What has the most impact on your enjoyment of a book: plot, character, writing, other? I have to go with writing – if I don’t enjoy reading the words, nothing else matters. And if I do enjoy reading the words, nothing else matters. Of course, there are preferences but I think there’s very little more exciting than falling in love with a book you’d never have suspected.  What’s the first book you recommend to new friends? Probably whatever I’ve just finished or am in the […]

You’re the champion of the ‘monster smut’ tag. What would you recommend as a place to start for someone just dipping their toe (claw?) into the genre? I’m not sure if I’m honored or not! Monster Romance has become increasingly mainstream. The Shape of Water won best picture a few years ago, and that movie was absolutely a Monster Romance. She had sex with the fish man! Any romance between a human and a non-human can be described as Monster Romance, so A Court of […]

In our January Zoom chat, drmllz and tiny_bookbot discovered they had met in real life! Cannonballers in the wild – a rare sighting! What’s your favorite subject/angle to teach as a literature and media studies lecturer and researcher? What gets your students the most fired up? I’m happy to teach most things! In my ‘have PhD, will travel’ years, which were precarious and stressful, I taught everything from post-modernism to medieval poetry to ‘the eighteenth century’ to news framing in the media, often at very short […]

What’s your favorite piece of literature (or theory, technique, etc.) to teach to your college students?  My favorite authors to teach are probably Charlotte Brontë and Virginia Woolf. Jane Eyre is of course a book with some plot elements that really raise our eyebrows (Edward Fairfax Rochester what ARE you doing?!) but those same elements are what help it to teach well, because it gives us real stuff to dig into and discuss. Also, Brontë burns through loads of plot, which hooks my students, while also […]

What’s the best book you’ve picked up as a result of a CBR recommendation/review? The September Book Club recommendations have been great so far – my favorite has been All Boys Aren’t Blue. Most recently I added The Journalist and the Murderer to my TBR, and it’s nearly at the top so I am looking forward to reading that soon! I am also currently listening to How to Be Perfect on audiobook in the car and really loving that (I also really loved The Good […]

You read a wide variety of stuff (manga, history, middle grade mysteries, Wilkie Collins!). How do you decide what to read next from your TBR pile? I tend to flip back and forth between fiction and non-fiction, while continuously reading comics, so I tend to decide by staring at the books on my bookcases until something strikes me. I feel like it’s often less of a rational decision than an internal urge for a certain genre or author, but I’m often circling my bookcases for […]