You have eight bingos – congratulations! Have you participated in Book Bingo in previous years? I have done Book Bingo at least once before, but I got bogged down with my reviews, so I don’t think I was very successful. Last year I was too busy to even try Book Bingo. This year, I’ve been better at staying up on my reviews. My goal was a blackout, and I’m almost there! What’s your go-to ‘recommend to new friends’ book? I think it depends a lot […]

Your bio says you have trouble not finishing books, but you don’t like stories where you hate all the characters or where a character has a stupid name. Is there anything that does make you put down a book unfinished? Do you look for a redeeming factor if it’s a book you’re not 100% enjoying? Ooh this is a good question. Like you said, I have a hard time not finishing books. It really has to be an accumulation of sins for me to not […]

You read a wide variety of stuff! (Second tier Russian classical authors?) How do you decide what to read next on your TBR list? I generally read two books at once, unless one of them really gets going. I have a list of books to read, goes back about 20 years by now, about 120 pages long. So first I try the LA County library system, and then Powell’s, and then Abe’s, a British used book system. Sometimes when I get it, I do wonder […]

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 […]