Author: Marion Deeds

Saturday is Independent Bookstore Day.  The ABA has provided a map and a guide to bookstores with events, by state. A bookstore crawl might be fun to organize.

From 2023, Bookbub provides a list of books with magic houses. A few recent releases aren’t included, and at least one of these, The Little Stranger, is not a magic house but a haunted one. (I won’t die on that hill, but I’m at least willing to take some damage on it.) The list is still worth checking out.

The National Space Society is awarding its inaugural Arthur C. Clarke Memorial Award to Joe Haldeman.

The link takes you to the list of books pulled by the Nimitz Library at the U.S. Naval Academy in response to the administration’s policies. Titles include: What Are We Fighting For? By Joanna Russ(nonfiction); Light from Uncommon Stars, by Ryka Aoki (fiction); A Psalm for the Wild-Built, by Becky Chambers (fiction); The Last White Man, Mohsin Hamid (fiction); Sorrowland, by Rivers Solomona (fiction),

The Story Hour has migrated from Facebook, which is owned by Meta, to YouTube. The live-story-reading site is hosted by writers Laura Blackwell and Daniel Marcus. You can read their statement about what led to this decision here.

Here is a review category I don’t see every day: Bulgarian fiction. I want to read the first one!

More in the saga of scraping and data-mining; Society of Authors published an article about the findings of their survey about proposed changes in copyright that privilege tech companies over the authors and creators.

Here is a nice website with statistics and facts you might find useful.

Judith Tarr considers a “river monster” from West Africa.

After the Army removed articles about the 442nd Regiment, World War II’s most decorated regiment, they reacted to public outcry and restored the articles. The 442nd was comprised mostly of Japanese American soldiers, many of whom had family members left behind in camps.

I read several paragraphs into this article, drawn in by the sprightly tone, before I realized it was a “Five Books…” list.