreal and nightmarish masterpiece inspired by The King in Yellow, and the author’s most famous tale, “Sticks,” a disturbing story thought by many to have been the basis for The Blair Witch Project.
​
This new edition includes all the stories from the original 1983 edition, plus an additional rare tale and the author’s afterword from the Scream/Press limited edition, and features a new introduction by Ramsey Campbell.

My Review:

The Pines: Reeling from the death of their only son, a married couple, Gerry and Janet, rent an old cabin nestled in the forest. They want to get away from life. To rest. To recover. Gerry, angry and depressed, drinks a little too much, and in his drunken haze, he begins to experience strange things. While I liked this story, I can’t say I loved it. It felt too short. The tension didn’t have time to build. The mystery was summarily explained rather than unfolded layer by layer.

Where the Summer Ends: Mercer is a collector of antiques and often shops at the dilapidated home of Mr. Gradie. He’s been buttering the old man up to part with a wood mantle at an affordable price that would go great in his apartment. This is what the story is about on the surface. Underlying this seemingly mundane transaction is the fast growth of the invasive kudzu plant and the mutilation of homeless men around town. The tension of this 28-page story grows as steadily as the kudzu. The twist at the end was unexpected and brought the story to an end in a dramatic fashion.

Sticks: In the spring of 1942, artist and illustrator Colin Leverett–he had just been drafted to fight in WWII–went fishing in Mann Brook, New York. Walking to the river, he came across a dilapidated house and several “lashed-together framework of sticks,” reminding him of a “bizarre crucifix.” He put pen to paper and began to draw several of the most intricately put-together stick formations. Several decades later, Leverett struggles to make a living, his artwork becoming too dark after his experiences in WWII for mainstream consumption. One day, he gets a call from a publisher interested in his dark style. Compelled to use the sticks as part of the illustrations, Leverett sets in motion a dangerous path that he cannot escape.

The Fourth Seal: The protagonist was hired as a medical doctor at a new institution. He is a cancer researcher and makes a breakthrough discovery. Just when he thinks he will have the opportunity to change the world, he is thrown a curveball that threatens not only his perspective but also his life. This story was interesting and had an unexpected twist at the end.

More Sinned Against: Candi Thorne was an aspiring actress in L.A. until she met actor hopeful Richards Justin. Introduced to drugs, Candi is forced into a downward spiral of acting in porn films, and when her looks fade due to drug use, prostitution to feed her habit — and to maintain the lazy and lecherous Richards. She does it all for love and on the promise that Richards will support her when he makes it big in Hollywood. She believes that investing in his future is also an investment in hers. It was no surprise to this reader that Richards was not faithful to his word. As I read this story, I felt bad for Candi, and sometimes I wanted to scream at her and tell her to WAKE UP to his obvious treachery. The ending, therefore, although unexpected, was highly welcome.

.220 Swift: Dr. Kendall is an archeologist in search of the mines of the ancients, built by the Spanish conquistadors in 1540. I was very interested in the story at the beginning. The mystery surrounding the hills captivated my attention. However, as the story moved along, it took an odd and unexpected turn. I wasn’t a fan of this twist, as it seemed too far removed from the original story. There were just certain elements that were introduced that I didn’t care for.

The River of Nights Dreaming: If I had to describe this story in one word, it would be confusion. The main character, Cassilda, was involved in a bus crash and swam to the opposite shore of the lake where the bus had sunk. Evidently, she was in prison for an unknown offense, and this was her chance to escape. They would think she had died in the crash and she could live a life of freedom. When she emerged from the water, a shadowy animal pursued her, and she sought refuge in the home of an elderly woman and her companion. Then the story really got strange–the women are not what they first appear to be. I did not understand the ending and found this one altogether weird and confusing, and it was not one of my favorites.

Beyond Any Measure: Lisette is an American girl attending school in London. She has been having realistic nightmares and, on the urging of her lover, Danielle, goes to see a hypnotherapist who theorizes that reincarnation is real. He believes that Lisette’s dreams are in fact memories of her past life. The twist at the end of this story has intrigued me and I’ve been thinking about it since I finished this story. Not a bad way to end an anthology!

This is a must read for horror fans!

Goodreads Monday: March 11, 2024

/ E.A. Hoffmann / Leave a comment

Goodreads Monday is hosted by Budget Tales Book Blog. “Goodreads Monday allows you to post about what books are on your “to read” lists, the progress you have made on your current books and reading challenge, and any other Goodreads news!”

Books I Finished In the Past 4 Weeks:

Hearers of the Constant Hum by William Pauley III

Della Comb is the queen of her hive. She’s only in her early twenties, but she’s already managed to build an empire selling drugs to junkies who are looking for the ultimate escape. The key to her success is that she manufactures her drugs with a secret ingredient: a very specific blend of pesticides.

Her only problem is the two bumbling exterminators she’s come to rely on for product. They spend more time playing video games and making armchair philosophies than actually working. Thankfully, they realize they too are short on supplies—pizza and breakfast burritos—so they give her a call, asking to meet up at the Chase High Rise, a building known for its unique brand of squalor.

Immediately, she feels sick to her stomach. Not only is the place absolutely disgusting, but it’s also home to Bill Krang, a man who claims to hear insects speaking. The things they say don’t make sense, even to him, but the words are causing him to physically deteriorate at a rapid pace.

Della’s ultimate fear is meeting this man and contracting his disease. However, business is business, and Krang’s apartment is abundant of product. Before long, she finds herself thrown straight into her worst nightmare, and the experience…changes her.

HEARERS OF THE CONSTANT HUM challenges its readers to work against instinct by exposing the dangers of our own curiosity. It’s more than just a story, it’s a warning of a much needed social change. We either take its advice, or risk rewriting what it means to be human in a world ran by insects.

See my review of this book here.

Holus Bolus by William Pauley III

OUR PROTAGONIST is pretty sure he’s just committed a murder. The body is newly dead, he’s the only one around, and a quick look at the evidence suggests he’s guilty as sin.

Also, he’s totally insane.

A rare brain condition causes his memories to reset every day, and because of this, he often wakes up in strange places with no memory of how he got there. He can’t even remember his own name. When he’s not racking his brain over his shoddy memory, he’s arguing incessantly with a disembodied voice that doesn’t seem to belong to him, one he can only hear inside his head.

He may not know much about the troubling situation he just woke up to, but he knows, without a doubt, that he’s completely f*cked.

While the odds are certainly stacked against him, there may be hope for our protagonist yet, for clutched in the corpse’s cold, clammy hands is a handwritten tome that suggests not only his innocence, but also reveals some bizarre and dangerous secrets, leading him to believe his own apartment building may be to blame… or is, at the very least, an accomplice.

That sounded better inside his head.

Luckily he’s not the only one trying to solve the case. The book also leads him to a group of outcasts who are in the midst of their own investigation. The only problem? They all suspect one another!

One thing’s for certain, someone inside the tower is a cold-blooded killer. Can our protagonist solve the murder before he falls asleep and his memories reset? Or worse, before the killer strikes again?

Find out in HOLUS BOLUS. You’ll be pushed to the very edge of sanity!

See my review of this book here.

Books I am Currently Reading:

If the Universe Is Teeming with Aliens … WHERE IS EVERYBODY? by Stephen Webb

Given the fact that there are perhaps 400 billion stars in our Galaxy alone, and perhaps
400 billion galaxies in the Universe, it stands to reason that somewhere out there, in the
14-billion-year-old cosmos, there is or once was a civilization at least as advanced as our
own. The sheer enormity of the numbers almost demands that we accept the truth of this
hypothesis. Why, then, have we encountered no evidence, no messages, no artifacts of
these extraterrestrials? 
In this second, significantly revised and expanded edition of his widely popular book,
Webb discusses in detail the (for now!) 75 most cogent and intriguing solutions to
Fermi’s famous paradox: If the numbers strongly point to the existence of extraterrestrial
civilizations, why have we found no evidence of them?

Progress: page 176 of 434. (Jan 6, 155, Jan 15, 164, Jan 29, 171, Feb 5, 176)

Death’s End by Cixin Liu

With The Three-Body Problem, English-speaking readers got their first chance to read China’s most beloved science fiction author, Cixin Liu. The Three-Body Problem was released to great acclaim, including coverage in The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal and reading list picks by Barack Obama and Mark Zuckerberg. It also won the Hugo and Nebula Awards, making it the first translated novel to win a major SF award.

