Historical Context of Monsters as Metaphors
Monsters can take many forms in literature and popular culture, but what’s interesting about them is that they often represent the beliefs of an era or appear as metaphors for human fears. Monste...
Monsters can take many forms in literature and popular culture, but what’s interesting about them is that they often represent the beliefs of an era or appear as metaphors for human fears. Monste...
While the e-book was (incorrectly) hailed as “the death of the paperback”, many readers still love to see a well-stocked bookshelf standing pride of place. There’s just something about a frie...
We’ve all been there — you finish the last page, you close the book you were reading, and a feeling of emptiness crashes over you. You hopefully enjoyed the book, and if it was a particularly g...
Most readers have a TBR pile, even if they don’t know what a TBR pile is. In book lingo, a ”TBR Pile” is your to-be-read pile. It’s all those books that you’ve stacked up with the honest ...
Before I began writing fiction, I was an academic living in a publish-or-perish world. I submitted articles to journals that accepted them, rejected them or (most often) asked me to revise and resu...
Over the last decade, buying books online has become commonplace thanks to big-name stores. And we’re not just talking about that online-only store, either. For any reader who’s trying not to d...
Avid readers know how book can be an incredible form of escapism where almost anything is possible and you never quite know what’s going to happen next. This is especially true when we look at gr...
Books to console, inspire and escape into… With all but essential workers on lockdown, and our social lives on hold, the time seems ripe for a (lockdown) reading revolution. But this is no ho...
Magic and the fantasy fiction genre, they go together like Bert and Ernie – or should I say Frodo and Sam? Wherever you look in fantasy, you’ll see examples of magic. Lord of the Rings, of ...
When you first decide to be a writer, you might read books on how to write a blockbuster, you might work on your grammar and punctuation or you put hours of research into your favourite genre by re...
I often get to the end of a novel and think Now I know where it’s going, I’d love to read it again. But, as a book blogger reading around 150 contemporary novels a year, I rarely do. But short ...
Landscapes have a tendency to set off questions in my head, about what lies below the surface of a place and what possibilities there might be. Can Fairy Tales Be Set in The Real World? I li...
Why Should I Read Translated Works? If you agree that reading diverse benefits your brain, you’re probably open to reading novels in translation. If language affects thought, there can’t be a b...
Over a decade ago, the children’s charity, Barnardo’s, ran a controversial advertising campaign aiming to raise awareness of the damaging impact of being born in poverty. The Advertising Standa...
A Title. It’s the first thing you see, pretty much. That is, unless the book’s cover artwork is so busy or the font is the same colour as the background (in which case you need a new designer)....
“Which is more important, plot or character?” It’s an odd thing to ask, because the two aren’t mutually exclusive. But which should be the focus of a compelling story? Does a complex plot...
“How do you come up with all these names?” For those of us writing Earth-based fiction, or any genre not based in fantasy, on the surface it’s a fairly simple process- you don’t gen...
A book cover should tell you a lot about what’s on the pages between. But there’s a fine line between good artistic composition, communicating the most important parts of the story (in ...
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