Terry Shames's Blog: 7 Criminal Minds, page 147

Books for people who "don't read" by Cathy Ace

Books make wonderful gifts. What are your recommendations this year?
Indeed, books do make wonderful gifts. The best gifts. I still have books that were given to me as gifts decades ago. They have traveled around the world with me, have entertained me, have inspired to me to do a great many things in life. And more. So, yes – if you can, give books when a gift is needed, for whatever reason.
Then the question is – which book to give? You might know someone for whom a book with baking recipes is...

Stuff the Stocking!

Books make wonderful gifts. What are your recommendations this year?

- from Frank

Everyone's tastes vary, but here are some book that I don't think you can go wrong with, if you dig the subgenre they're in.

I'm only including ones I've already read. If  I drew from my TBR pile, either this list would scroll forever, or my head would explode in an attempt to pare things down to a reasonable number of entries.

Also, it is my goal to eventually read books by all of my fellow Criminal Minds...

A Few Good Books

-from Susan
By now, you’ve read a zillion “best books of 2019” lists, so I am going to spare you and give you just five diverse fiction and two non-fiction books that I particularly appreciated, one of which was published in 2018 but which deserved special attention. I make no claims that my choices are “best.” These are books I responded to strongly and that have stayed with me. Their settings, characters, stories, and prose styles held me in their grasp. I would happily give any one of them...

You Might Want to Read These...

It’s that time of year again, when the airwaves are filled with the sound of Michael Bublé coming out of hibernation and the papers are filled with critics’ Best Of lists.
Like Jim yesterday, I make no claim that my choices are a best of anything, merely a list of books I enjoyed this year. I’m going to start with a confession, though. There was no book that I read in 2019 which wowed me in the way certain books (like Attica Locke’s Bluebird Bluebird or Denise Mina’s ...

Five Go-old Books!

by Catriona .

Sorry for the ear worm. You can dislodge it with a quick verse and chorus of Jose Feliciano's "Feliz Navidad" (For readers in the UK - this is a song even more ubiquitous and annoying/amazing than Slade's "Merry Christmas, Everybody" (For readers who don't know either of these songs: do NOT click the links. Save yourselves.))

Aaaaannyway, here we are again, buying books for our nearest and dearest and dropping hints like anvils for the books we'd like to find in our own stockings....

Some Really Good Books I Read in 2019

Question: Books make wonderful gifts. What are your recommendations this year?

From Jim


I made a list like this one last year, so I suppose this will become an annual post from me. I don’t like to make a “best of” list because, for one thing, who the hell am I? And, for another, I haven’t read enough (all) books to make any such pronouncements. I have, however, enjoyed quite a few books this year.
In August, I posted here a list of books I’d read in the first half of 2019.  ...

The twelve books of Christmas

by Dietrich
I had plenty of reading time this past year, and I’ve already recommended some of my favorites from earlier this year, so I won’t repeat any of them. Here are a dozen more from the books I read since then that deserve a place on the holiday list – perfect picks for the fiction fan.
Blood and Lemonade by by Joe R. Lansdale is number eleven in the Hap and Leonard series. Published in 2017, it’s a mosaic of stories from the early days of Hap and Leonard. Often funny, sometimes...

Book Gifts

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Books Make the Best Presents. By Brenda

Question: Books make wonderful gifts. What are your recommendations this year?

I love giving books for Christmas and receiving them. I always tucked a novel in my girls' stockings so they'd have something to read over the holidays. Some afternoons after the gift-giving, all you'd hear in the living room was the sound of turning pages.

I must confess that I joined a book club this year that reads mainly literary fiction so these books are top of mind; however, I've squeezed in a couple of...

Writing is a Harsh Mistress

Does your writing ever interfere with your family life? Do the demands of your fiction ever create friction with those closest to you?

by Paul D. Marks

The title of this piece, Writing is a Harsh Mistress, pretty much answers the question. Yes, writing interferes with family life. It interferes with daily life. The demands of my fiction definitely create friction with the reality of my life and sometimes those close to me.

Jack Kerouac and his scroll.Most people don’t understand both the demands...