Now, this epic trilogy concludes with Death’s End. Half a century after the Doomsday Battle, the uneasy balance of Dark Forest Deterrence keeps the Trisolaran invaders at bay. Earth enjoys unprecedented prosperity due to the infusion of Trisolaran knowledge. With human science advancing daily and the Trisolarans adopting Earth culture, it seems that the two civilizations will soon be able to co-exist peacefully as equals without the terrible threat of mutually assured annihilation. But the peace has also made humanity complacent.

Cheng Xin, an aerospace engineer from the early twenty-first century, awakens from hibernation in this new age. She brings with her knowledge of a long-forgotten program dating from the beginning of the Trisolar Crisis, and her very presence may upset the delicate balance between two worlds. Will humanity reach for the stars or die in its cradle?

Progress: page 608 of 724 (Feb 5, 328, Mar 4, 345)

In A Lonely Place by Karl Edward Wagner

Karl Edward Wagner (1945-1994) has earned a reputation as one of the finest horror writers of the modern era, but his work has been out of print and nearly unobtainable for many years. His seminal volume In a Lonely Place collects eight of his best tales, including “In the Pines,” a classic ghost story evocatively set in the Tennessee woods, “Beyond Any Measure,” an original take on the vampire story, “River of Night’s Dreaming,” a surreal and nightmarish masterpiece inspired by The King in Yellow, and the author’s most famous tale, “Sticks,” a disturbing story thought by many to have been the basis for The Blair Witch Project.
​
This new edition includes all the stories from the original 1983 edition, plus an additional rare tale and the author’s afterword from the Scream/Press limited edition, and features a new introduction by Ramsey Campbell.

Progress: page 173 of 270 (Feb 5, 42, Mar 4, 92)

How to Market a Book: Overperform in a Crowded Market by Ricardo Fayet

Writing a book is hard. Marketing it can be even harder.

Marketing a book in 2021 can seem like a full-time job, what with the crazy number of things authors seem to be expected to do: social media, blog tours, advertising, price promotions, mailing lists, giveaways, you name it.

But here’s a little secret: you don’t need to do all those things to successfully set your book on the path to success. What you need is a solid plan to find the one or two tactics that will work, and start to drive sales… in a minimum amount of time. And that’s exactly what you’ll find in this book.

Instead of drowning you in information or inundating you with hundreds of different tactics and strategies that eventually prove fruitless, this book will guide you through a step-by-step framework to find the ones that actually work for you and your book, so that you can start marketing more efficiently.

In particular, you’ll learn:

• How to change your mindset and sell more books with less effort.;
• How to write books that guarantee a lasting, profitable career;
• How to get Amazon’s Kindle Store to market your book for you;
• How to get thousands of readers into your mailing list before you even release the book;
• How to propel your book to the top of the charts at launch; and
• How to automate your marketing so that you can spend less time marketing and more time writing,

After helping over 150,000 authors crack the marketing code through a popular weekly newsletter, Reedsy’s Co-founder Ricardo Fayet is sharing everything he’s learned over the past few years in this beginner-friendly, jargon-free guide to book marketing.

Progress: Kindle Book 48% (Feb 5, 9%, Mar 4, 45%)

Leave the World Behind by Rumaan Alam

A magnetic novel about two families, strangers to each other, who are forced together on a long weekend gone terribly wrong

Amanda and Clay head to a remote corner of Long Island expecting a a quiet reprieve from life in New York City, quality time with their teenage son and daughter and a taste of the good life in the luxurious home they’ve rented for the week. But with a late-night knock on the door, the spell is broken. Ruth and G. H., an older couple who claim to own the home, have arrived there in a panic. These strangers say that a sudden power outage has swept the city, and – with nowhere else to turn – they have come to the country in search of shelter.

But with the TV and internet down, and no phone service, the facts are unknowable. Should Amanda and Clay trust this couple – and vice versa? What has happened back in New York? Is the holiday home, isolated from civilisation, a truly safe place for their families? And are they safe from one another?

Progress: page 34 of 241

Elsie’s Tune: One Last Song to Overcome by Jonathan Watson

“She took the record out and put it on. As it started to play, she simply didn’t know if good memories would come back. Maybe bad memories would overtake them. Whichever way she felt, she just knew that it was ‘absolutely necessary’ to purely have it play.”

Elsie Ragusin started out in life with everything laid out. She was passionate about God, music, and her family. However, life would soon test her in the most unimaginable ways. She would realize that during the worst atrocities that human history has ever witnessed, she had to rely completely on her Christian faith to get by. Some days, she never ate or felt too weak to work in the concentration camps. Her mental strength in using music and the hope of getting back to her family helped her get through it in 1945. Yet, those haunting memories are what she still has to overcome. Will she use the talents that God has given her to show her present family that one can truly overcome anything? Listen and follow along with Elsie’s Tune. 

Progress: page 60 of 334

Quozl by Alan Dean Foster

Rabbitlike aliens from outer space colonize Earth during humankind’s Second World War in a delightfully funny and thought-provoking science fiction adventure The Quozl just need somewhere to call home. A gentle race of extraterrestrial rabbits, they have a propensity for reproduction that has left their home planet, Quozlene, dangerously overpopulated, and in their search for greener and less-crowded pastures, they have discovered the perfect place to start the third planet away from a healthy, warming sun. What they don’t realize is that this world they call Shiraz is already inhabited by a species of violent sentient creatures known as humans.   But there’s no going back now. In the midst of the brutal and helpfully distracting global conflict the Shirazians call World War II, the colony ship lands undetected, and the space rabbits immediately go into hiding. But a secret like the Quozl can be concealed for only so long, especially when their numbers start to increase and certain rebellious members of the long-eared society decide the time is ripe to claim their place in a world they believe is rightfully theirs.   One of the most admired and prolific authors in the science fiction arena, Alan Dean Foster will delight readers who hunger for something different with this funny, thoughtful, and wildly inventive novel of first contact and coexistence. Once you meet the Quozl, you will never forget them.

Progress: Audiobook 40%

Book I Will Read:

Title: Crash Course

Author: Julie Whipple

Published: 2018

Pages: 296

Genres: Nonfiction, Aviation

Goodreads Synopsis: “Relive the story of an ill-fated commercial flight that was doomed before it was ever airborne; and find out how it may one day save your life – if it hasn’t already.” (Chris Mendenhall, air traffic controller, Tinker Air Force Base)

On a cold winter night, a passenger jet with 189 aboard crash landed, out of fuel, in a suburban neighborhood in Portland, Oregon. Ten people died. The pilot was blamed and stripped of his career, and a sweeping transformation of flight-crew training took place that made United Flight 173 (in)famous worldwide as the model for failure and change. That was only the half of it.

Hiding in plain sight for years in an attorney’s file boxes, the forgotten truths of the landmark air disaster reveal much more: an emotional journey tethered to the disgraced pilot and a three-year-old girl who survived the crash and became an unlikely hero for justice and public safety in the dramatic legal battle that followed.

Crash Course, by award-winning journalist Julie Whipple, is the long-overdue, true story of a misunderstood airline tragedy that changed more about our daily lives than most people know. Here is why we’re safer today, how we’re not, and what we can do about it.

Time Travel Thursday, March 7, 2024

/ E.A. Hoffmann / Leave a comment

Time Travel Thursday is hosted by Budget Tales Book Blog. This is where I take a look back at what I was reading this time last year (or the year before or the year before that…) and compare it to what I am reading now.

Books I was Reading on This Day in 2023:

Ripper: The Secret Life of Walter Sickert by Patricia Cornwell

From New York Times bestselling author Patricia Cornwell comes Ripper: The Secret Life of Walter Sickert, a comprehensive and intriguing exposé of one of the world’s most chilling cases of serial murder—and the police force that failed to solve it.

Vain and charismatic Walter Sickert made a name for himself as a painter in Victorian London. But the ghoulish nature of his art—as well as extensive evidence—points to another name, one that’s left its bloody mark on the pages of history: Jack the Ripper. Cornwell has collected never-before-seen archival material—including a rare mortuary photo, personal correspondence and a will with a mysterious autopsy clause—and applied cutting-edge forensic science to open an old crime to new scrutiny.

