Time for a pause and reevaluation. I’ve been on this quest for about six months, and as I’ve stated, it’s been illuminating to me that in writing fiction, you make the rules as far as grammar goes. Another thing I’ve noticed is that there are so many best-selling, or international best-selling, writers—who knew? At first, this swayed me to pick up their book. Now it's a red flag. There are also so many award-winning authors—so many. Who knew there were so many awards? Definit

Timeline by Michael Crichton I have seen a few Blake Crouch fans reference Michael Crichton as their favorite author and Blake replacing Michael as their favorite author. So I had put this on my radar, although I still haven’t seen any of the Jurassic Park movies. I came across Michael’s book, Timeline, a 441-page book, at the Goodwill (it was $3.95) about time travel. I’m down with time travel, and I picked it up. It starts out fine, and then came the multi-page passover of

Hard-Boiled Wonderland and The End of the World by Haruki Murakami After reading Men Without Women, by Haruki Murakami, I did some research on him. I was intrigued enough with his writing style, I thought I’d give another one of his books a whirl. I came across the books he’s really famous for, 1Q84, but oh my, it’s 1200 pages. I stated how I feel about a long book and 1200 pages is very scary, so I found a few small works, Kafa on the Shore and Hard-Boiled Wonderland and th

Rehabilitation of a reader Men Without Women by Haruki Murakami This author keeps popping up. He writes in something called Magical Surrealism. Very intriguing. His book, the one the most people recommend, is 1Q84, which is 1,200 pages. I’ve already stated my thoughts on books over 500 pages. Would this be a bloat fest? I thought I would dip my toes into the water and try something a little less time consuming. So I picked up Men Without Women (a collection of short stories)

Dark Matter By Blake Crouch Having a conversation with a friend, telling him about my journey to become a reader again, he suggested that I should try Dark Matter by Blake Crouch. He is the person I bounce my ideas off of for books I’m going to write. He thought that my book, Losing Grip, sounded like Dark Matter. Dark Matter deals with multiverses, and mine, with dreams and parallel worlds. Okay, I’ll give it a whirl. This was a chilling experience because our styles are so

This is a continuation of a Rehabilitation of Reader blog. I’m trying to keep it to 5 to 6 reviews per blog. When I started this journey, I wanted to read for at least 2 hours every morning. It’s now become a thing with me. Testing out different writing styles and subject matters has been fun. Next up: The Illustrated Man by Ray Bradbury. Interesting concept; a man with tattoos that are live, telling stories. I love this book. A great way to compile short stores. My favorit

I used to read, not a lot, about five to six books a year, and then about 15 years ago I stopped, at least with fiction. Now I write, I write books that I would like to read. But one thing keeps coming up, you can't be a writer if you don't read. Is this true? I'm not convinced, but I do like to read. So, I have created a schedule to get back into activity. This blog is my honest account of that journey: the books I pick up, the challenges I face, and the joy I rediscover. I