Here is your weekly reminder that there are also new articles up on our other website KRL News & Reviews! Every week there will be book reviews and giveaways, plus sometimes pet articles, theatre articles, and more! And listen to our new podcast!
With equal parts dread and curiosity, I’ve been reading about people who create poems, screenplays, and even novels using artificial intelligence programs like Jasper and ChatGPT.
This holiday season, enjoy Festive Mayhem 3, a limited-edition anthology by seven crime writers of color.
Few things are as upsetting as reading the final page of a satisfying book. The End. Two words as unwelcomed as the last day of vacation. Two words that mean new friends are vanishing along with a familiar setting.
James Patterson, the wealthiest writer in the U.S. weighing in at a hefty net worth of $800 million, planted his foot squarely in his mouth when he bellyached about how he was the victim of racism because he was a white male writer. I’ve read lots of Patterson‘s books. I even enrolled in his online MasterClass. But, wow!
A TV show filming in Harlem. A rising, sexy star with secrets (Don’t they always?). An executive on the set fearing for her life. A young punk with a gambling problem—he loses more than he wins. A mid-level mob goon with a taste for hurting people. A private investigator pulling security duty.
When I lived in Tokyo in the ‘80s, I devoured mystery books faster than conveyor belt sushi. But even in the largest bookstores in the world's largest city, English-language mysteries were hard to come by. The books were invariably exiled to a lonely corner in the far reaches of the store. I picked through the desolate shelves, hoping to find a few overlooked titles.
As much as Lila Macapagal loves cooking and helping out at her family’s Tita Rosie’s Kitchen, Lila has been dragging her feet with plans for the new Brew-ha Café. A play on the Filipino word “bruja” that means witch, the café is designed to help Lila, her BFF Adeena Awan, and Adeena’s girlfriend Elena Torres celebrate their unique, multi-ethnic backgrounds. Lila is still suffering from the PSTD caused by events documented in the previous novel, and as a result she is dealing with a Baking Block and without the mojo that enabled her to create delectable Filipino-American treats in the kitchen. While the last thing Lila wants to experience is reliving the trauma of her beauty pageant teen years, the last-minute dropout of a judge for the Miss Teen Shady Palms Pageant has her nagged by her aunties into subbing in as a replacement.
Read crime fiction and step into the shoes of characters ensnared in increasingly desperate circumstances. Crime novels invite readers to experience the world of people who — out of necessity, greed, boredom, or frustration — are drawn across the line of legality.
Summer is a time for unapologetic, indulgent reading. From frothy beach reads to page-turning thrillers. But it’s also a time when schools hand students that dreaded list: summer required reading.
Mandatory books I was forced to read sank to the bottom of my TBR pile. The assigned titles, a collection of dusty publications I wouldn’t have picked for myself, never called to me. Not until the waning days of summer vacation when I realized I had to plow through hundreds of pages of un-fun reading before the school year began.