Incorporating material from Portrait of a Killer: Jack the Ripper—Case Closed, this new edition has been revised and expanded to include eight new chapters, detailed maps and hundreds of images that bring the sinister case to life.

See my review of this book here.

Starvation Heights: A True Story of Murder and Malice in the Woods of the Pacific Northwest by Gregg Olsen

In this true story—a haunting saga of medical murder set in an era of steamships and gaslights—Gregg Olsen reveals one of the most unusual and disturbing criminal cases in American history.

In 1911 two wealthy British heiresses, Claire and Dora Williamson, arrived at a sanitorium in the forests of the Pacific Northwest to undergo the revolutionary “fasting treatment” of Dr. Linda Burfield Hazzard. It was supposed to be a holiday for the two sisters, but within a month of arriving at what the locals called Starvation Heights, the women underwent brutal treatments and were emaciated shadows of their former selves.

Claire and Dora were not the first victims of Linda Hazzard, a quack doctor of extraordinary evil and greed. But as their jewelry disappeared and forged bank drafts began transferring their wealth to Hazzard’s accounts, the sisters came to learn that Hazzard would stop at nothing short of murder to achieve her ambitions.

See my review of this book here.

Your First Novel Revised and Expanded Edition: A Top Agent and a Published Author Show You How to Write Your Book and Get It Published by Ann Rittenberg and Laura Whitcomb

Your Expert Guide to Writing and Publishing a NovelIn this revised and expanded edition of Your First Novel, novelist Laura Whitcomb, seasoned literary agent Ann Rittenberg, and her knowledgeable assistant, Camille Goldin, team up to provide you with the essential skills needed to craft the best novel you can–and the savvy business know-how to get it published. Complete with updated references, analysis of new best-selling novels, and the same detailed instruction, Whitcomb will show you how    • Practice the craft of writing, using both your right- and left-brain   • Develop a flexible card system for organizing and outlining plot   • Create dynamic characters that readers love–and love to hate   • Study classic novels and story structure to adapt with your ideasFeaturing two new chapters on choosing your path as an author and understanding the world of self-publishing, Rittenberg and Goldin dive into the business side of publishing,    • What agents can–and should–do for your future   • Who you should target as an agent for your burgeoning career   • How the mysterious auction for novels actually goes down   • Why you should learn to work with your agent through thick and thin. Guiding your first novel from early words to a spot on the bookshelf can be an exciting and terrifying journey, but you’re not alone. Alongside the advice of industry veterans, Your First Novel Revised and Expanded also includes plenty of firsthand accounts from published authors on their journeys, including Dennis Lehane, C.J. Box, Kathleen McCleary, David Kazzie, and more.

See my review of this book here.

What I’m Reading Now:

If the Universe Is Teeming with Aliens … WHERE IS EVERYBODY? by Stephen Webb

Given the fact that there are perhaps 400 billion stars in our Galaxy alone, and perhaps
400 billion galaxies in the Universe, it stands to reason that somewhere out there, in the
14-billion-year-old cosmos, there is or once was a civilization at least as advanced as our
own. The sheer enormity of the numbers almost demands that we accept the truth of this
hypothesis. Why, then, have we encountered no evidence, no messages, no artifacts of
these extraterrestrials? 
In this second, significantly revised and expanded edition of his widely popular book,
Webb discusses in detail the (for now!) 75 most cogent and intriguing solutions to
Fermi’s famous paradox: If the numbers strongly point to the existence of extraterrestrial
civilizations, why have we found no evidence of them?

Progress: page 176 of 434.

Death’s End by Cixin Liu

With The Three-Body Problem, English-speaking readers got their first chance to read China’s most beloved science fiction author, Cixin Liu. The Three-Body Problem was released to great acclaim, including coverage in The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal and reading list picks by Barack Obama and Mark Zuckerberg. It also won the Hugo and Nebula Awards, making it the first translated novel to win a major SF award.

Now, this epic trilogy concludes with Death’s End. Half a century after the Doomsday Battle, the uneasy balance of Dark Forest Deterrence keeps the Trisolaran invaders at bay. Earth enjoys unprecedented prosperity due to the infusion of Trisolaran knowledge. With human science advancing daily and the Trisolarans adopting Earth culture, it seems that the two civilizations will soon be able to co-exist peacefully as equals without the terrible threat of mutually assured annihilation. But the peace has also made humanity complacent.

Cheng Xin, an aerospace engineer from the early twenty-first century, awakens from hibernation in this new age. She brings with her knowledge of a long-forgotten program dating from the beginning of the Trisolar Crisis, and her very presence may upset the delicate balance between two worlds. Will humanity reach for the stars or die in its cradle?

Progress: page 599 of 724

In A Lonely Place by Karl Edward Wagner

Karl Edward Wagner (1945-1994) has earned a reputation as one of the finest horror writers of the modern era, but his work has been out of print and nearly unobtainable for many years. His seminal volume In a Lonely Place collects eight of his best tales, including “In the Pines,” a classic ghost story evocatively set in the Tennessee woods, “Beyond Any Measure,” an original take on the vampire story, “River of Night’s Dreaming,” a surreal and nightmarish masterpiece inspired by The King in Yellow, and the author’s most famous tale, “Sticks,” a disturbing story thought by many to have been the basis for The Blair Witch Project.
​
This new edition includes all the stories from the original 1983 edition, plus an additional rare tale and the author’s afterword from the Scream/Press limited edition, and features a new introduction by Ramsey Campbell.

Progress: page 132 of 270

How to Market a Book: Overperform in a Crowded Market by Ricardo Fayet

Writing a book is hard. Marketing it can be even harder.

Marketing a book in 2021 can seem like a full-time job, what with the crazy number of things authors seem to be expected to do: social media, blog tours, advertising, price promotions, mailing lists, giveaways, you name it.

But here’s a little secret: you don’t need to do all those things to successfully set your book on the path to success. What you need is a solid plan to find the one or two tactics that will work, and start to drive sales… in a minimum amount of time. And that’s exactly what you’ll find in this book.

Instead of drowning you in information or inundating you with hundreds of different tactics and strategies that eventually prove fruitless, this book will guide you through a step-by-step framework to find the ones that actually work for you and your book, so that you can start marketing more efficiently.

In particular, you’ll learn:

• How to change your mindset and sell more books with less effort.;
• How to write books that guarantee a lasting, profitable career;
• How to get Amazon’s Kindle Store to market your book for you;
• How to get thousands of readers into your mailing list before you even release the book;
• How to propel your book to the top of the charts at launch; and
• How to automate your marketing so that you can spend less time marketing and more time writing,

After helping over 150,000 authors crack the marketing code through a popular weekly newsletter, Reedsy’s Co-founder Ricardo Fayet is sharing everything he’s learned over the past few years in this beginner-friendly, jargon-free guide to book marketing.

Progress: Kindle Book 58%

Leave the World Behind by Rumaan Alam

A magnetic novel about two families, strangers to each other, who are forced together on a long weekend gone terribly wrong

Amanda and Clay head to a remote corner of Long Island expecting a a quiet reprieve from life in New York City, quality time with their teenage son and daughter and a taste of the good life in the luxurious home they’ve rented for the week. But with a late-night knock on the door, the spell is broken. Ruth and G. H., an older couple who claim to own the home, have arrived there in a panic. These strangers say that a sudden power outage has swept the city, and – with nowhere else to turn – they have come to the country in search of shelter.

But with the TV and internet down, and no phone service, the facts are unknowable. Should Amanda and Clay trust this couple – and vice versa? What has happened back in New York? Is the holiday home, isolated from civilisation, a truly safe place for their families? And are they safe from one another?

Progress: page 27 of 241

Holus Bolus by William Pauley III

OUR PROTAGONIST is pretty sure he’s just committed a murder. The body is newly dead, he’s the only one around, and a quick look at the evidence suggests he’s guilty as sin.

Also, he’s totally insane.

A rare brain condition causes his memories to reset every day, and because of this, he often wakes up in strange places with no memory of how he got there. He can’t even remember his own name. When he’s not racking his brain over his shoddy memory, he’s arguing incessantly with a disembodied voice that doesn’t seem to belong to him, one he can only hear inside his head.

He may not know much about the troubling situation he just woke up to, but he knows, without a doubt, that he’s completely f*cked.

