I am an unashamed podcast junkie. I inhale them. I listen to them while driving, house cleaning, cooking, walking, crafting, drawing, knitting, playing games or just relaxing. It seems to me fiction has been having a renaissance in podcasts the past few years. Here are some of my faves.
The Mantawauk Caves is my all time favorite fiction podcast. A tortured man returns to his small Appalachian town to find the evidence to get his childhood friend off death row for a double murder committed...
I’m not sure when I started reading vintage mystery novels by Japanese authors. Maybe after I visited my brother in Japan in 2017. I hadn’t expected to love the country as much as I did, so I suspect that’s what got me looking for fiction that transported me back there from my home in Europe.
I love to learn about places via their history, and it’s no surprise I look to vintage novels, not contemporary ones. The first I read was The Honjin Murders by Seishi Yokomizo, which won Japan’s first...
I don’t write sci fi, one of the reasons it’s relaxing to read. Usually. It’s not something I read often, so to me, every sci fi novel is going to sort of resemble Red Mars or something by Bradbury because those are still my favorites.
In the English section of the Dussmann bookstore in Berlin, I came across the yellow SF Masterworks editions and picked up Neuromancer because. . .I don’t know. Maybe the Japanese setting on the cover. Or the pseudo-noir feel of the back cover blurb. A book...
After listening to the really interesting interview Trevor Noah did with the author of The Anxious Generation, I did a bit of research to get the critical side of the argument that social media and screen time are harming young people. It wasn’t just my old journalist instincts kicking in. It’s because Jonathan Haidt’s arguments made a ton of sense for me, a mom with two teenage daughters. I’ve also had to reassess my social media usage for the sake of my own mental health. So I wanted to...
The first time I read The Leopard, the novel about the fall of a Sicilian noble family in the 19th century, I was dazzled. I was in Italy — on the Ligurian coast, not Sicily — one summer during the pandemic, and we had splurged on a historical villa overlooking the sea. For the first and probably only time in my life, I lived in a house with frescoed ceilings, stained glass panels and terraced gardens bursting with rosemary and bougainvillea. Lounging on an antique sofa, I read The Leopard...
Lately, I’ve been rereading books that had a big effect on me when I was younger. We’re talking stuff I haven’t looked at in 20 years or more. Some of the books have sat on my shelves that long. The other day, I picked up The Power of Myth.
The book is a condensed version of journalist Bill Moyers’ televised discussion with mythology professor Joseph Campbell about life, stories, religion, society and so many other things. The talks took place at George Lucas’ Skywalker ranch in 1985/6 and...
My first novel The German Heiress debuted near the start of the pandemic in 2020 — what’s changed since then? About me as an author, about how I write? Do I still love this book that was my secret little baby for almost 8 years?
That’s all too much for one post. I’d have to first write about how devastating it was to be on the terrifying high of releasing my first novel into the world only to have the world shut down all around me. In the US, The German Heiress was stocked at airports while...