Friday Reads 10.26.23
It’s Friday, friends, and you know what that means… let’s take a break from the news cycle and talk about what we’re reading!
I’m still reeling from the week-long reading festivus that was show prep, and I’m still thinking about Christine Coulson’s magnificent novella ONE WOMAN SHOW. It is the story of a woman’s life told through museum wall labels. I know, that sounds…difficult. It is a short but impactful read, as the prose is top-notch, and the conceit of telling a story in 75-word increments means not a single word is fluff. I can’t recommend this one highly enough, and especially for you writers out there, because I think this would be a super cool way to build a story. If you could distill your main character’s life down to the most important moments, and use those to define their current and future state, they’d be very rich indeed. Christine and I had a fascinating conversation about her life at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, too. Good stuff.
Mary Beard has a new book out, EMPEROR OF ROME, which I preordered (twice—I was thrilled when two copies showed up LOL). I am currently collecting books that deal with a certain emperor, and couldn’t wait for this installment.
This piece by Heather Hach in Crimereads about her move from Broadway to writing thrillers captured my attention. This line specifically made me stop and think:
…Suspense is the lynchpin for the medium, the art of dialing up the tension to hold an audience captive…
Building suspense and dread *is* an art. I read and spoke to one of those artists last week, Megan Miranda, about her fabulous new book, THE ONLY SURVIVORS. It’s superbly constructed, and I couldn’t turn the pages fast enough, because the dread, the dialing up of the tension, is what makes this book work so incredible well.
Food for thought as I start turning my brain to my next suspense novel…
What about you? What’s on your plate this weekend?