While the odds are certainly stacked against him, there may be hope for our protagonist yet, for clutched in the corpse’s cold, clammy hands is a handwritten tome that suggests not only his innocence, but also reveals some bizarre and dangerous secrets, leading him to believe his own apartment building may be to blame… or is, at the very least, an accomplice.

That sounded better inside his head.

Luckily he’s not the only one trying to solve the case. The book also leads him to a group of outcasts who are in the midst of their own investigation. The only problem? They all suspect one another!

One thing’s for certain, someone inside the tower is a cold-blooded killer. Can our protagonist solve the murder before he falls asleep and his memories reset? Or worse, before the killer strikes again?

Find out in HOLUS BOLUS. You’ll be pushed to the very edge of sanity!

Progress: Audiobook 90%

Elsie’s Tune: One Last Song to Overcome by Jonathan Watson

“She took the record out and put it on. As it started to play, she simply didn’t know if good memories would come back. Maybe bad memories would overtake them. Whichever way she felt, she just knew that it was ‘absolutely necessary’ to purely have it play.”

Elsie Ragusin started out in life with everything laid out. She was passionate about God, music, and her family. However, life would soon test her in the most unimaginable ways. She would realize that during the worst atrocities that human history has ever witnessed, she had to rely completely on her Christian faith to get by. Some days, she never ate or felt too weak to work in the concentration camps. Her mental strength in using music and the hope of getting back to her family helped her get through it in 1945. Yet, those haunting memories are what she still has to overcome. Will she use the talents that God has given her to show her present family that one can truly overcome anything? Listen and follow along with Elsie’s Tune. 

Progress: page 54 of 334

Time Travel Thursday, February 15, 2024

/ E.A. Hoffmann / Leave a comment

Time Travel Thursday is hosted by Budget Tales Book Blog. This is where I take a look back at what I was reading this time last year (or the year before or the year before that…) and compare it to what I am reading now.

Books I was Reading on This Day in 2023:

Ripper: The Secret Life of Walter Sickert by Patricia Cornwell

From New York Times bestselling author Patricia Cornwell comes Ripper: The Secret Life of Walter Sickert, a comprehensive and intriguing exposé of one of the world’s most chilling cases of serial murder—and the police force that failed to solve it.

Vain and charismatic Walter Sickert made a name for himself as a painter in Victorian London. But the ghoulish nature of his art—as well as extensive evidence—points to another name, one that’s left its bloody mark on the pages of history: Jack the Ripper. Cornwell has collected never-before-seen archival material—including a rare mortuary photo, personal correspondence and a will with a mysterious autopsy clause—and applied cutting-edge forensic science to open an old crime to new scrutiny.

Incorporating material from Portrait of a Killer: Jack the Ripper—Case Closed, this new edition has been revised and expanded to include eight new chapters, detailed maps and hundreds of images that bring the sinister case to life.

See my review of this book here.

Starvation Heights: A True Story of Murder and Malice in the Woods of the Pacific Northwest by Gregg Olsen

In this true story—a haunting saga of medical murder set in an era of steamships and gaslights—Gregg Olsen reveals one of the most unusual and disturbing criminal cases in American history.

In 1911 two wealthy British heiresses, Claire and Dora Williamson, arrived at a sanitorium in the forests of the Pacific Northwest to undergo the revolutionary “fasting treatment” of Dr. Linda Burfield Hazzard. It was supposed to be a holiday for the two sisters, but within a month of arriving at what the locals called Starvation Heights, the women underwent brutal treatments and were emaciated shadows of their former selves.

Claire and Dora were not the first victims of Linda Hazzard, a quack doctor of extraordinary evil and greed. But as their jewelry disappeared and forged bank drafts began transferring their wealth to Hazzard’s accounts, the sisters came to learn that Hazzard would stop at nothing short of murder to achieve her ambitions.

See my review of this book here.

Your First Novel Revised and Expanded Edition: A Top Agent and a Published Author Show You How to Write Your Book and Get It Published by Ann Rittenberg and Laura Whitcomb

Your Expert Guide to Writing and Publishing a NovelIn this revised and expanded edition of Your First Novel, novelist Laura Whitcomb, seasoned literary agent Ann Rittenberg, and her knowledgeable assistant, Camille Goldin, team up to provide you with the essential skills needed to craft the best novel you can–and the savvy business know-how to get it published. Complete with updated references, analysis of new best-selling novels, and the same detailed instruction, Whitcomb will show you how    • Practice the craft of writing, using both your right- and left-brain   • Develop a flexible card system for organizing and outlining plot   • Create dynamic characters that readers love–and love to hate   • Study classic novels and story structure to adapt with your ideasFeaturing two new chapters on choosing your path as an author and understanding the world of self-publishing, Rittenberg and Goldin dive into the business side of publishing,    • What agents can–and should–do for your future   • Who you should target as an agent for your burgeoning career   • How the mysterious auction for novels actually goes down   • Why you should learn to work with your agent through thick and thin. Guiding your first novel from early words to a spot on the bookshelf can be an exciting and terrifying journey, but you’re not alone. Alongside the advice of industry veterans, Your First Novel Revised and Expanded also includes plenty of firsthand accounts from published authors on their journeys, including Dennis Lehane, C.J. Box, Kathleen McCleary, David Kazzie, and more.

See my review of this book here.

Our Missing Hearts by Celeste Ng

Twelve-year-old Bird Gardner lives a quiet existence with his loving but broken father, a former linguist who now shelves books in a university library. Bird knows to not ask too many questions, stand out too much, or stray too far. For a decade, their lives have been governed by laws written to preserve “American culture” in the wake of years of economic instability and violence. To keep the peace and restore prosperity, the authorities are now allowed to relocate children of dissidents, especially those of Asian origin, and libraries have been forced to remove books seen as unpatriotic—including the work of Bird’s mother, Margaret, a Chinese American poet who left the family when he was nine years old.

Bird has grown up disavowing his mother and her poems; he doesn’t know her work or what happened to her, and he knows he shouldn’t wonder. But when he receives a mysterious letter containing only a cryptic drawing, he is pulled into a quest to find her. His journey will take him back to the many folktales she poured into his head as a child, through the ranks of an underground network of librarians, into the lives of the children who have been taken, and finally to New York City, where a new act of defiance may be the beginning of much-needed change.

See my review of this book here.

What I’m Reading Now:

If the Universe Is Teeming with Aliens … WHERE IS EVERYBODY? by Stephen Webb

Given the fact that there are perhaps 400 billion stars in our Galaxy alone, and perhaps
400 billion galaxies in the Universe, it stands to reason that somewhere out there, in the
14-billion-year-old cosmos, there is or once was a civilization at least as advanced as our
own. The sheer enormity of the numbers almost demands that we accept the truth of this
hypothesis. Why, then, have we encountered no evidence, no messages, no artifacts of
these extraterrestrials? 
In this second, significantly revised and expanded edition of his widely popular book,
Webb discusses in detail the (for now!) 75 most cogent and intriguing solutions to
Fermi’s famous paradox: If the numbers strongly point to the existence of extraterrestrial
civilizations, why have we found no evidence of them?

Progress: page 176 of 434.

Death’s End by Cixin Liu

With The Three-Body Problem, English-speaking readers got their first chance to read China’s most beloved science fiction author, Cixin Liu. The Three-Body Problem was released to great acclaim, including coverage in The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal and reading list picks by Barack Obama and Mark Zuckerberg. It also won the Hugo and Nebula Awards, making it the first translated novel to win a major SF award.

Now, this epic trilogy concludes with Death’s End. Half a century after the Doomsday Battle, the uneasy balance of Dark Forest Deterrence keeps the Trisolaran invaders at bay. Earth enjoys unprecedented prosperity due to the infusion of Trisolaran knowledge. With human science advancing daily and the Trisolarans adopting Earth culture, it seems that the two civilizations will soon be able to co-exist peacefully as equals without the terrible threat of mutually assured annihilation. But the peace has also made humanity complacent.

Cheng Xin, an aerospace engineer from the early twenty-first century, awakens from hibernation in this new age. She brings with her knowledge of a long-forgotten program dating from the beginning of the Trisolar Crisis, and her very presence may upset the delicate balance between two worlds. Will humanity reach for the stars or die in its cradle?

