Hannah Fielding's Blog, page 84

Scent-sational: Indiscretion

  Whenever I start writing a new romance novel, setting is one of the most important considerations. My signature style incorporates exotic, beautiful, romantic settings, and for each novel I […]

Sebastian the Alchemist and His Captive by Lindsay Townsend

From the blurb: He takes her for hate. Will he keep her for love? Sebastian, lord of the tower in the northern high lands, is a proud, bitter man with […]

Follow your read with The Fictionary

I’ve written about a couple of interesting apps for readers recently: Whichbook, which matches a book to your mood, and The Clean Reader, which blanks out offensive language. Here’s a […]

Author: the most coveted job, and yet the least lucrative?

Back in February I reported on a government survey of almost 15,000 British people in the UK that revealed ‘author’ is the most desired job in the country. But a […]

An Andalusian specialty: Gazpacho

  One of the most lingering memories of my time in Andalusia, Spain – setting for my new novel, Indiscretion– is of flavours. Succulent tomato. The very freshest of fish. […]

How to Tame a Willful Wife by Christy English

From the blurb: How To Tame A Willful Wife: 1. Forbid her from riding astride 2. Hide her dueling sword 3. Burn all her breeches and buy her silk drawers […]

Author outputs: Prioritising quantity over quality?

The publishing industry has transformed radically in the past twenty years. The keyword in the preceding sentence is industry. The business of publishing has been forced to up its game […]

Improbable libraries

I came across this book via the Guardian this week: Here’s the outline: From the rise of the egalitarian Little Free Library movement (motto: Take a book, return a book) […]

Improbable libraries

I came across this book via the Guardian this week:

Here’s the outline:

From the rise of the egalitarian Little Free Library movement (motto: Take a book, return a book) to the growth in luxury hotel libraries, Alex Johnson whose parents were both librarians maps out the history and future of the 21st-century library revolution in seven thematic chapters, each consisting of a brief essay followed by illustrated project profiles. Whether by bike in Chicago or by donkey in Colombia, librarians all over the world are coming up with astonishingly ingenious ways of ensuring their books reach the people who need them. Many of these new libraries function as community centres, and assist their members in overcoming economic, social and political barriers. Others provide an unexpected dose of culture for travellers and commuters or even prisoners. Elsewhere, architects are designing monumental public libraries without walls, and prefabricated home libraries that can be assembled in an ordinary back garden. Whether youre at an airport, a park, a café or in the wilds, you can still find just the right book all for free.

It sounds fascinating, don’t you think? By the time I got to the end of the Guardian article (which features amazing pictures: the Mongolian Children’s Mobile Library, on the back of a camel, and the Lao library boats for children on the Mekong and Ou rivers), I was off out: to my local bookstore to buy the book, and then to the library, to find a quiet corner and read it.

Rehoming the forgotten books

Here’s a simple fact of the publishing industry: many more books are printed than are read. In the UK, for example, according to data compiled by theInternational Publishers’ Association, in […]