Desert Island Reads

The ArcLight Cinemas in Hollywood has a miniature bookstore in their lobby curated by One Grand Books. They ask actors, artists, writers and other creatives to pick their ten “desert island reads” and explain their choices. Browsing through these selections is a great way to kill time while you wait for your movie to start. Some … Read more

Millennials Love “Real Books” and Other Generalizations

millennials love books

Over at Mashable, MJ Franklin declares that he is “a millennial, and (he) will never give up reading real books“. If you were wondering, he defines “real books” as the paper-and-glue sort, not those filthy ones-and-zeroes people keep locked up in their e-readers. Audiobooks don’t even enter the discussion, so his post is already inadequate … Read more

Awesome Authors Who Are Also Fantastic Narrators

I recently started listening to H is For Hawk by Helen MacDonald. The book is a rare experience, both because I don’t read many non-fiction books and because the author is a fantastic narrator. Her recitation is both deeply personal and carefully, perfectly enunciated in the exact sort of British accent that makes for a pleasant listening … Read more

Romance By Any Other Name

We’ve been watching the Starz adaptation of Outlander recently, and it got me thinking about how I’ve never actually read a “romance” novel, but I’ve read plenty of stealth romance sold as other genres. I’ve actually owned Outlander on Kindle for a while – it was free at one point and I thought I might as well find out what all of the fuss was about – but I never actually got around to reading it.

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Turn Overcast Into an Amazing Audiobook App

Overcast is one of the best podcasting apps on the market, but I decided that I wanted to use it to listen to audiobooks. The only problem? Overcast only works with podcast feeds. As far as I can tell, there isn’t a simple way to manually load in MP3s or point the app directly at a file. However, I didn’t let this limitation discourage me; instead, I came up with a convoluted solution that probably isn’t for the faint of heart.

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Netflix for Books: Scribd vs Kindle Unlimited

People keep trying to make “Netflix for books” happen. It’s probably because someone out there thinks I don’t have enough to read. I was definitely skeptical about these services at first because I have always been perfectly happy getting too many books from my local library. However, once they started introducing options that included audiobooks and comic books, it wasn’t long before I gave a few of the all-you-can-read services a spin. Luckily, most of them offer a free trial month, so it was easy for me to get sucked in.

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A Few of My Reading Statistics from 2014

Number of books I read last year: 53 2014 was the first year in a good long while where it felt like I might fall short of my reading goal. I’d originally challenged myself to read 75 books – I’ve easily read at least that many for the past few years – but it wasn’t long … Read more