Progress: page 354 of 724

In A Lonely Place by Karl Edward Wagner

Karl Edward Wagner (1945-1994) has earned a reputation as one of the finest horror writers of the modern era, but his work has been out of print and nearly unobtainable for many years. His seminal volume In a Lonely Place collects eight of his best tales, including “In the Pines,” a classic ghost story evocatively set in the Tennessee woods, “Beyond Any Measure,” an original take on the vampire story, “River of Night’s Dreaming,” a surreal and nightmarish masterpiece inspired by The King in Yellow, and the author’s most famous tale, “Sticks,” a disturbing story thought by many to have been the basis for The Blair Witch Project.
​
This new edition includes all the stories from the original 1983 edition, plus an additional rare tale and the author’s afterword from the Scream/Press limited edition, and features a new introduction by Ramsey Campbell.

Progress: page 92 of 270

How to Market a Book: Overperform in a Crowded Market by Ricardo Fayet

Writing a book is hard. Marketing it can be even harder.

Marketing a book in 2021 can seem like a full-time job, what with the crazy number of things authors seem to be expected to do: social media, blog tours, advertising, price promotions, mailing lists, giveaways, you name it.

But here’s a little secret: you don’t need to do all those things to successfully set your book on the path to success. What you need is a solid plan to find the one or two tactics that will work, and start to drive sales… in a minimum amount of time. And that’s exactly what you’ll find in this book.

Instead of drowning you in information or inundating you with hundreds of different tactics and strategies that eventually prove fruitless, this book will guide you through a step-by-step framework to find the ones that actually work for you and your book, so that you can start marketing more efficiently.

In particular, you’ll learn:

• How to change your mindset and sell more books with less effort.;
• How to write books that guarantee a lasting, profitable career;
• How to get Amazon’s Kindle Store to market your book for you;
• How to get thousands of readers into your mailing list before you even release the book;
• How to propel your book to the top of the charts at launch; and
• How to automate your marketing so that you can spend less time marketing and more time writing,

After helping over 150,000 authors crack the marketing code through a popular weekly newsletter, Reedsy’s Co-founder Ricardo Fayet is sharing everything he’s learned over the past few years in this beginner-friendly, jargon-free guide to book marketing.

Progress: Kindle Book 48%

Hearers of the Constant Hum by William Pauley III

Della Comb is the queen of her hive. She’s only in her early twenties, but she’s already managed to build an empire selling drugs to junkies who are looking for the ultimate escape. The key to her success is that she manufactures her drugs with a secret ingredient: a very specific blend of pesticides.

Her only problem is the two bumbling exterminators she’s come to rely on for product. They spend more time playing video games and making armchair philosophies than actually working. Thankfully, they realize they too are short on supplies—pizza and breakfast burritos—so they give her a call, asking to meet up at the Chase High Rise, a building known for its unique brand of squalor.

Immediately, she feels sick to her stomach. Not only is the place absolutely disgusting, but it’s also home to Bill Krang, a man who claims to hear insects speaking. The things they say don’t make sense, even to him, but the words are causing him to physically deteriorate at a rapid pace.

Della’s ultimate fear is meeting this man and contracting his disease. However, business is business, and Krang’s apartment is abundant of product. Before long, she finds herself thrown straight into her worst nightmare, and the experience…changes her.

HEARERS OF THE CONSTANT HUM challenges its readers to work against instinct by exposing the dangers of our own curiosity. It’s more than just a story, it’s a warning of a much needed social change. We either take its advice, or risk rewriting what it means to be human in a world ran by insects.

Progress: Audiobook 41%

Goodreads Monday: February 12, 2024

/ E.A. Hoffmann / 2 Comments

Goodreads Monday is hosted by Budget Tales Book Blog. “Goodreads Monday allows you to post about what books are on your “to read” lists, the progress you have made on your current books and reading challenge, and any other Goodreads news!”

Books I Finished In the Past Week:

Chaos in Color: A Memoir of Childhood Trauma and Forgiveness by R. Layla Salek

From a young age, Layla Salek has experienced some people as colors—her mother brown, her father green, her husband rainbow. As she notes, sometimes, when words fail, colors speak.

Chaos in Color is the captivating story of Layla’s journey from childhood to adulthood with a mother who suffered from untreated bipolar disorder. Each chapter paints a vivid, heartbreaking picture of the abuse, neglect, and trauma that she experienced as she grew up at the mercy of her mother’s bipolar swings, an incompetent mental health system, and the strangers with whom she was often left. But dissipating those times of darkness were moments of love, joy, and happiness that she felt while being cared for by others in her life. These moments inspired her to start her own family, complete a doctorate in psychology, and work with children with mental illness and severe behavior disorders.

Layla’s story traces how personal and familial trauma is carried into adulthood and how it can be released through forgiveness. This honest, provocative memoir offers a relatable account for others who have experienced similar trauma, as well as hope for healing and a future full of light.

See my review of this book here.

Automated Daydreaming by William Pauley III

This is a cycle. Unalleviated, its components are connected by electricity and fed through the rage of lightning. Insect and road monsters scour the desert. Bodies morph into new constructions, only partially human and searching for conclusion. Tongues entwine in an embrace of benthos, while mermaids and jellyfish glow in tandem. The moon is waiting. Dream.

See my review of this book here.

Books I am Currently Reading:

If the Universe Is Teeming with Aliens … WHERE IS EVERYBODY? by Stephen Webb

Given the fact that there are perhaps 400 billion stars in our Galaxy alone, and perhaps
400 billion galaxies in the Universe, it stands to reason that somewhere out there, in the
14-billion-year-old cosmos, there is or once was a civilization at least as advanced as our
own. The sheer enormity of the numbers almost demands that we accept the truth of this
hypothesis. Why, then, have we encountered no evidence, no messages, no artifacts of
these extraterrestrials? 
In this second, significantly revised and expanded edition of his widely popular book,
Webb discusses in detail the (for now!) 75 most cogent and intriguing solutions to
Fermi’s famous paradox: If the numbers strongly point to the existence of extraterrestrial
civilizations, why have we found no evidence of them?

Progress: page 176 of 434. (Jan 6, 155, Jan 15, 164, Jan 29, 171, Feb 5, 176 )

Death’s End by Cixin Liu

With The Three-Body Problem, English-speaking readers got their first chance to read China’s most beloved science fiction author, Cixin Liu. The Three-Body Problem was released to great acclaim, including coverage in The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal and reading list picks by Barack Obama and Mark Zuckerberg. It also won the Hugo and Nebula Awards, making it the first translated novel to win a major SF award.

Now, this epic trilogy concludes with Death’s End. Half a century after the Doomsday Battle, the uneasy balance of Dark Forest Deterrence keeps the Trisolaran invaders at bay. Earth enjoys unprecedented prosperity due to the infusion of Trisolaran knowledge. With human science advancing daily and the Trisolarans adopting Earth culture, it seems that the two civilizations will soon be able to co-exist peacefully as equals without the terrible threat of mutually assured annihilation. But the peace has also made humanity complacent.

Cheng Xin, an aerospace engineer from the early twenty-first century, awakens from hibernation in this new age. She brings with her knowledge of a long-forgotten program dating from the beginning of the Trisolar Crisis, and her very presence may upset the delicate balance between two worlds. Will humanity reach for the stars or die in its cradle?

Progress: page 345 of 724 (Feb 5, 328)

In A Lonely Place by Karl Edward Wagner

Karl Edward Wagner (1945-1994) has earned a reputation as one of the finest horror writers of the modern era, but his work has been out of print and nearly unobtainable for many years. His seminal volume In a Lonely Place collects eight of his best tales, including “In the Pines,” a classic ghost story evocatively set in the Tennessee woods, “Beyond Any Measure,” an original take on the vampire story, “River of Night’s Dreaming,” a surreal and nightmarish masterpiece inspired by The King in Yellow, and the author’s most famous tale, “Sticks,” a disturbing story thought by many to have been the basis for The Blair Witch Project.
​
This new edition includes all the stories from the original 1983 edition, plus an additional rare tale and the author’s afterword from the Scream/Press limited edition, and features a new introduction by Ramsey Campbell.

Progress: page 92 of 270 (Feb 5, 42)

How to Market a Book: Overperform in a Crowded Market by Ricardo Fayet

Writing a book is hard. Marketing it can be even harder.

Marketing a book in 2021 can seem like a full-time job, what with the crazy number of things authors seem to be expected to do: social media, blog tours, advertising, price promotions, mailing lists, giveaways, you name it.

But here’s a little secret: you don’t need to do all those things to successfully set your book on the path to success. What you need is a solid plan to find the one or two tactics that will work, and start to drive sales… in a minimum amount of time. And that’s exactly what you’ll find in this book.

Instead of drowning you in information or inundating you with hundreds of different tactics and strategies that eventually prove fruitless, this book will guide you through a step-by-step framework to find the ones that actually work for you and your book, so that you can start marketing more efficiently.

In particular, you’ll learn:

• How to change your mindset and sell more books with less effort.;
• How to write books that guarantee a lasting, profitable career;
• How to get Amazon’s Kindle Store to market your book for you;
• How to get thousands of readers into your mailing list before you even release the book;
• How to propel your book to the top of the charts at launch; and
• How to automate your marketing so that you can spend less time marketing and more time writing,

After helping over 150,000 authors crack the marketing code through a popular weekly newsletter, Reedsy’s Co-founder Ricardo Fayet is sharing everything he’s learned over the past few years in this beginner-friendly, jargon-free guide to book marketing.

Progress: Kindle Book 45% (Feb 5, 9%)

Book I Will Read:

Title: Hunt, Gather, Parent

Author: Michaeleen Doucleff, PhD

Published: 2021

Pages: 353

Genres: Nonfiction, Parenting, Family, Children, Self-help, Psychology

Goodreads Synopsis: When Dr. Michaeleen Doucleff becomes a mother, she examines the studies behind modern parenting guidance and finds the evidence frustratingly limited and the conclusions often ineffective. Curious to learn about more effective parenting approaches, she visits a Maya village in the Yucatán Peninsula. There she encounters moms and dads who parent in a totally different way than we do—and raise extraordinarily kind, generous, and helpful children without yelling, nagging, or issuing timeouts. What else, Doucleff wonders, are Western parents missing out on?

In Hunt, Gather, Parent, Doucleff sets out with her three-year-old daughter in tow to learn and practice parenting strategies from families in three of the world’s most venerable communities: Maya families in Mexico, Inuit families above the Arctic Circle, and Hadzabe families in Tanzania. She sees that these cultures don’t have the same problems with children that Western parents do. Most strikingly, parents build a relationship with young children that is vastly different from the one many Western parents develop—it’s built on cooperation instead of control, trust instead of fear, and personalized needs instead of standardized development milestones.

Maya parents are masters at raising cooperative children. Without resorting to bribes, threats, or chore charts, Maya parents rear loyal helpers by including kids in household tasks from the time they can walk. Inuit parents have developed a remarkably effective approach for teaching children emotional intelligence. When kids cry, hit, or act out, Inuit parents respond with a calm, gentle demeanor that teaches children how to settle themselves down and think before acting. Hadzabe parents are world experts on raising confident, self-driven kids with a simple tool that protects children from stress and anxiety, so common now among American kids.

Not only does Doucleff live with families and observe their techniques firsthand, she also applies them with her own daughter, with striking results. She learns to discipline without yelling. She talks to psychologists, neuroscientists, anthropologists, and sociologists and explains how these strategies can impact children’s mental health and development. Filled with practical takeaways that parents can implement immediately, Hunt, Gather, Parent helps us rethink the ways we relate to our children, and reveals a universal parenting paradigm adapted for American families.

Time Travel Thursday, February 8, 2024

/ E.A. Hoffmann / Leave a comment

Time Travel Thursday is hosted by Budget Tales Book Blog. This is where I take a look back at what I was reading this time last year (or the year before or the year before that…) and compare it to what I am reading now.

Books I was Reading on This Day in 2023:

It Starts with Us by Colleen Hoover

Before It Ends with Us, it started with Atlas. Colleen Hoover tells fan favorite Atlas’s side of the story and shares what comes next in this long-anticipated sequel to the “glorious and touching” (USA TODAY) #1 New York Times bestseller It Ends with Us.

Lily and her ex-husband, Ryle, have just settled into a civil coparenting rhythm when she suddenly bumps into her first love, Atlas, again. After nearly two years separated, she is elated that for once, time is on their side, and she immediately says yes when Atlas asks her on a date.

But her excitement is quickly hampered by the knowledge that, though they are no longer married, Ryle is still very much a part of her life—and Atlas Corrigan is the one man he will hate being in his ex-wife and daughter’s life.

Switching between the perspectives of Lily and Atlas, It Starts with Us picks up right where the epilogue for the “gripping, pulse-pounding” (Sarah Pekkanen, author of Perfect Neighbors) bestselling phenomenon It Ends with Us left off. Revealing more about Atlas’s past and following Lily as she embraces a second chance at true love while navigating a jealous ex-husband, it proves that “no one delivers an emotional read like Colleen Hoover” (Anna Todd, New York Times bestselling author).

See my review of this book here.

Fairy Tale by Stephen King

Charlie Reade looks like a regular high school kid, great at baseball and football, a decent student. But he carries a heavy load. His mom was killed in a hit-and-run accident when he was ten, and grief drove his dad to drink. Charlie learned how to take care of himself—and his dad. Then, when Charlie is seventeen, he meets Howard Bowditch, a recluse with a big dog in a big house at the top of a big hill. In the backyard is a locked shed from which strange sounds emerge, as if some creature is trying to escape. When Mr. Bowditch dies, he leaves Charlie the house, a massive amount of gold, a cassette tape telling a story that is impossible to believe, and a responsibility far too massive for a boy to shoulder.

Because within the shed is a portal to another world—one whose denizens are in peril and whose monstrous leaders may destroy their own world, and ours. In this parallel universe, where two moons race across the sky, and the grand towers of a sprawling palace pierce the clouds, there are exiled princesses and princes who suffer horrific punishments; there are dungeons; there are games in which men and women must fight each other to the death for the amusement of the “Fair One.” And there is a magic sundial that can turn back time.

A story as old as myth, and as startling and iconic as the rest of King’s work, Fairy Tale is about an ordinary guy forced into the hero’s role by circumstance, and it is both spectacularly suspenseful and satisfying.

See the review of this book here.

Starvation Heights: A True Story of Murder and Malice in the Woods of the Pacific Northwest by Gregg Olsen

In this true story—a haunting saga of medical murder set in an era of steamships and gaslights—Gregg Olsen reveals one of the most unusual and disturbing criminal cases in American history.

In 1911 two wealthy British heiresses, Claire and Dora Williamson, arrived at a sanitorium in the forests of the Pacific Northwest to undergo the revolutionary “fasting treatment” of Dr. Linda Burfield Hazzard. It was supposed to be a holiday for the two sisters, but within a month of arriving at what the locals called Starvation Heights, the women underwent brutal treatments and were emaciated shadows of their former selves.

Claire and Dora were not the first victims of Linda Hazzard, a quack doctor of extraordinary evil and greed. But as their jewelry disappeared and forged bank drafts began transferring their wealth to Hazzard’s accounts, the sisters came to learn that Hazzard would stop at nothing short of murder to achieve her ambitions.

See my review of this book here.

Ripper: The Secret Life of Walter Sickert by Patricia Cornwell

From New York Times bestselling author Patricia Cornwell comes Ripper: The Secret Life of Walter Sickert, a comprehensive and intriguing exposé of one of the world’s most chilling cases of serial murder—and the police force that failed to solve it.

Vain and charismatic Walter Sickert made a name for himself as a painter in Victorian London. But the ghoulish nature of his art—as well as extensive evidence—points to another name, one that’s left its bloody mark on the pages of history: Jack the Ripper. Cornwell has collected never-before-seen archival material—including a rare mortuary photo, personal correspondence and a will with a mysterious autopsy clause—and applied cutting-edge forensic science to open an old crime to new scrutiny.

Incorporating material from Portrait of a Killer: Jack the Ripper—Case Closed, this new edition has been revised and expanded to include eight new chapters, detailed maps and hundreds of images that bring the sinister case to life.

See my review of this book here.

Your First Novel Revised and Expanded Edition: A Top Agent and a Published Author Show You How to Write Your Book and Get It Published by Ann Rittenberg and Laura Whitcomb

Your Expert Guide to Writing and Publishing a NovelIn this revised and expanded edition of Your First Novel, novelist Laura Whitcomb, seasoned literary agent Ann Rittenberg, and her knowledgeable assistant, Camille Goldin, team up to provide you with the essential skills needed to craft the best novel you can–and the savvy business know-how to get it published. Complete with updated references, analysis of new best-selling novels, and the same detailed instruction, Whitcomb will show you how    • Practice the craft of writing, using both your right- and left-brain   • Develop a flexible card system for organizing and outlining plot   • Create dynamic characters that readers love–and love to hate   • Study classic novels and story structure to adapt with your ideasFeaturing two new chapters on choosing your path as an author and understanding the world of self-publishing, Rittenberg and Goldin dive into the business side of publishing,    • What agents can–and should–do for your future   • Who you should target as an agent for your burgeoning career   • How the mysterious auction for novels actually goes down   • Why you should learn to work with your agent through thick and thin. Guiding your first novel from early words to a spot on the bookshelf can be an exciting and terrifying journey, but you’re not alone. Alongside the advice of industry veterans, Your First Novel Revised and Expanded also includes plenty of firsthand accounts from published authors on their journeys, including Dennis Lehane, C.J. Box, Kathleen McCleary, David Kazzie, and more.

See my review of this book here.

What I’m Reading Now:

If the Universe Is Teeming with Aliens … WHERE IS EVERYBODY? by Stephen Webb

Given the fact that there are perhaps 400 billion stars in our Galaxy alone, and perhaps
400 billion galaxies in the Universe, it stands to reason that somewhere out there, in the
14-billion-year-old cosmos, there is or once was a civilization at least as advanced as our
own. The sheer enormity of the numbers almost demands that we accept the truth of this
hypothesis. Why, then, have we encountered no evidence, no messages, no artifacts of
these extraterrestrials? 
In this second, significantly revised and expanded edition of his widely popular book,
Webb discusses in detail the (for now!) 75 most cogent and intriguing solutions to
Fermi’s famous paradox: If the numbers strongly point to the existence of extraterrestrial
civilizations, why have we found no evidence of them?

Progress: page 176 of 434.

Death’s End by Cixin Liu

With The Three-Body Problem, English-speaking readers got their first chance to read China’s most beloved science fiction author, Cixin Liu. The Three-Body Problem was released to great acclaim, including coverage in The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal and reading list picks by Barack Obama and Mark Zuckerberg. It also won the Hugo and Nebula Awards, making it the first translated novel to win a major SF award.

Now, this epic trilogy concludes with Death’s End. Half a century after the Doomsday Battle, the uneasy balance of Dark Forest Deterrence keeps the Trisolaran invaders at bay. Earth enjoys unprecedented prosperity due to the infusion of Trisolaran knowledge. With human science advancing daily and the Trisolarans adopting Earth culture, it seems that the two civilizations will soon be able to co-exist peacefully as equals without the terrible threat of mutually assured annihilation. But the peace has also made humanity complacent.

Cheng Xin, an aerospace engineer from the early twenty-first century, awakens from hibernation in this new age. She brings with her knowledge of a long-forgotten program dating from the beginning of the Trisolar Crisis, and her very presence may upset the delicate balance between two worlds. Will humanity reach for the stars or die in its cradle?

Progress: page 328 of 724

In A Lonely Place by Karl Edward Wagner

Karl Edward Wagner (1945-1994) has earned a reputation as one of the finest horror writers of the modern era, but his work has been out of print and nearly unobtainable for many years. His seminal volume In a Lonely Place collects eight of his best tales, including “In the Pines,” a classic ghost story evocatively set in the Tennessee woods, “Beyond Any Measure,” an original take on the vampire story, “River of Night’s Dreaming,” a surreal and nightmarish masterpiece inspired by The King in Yellow, and the author’s most famous tale, “Sticks,” a disturbing story thought by many to have been the basis for The Blair Witch Project.
​
This new edition includes all the stories from the original 1983 edition, plus an additional rare tale and the author’s afterword from the Scream/Press limited edition, and features a new introduction by Ramsey Campbell.

Progress: page 42 of 270

Chaos in Color: A Memoir of Childhood Trauma and Forgiveness by R. Layla Salek

From a young age, Layla Salek has experienced some people as colors—her mother brown, her father green, her husband rainbow. As she notes, sometimes, when words fail, colors speak.

Chaos in Color is the captivating story of Layla’s journey from childhood to adulthood with a mother who suffered from untreated bipolar disorder. Each chapter paints a vivid, heartbreaking picture of the abuse, neglect, and trauma that she experienced as she grew up at the mercy of her mother’s bipolar swings, an incompetent mental health system, and the strangers with whom she was often left. But dissipating those times of darkness were moments of love, joy, and happiness that she felt while being cared for by others in her life. These moments inspired her to start her own family, complete a doctorate in psychology, and work with children with mental illness and severe behavior disorders.

Layla’s story traces how personal and familial trauma is carried into adulthood and how it can be released through forgiveness. This honest, provocative memoir offers a relatable account for others who have experienced similar trauma, as well as hope for healing and a future full of light.

Progress: Audiobook 81%

How to Market a Book: Overperform in a Crowded Market by Ricardo Fayet

Writing a book is hard. Marketing it can be even harder.

Marketing a book in 2021 can seem like a full-time job, what with the crazy number of things authors seem to be expected to do: social media, blog tours, advertising, price promotions, mailing lists, giveaways, you name it.

But here’s a little secret: you don’t need to do all those things to successfully set your book on the path to success. What you need is a solid plan to find the one or two tactics that will work, and start to drive sales… in a minimum amount of time. And that’s exactly what you’ll find in this book.

Instead of drowning you in information or inundating you with hundreds of different tactics and strategies that eventually prove fruitless, this book will guide you through a step-by-step framework to find the ones that actually work for you and your book, so that you can start marketing more efficiently.

In particular, you’ll learn:

• How to change your mindset and sell more books with less effort.;
• How to write books that guarantee a lasting, profitable career;
• How to get Amazon’s Kindle Store to market your book for you;
• How to get thousands of readers into your mailing list before you even release the book;
• How to propel your book to the top of the charts at launch; and
• How to automate your marketing so that you can spend less time marketing and more time writing,

After helping over 150,000 authors crack the marketing code through a popular weekly newsletter, Reedsy’s Co-founder Ricardo Fayet is sharing everything he’s learned over the past few years in this beginner-friendly, jargon-free guide to book marketing.

Progress: Kindle Book 9%

First Chapter, First Paragraph, Tuesday, February 6, 2024: In a Lonely Place by Karl Edward Wagner

/ E.A. Hoffmann / Leave a comment

First Chapter First Paragraph Tuesday! Hosted by Socrates Book Reviews this is where you share the first paragraph of one of the books that you are currently reading.

“There is an atmosphere of unutterable loneliness that haunts any ruin–a feeling particularly evident in those places once given over to the lighter emotions. Wander over the littered grounds of an abandoned amusement park and feel the overwhelming presence of desolation. Flimsy booths with awnings tattered in the wind, rotting heaps of sun-bleached papier-mache. Crumbling timbers of a roller coaster thrust upward through the jungle of weeds and debris–like ribs of some titantic unburied skeleton. The wind blows colder there; the sun seems dimmer. Ghosts of laughter, lost strains of raucous music can almost be heard. Speak, and your voice sounds strangely loud–and yet curiously smothered.”

page 1

Goodreads Monday: February 5, 2024

/ E.A. Hoffmann / Leave a comment

Goodreads Monday is hosted by Budget Tales Book Blog. “Goodreads Monday allows you to post about what books are on your “to read” lists, the progress you have made on your current books and reading challenge, and any other Goodreads news!”

Books I Finished In the Past Week:

The No-Cry Sleep Solution for Toddlers and Preschoolers: Gentle Ways to Stop Bedtime Battles and Improve Your Child’s Sleep by Elizabeth Pantley

Guaranteed to help parents reclaim sweet dreams for their entire family New from the bestselling author of the classic baby sleep guide! Getting babies to sleep through the night is one thing; getting willful toddlers and energetic preschoolers to sleep is another problem altogether. Written to help sleep-deprived parents of children ages one to five, The No-Cry Sleep Solution for Toddlers and Preschoolers offers loving solutions to help this active age-group get the rest they–and their parents–so desperately need. A follow-up to Elizabeth Pantley’s megahit The No-Cry Sleep Solution , this breakthrough guide is written in Pantley’s trademark gentle, child-centered style. Parents will discover a wellspring of positive approaches to help their children get to bed, stay in bed, and sleep all night, without having to resort to punishments or other negative and ineffective measures. The No-Cry Sleep Solution for Toddlers and Preschoolers tackles many common nighttime obstacles.

Doc Doc Zeus: A Novel of White Coat Crime by Thomas Keech

Still mourning the baby she gave away a year before – and feeling rejected by the same church people who had so cheerfully arranged that adoption – sixteen-year-old Diane seems to find a supportive friend in her gynecologist, Dr. Zeus. Diane is intelligent and bold but often leaps before she looks, and now she questions why he has to examine her so often, and why he prescribes her so many drugs. The state medical board also has suspicions about Dr. Zeus, but the official inquiry inches forward very slowly as its new investigator stumbles over his own hang-ups.

See my review of this book here.

Books I am Currently Reading:

If the Universe Is Teeming with Aliens … WHERE IS EVERYBODY? by Stephen Webb

Given the fact that there are perhaps 400 billion stars in our Galaxy alone, and perhaps
400 billion galaxies in the Universe, it stands to reason that somewhere out there, in the
14-billion-year-old cosmos, there is or once was a civilization at least as advanced as our
own. The sheer enormity of the numbers almost demands that we accept the truth of this
hypothesis. Why, then, have we encountered no evidence, no messages, no artifacts of
these extraterrestrials? 
In this second, significantly revised and expanded edition of his widely popular book,
Webb discusses in detail the (for now!) 75 most cogent and intriguing solutions to
Fermi’s famous paradox: If the numbers strongly point to the existence of extraterrestrial
civilizations, why have we found no evidence of them?

Progress: page 176 of 434. (Jan 6, 155, Jan 15, 164, Jan 29, 171 )

Death’s End by Cixin Liu

With The Three-Body Problem, English-speaking readers got their first chance to read China’s most beloved science fiction author, Cixin Liu. The Three-Body Problem was released to great acclaim, including coverage in The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal and reading list picks by Barack Obama and Mark Zuckerberg. It also won the Hugo and Nebula Awards, making it the first translated novel to win a major SF award.

Now, this epic trilogy concludes with Death’s End. Half a century after the Doomsday Battle, the uneasy balance of Dark Forest Deterrence keeps the Trisolaran invaders at bay. Earth enjoys unprecedented prosperity due to the infusion of Trisolaran knowledge. With human science advancing daily and the Trisolarans adopting Earth culture, it seems that the two civilizations will soon be able to co-exist peacefully as equals without the terrible threat of mutually assured annihilation. But the peace has also made humanity complacent.

Cheng Xin, an aerospace engineer from the early twenty-first century, awakens from hibernation in this new age. She brings with her knowledge of a long-forgotten program dating from the beginning of the Trisolar Crisis, and her very presence may upset the delicate balance between two worlds. Will humanity reach for the stars or die in its cradle?

Progress: page 328 of 724

In A Lonely Place by Karl Edward Wagner

Karl Edward Wagner (1945-1994) has earned a reputation as one of the finest horror writers of the modern era, but his work has been out of print and nearly unobtainable for many years. His seminal volume In a Lonely Place collects eight of his best tales, including “In the Pines,” a classic ghost story evocatively set in the Tennessee woods, “Beyond Any Measure,” an original take on the vampire story, “River of Night’s Dreaming,” a surreal and nightmarish masterpiece inspired by The King in Yellow, and the author’s most famous tale, “Sticks,” a disturbing story thought by many to have been the basis for The Blair Witch Project.
​
This new edition includes all the stories from the original 1983 edition, plus an additional rare tale and the author’s afterword from the Scream/Press limited edition, and features a new introduction by Ramsey Campbell.

Progress: page 42 of 270

Chaos in Color: A Memoir of Childhood Trauma and Forgiveness by R. Layla Salek

From a young age, Layla Salek has experienced some people as colors—her mother brown, her father green, her husband rainbow. As she notes, sometimes, when words fail, colors speak.

Chaos in Color is the captivating story of Layla’s journey from childhood to adulthood with a mother who suffered from untreated bipolar disorder. Each chapter paints a vivid, heartbreaking picture of the abuse, neglect, and trauma that she experienced as she grew up at the mercy of her mother’s bipolar swings, an incompetent mental health system, and the strangers with whom she was often left. But dissipating those times of darkness were moments of love, joy, and happiness that she felt while being cared for by others in her life. These moments inspired her to start her own family, complete a doctorate in psychology, and work with children with mental illness and severe behavior disorders.

Layla’s story traces how personal and familial trauma is carried into adulthood and how it can be released through forgiveness. This honest, provocative memoir offers a relatable account for others who have experienced similar trauma, as well as hope for healing and a future full of light.

Progress: Audiobook 81%

How to Market a Book: Overperform in a Crowded Market by Ricardo Fayet

Writing a book is hard. Marketing it can be even harder.

Marketing a book in 2021 can seem like a full-time job, what with the crazy number of things authors seem to be expected to do: social media, blog tours, advertising, price promotions, mailing lists, giveaways, you name it.

But here’s a little secret: you don’t need to do all those things to successfully set your book on the path to success. What you need is a solid plan to find the one or two tactics that will work, and start to drive sales… in a minimum amount of time. And that’s exactly what you’ll find in this book.

Instead of drowning you in information or inundating you with hundreds of different tactics and strategies that eventually prove fruitless, this book will guide you through a step-by-step framework to find the ones that actually work for you and your book, so that you can start marketing more efficiently.

In particular, you’ll learn:

• How to change your mindset and sell more books with less effort.;
• How to write books that guarantee a lasting, profitable career;
• How to get Amazon’s Kindle Store to market your book for you;
• How to get thousands of readers into your mailing list before you even release the book;
• How to propel your book to the top of the charts at launch; and
• How to automate your marketing so that you can spend less time marketing and more time writing,

After helping over 150,000 authors crack the marketing code through a popular weekly newsletter, Reedsy’s Co-founder Ricardo Fayet is sharing everything he’s learned over the past few years in this beginner-friendly, jargon-free guide to book marketing.

Progress: Kindle Book 9%

Book I Will Read:

Title: Something Blue

Author: Emily Giffin

Published: 2005

Pages: 338

Genres: Fiction, Romance, Contemporary

Goodreads Synopsis: Following the smash-hit Something Borrowed comes story of betrayal, redemption, and forgiveness

Darcy Rhone has always been able to rely on a few things: Her beauty and charm. Her fiance, Dex. Her lifelong best friend, Rachel. She never needed anything else. Or so she thinks until Dex calls off their dream wedding and she uncovers the ultimate betrayal. Blaming everyone but herself, Darcy flees to London and attempts to re-create her glamorous life on a new continent. But to her dismay, she discovers that her tried-and-true tricks no longer apply—and that her luck has finally expired. It is only then that she can begin her journey toward redemption, forgiveness, and true love.

Shelf Control Wednesdays: January 10, 2024

/ E.A. Hoffmann / 2 Comments

Shelf Control is hosted by Bookshelf Fantasies. Instead of always looking ahead to upcoming new releases, I thought I’d start a weekly feature focusing on already released books that I want to read. Consider this a variation of a Wishing & Waiting post… but looking at books already available, and in most cases, books that are either on my shelves or on my Kindle!

Title: In a Lonely Place

Author: Karl Edward Wagner

Published: 1974

Length: 270 pages

Goodreads Synopsis: Karl Edward Wagner (1945-1994) has earned a reputation as one of the finest horror writers of the modern era, but his work has been out of print and nearly unobtainable for many years. His seminal volume In a Lonely Place collects eight of his best tales, including “In the Pines,” a classic ghost story evocatively set in the Tennessee woods, “Beyond Any Measure,” an original take on the vampire story, “River of Night’s Dreaming,” a surreal and nightmarish masterpiece inspired by The King in Yellow, and the author’s most famous tale, “Sticks,” a disturbing story thought by many to have been the basis for The Blair Witch Project.
​
This new edition includes all the stories from the original 1983 edition, plus an additional rare tale and the author’s afterword from the Scream/Press limited edition, and features a new introduction by Ramsey Campbell.

How I got it: The library

When I got it: 2023

Why I want to read it: I was browsing the shelves and came across this one. It is a new edition of an older published work, and the description seemed really interesting.