Posts under ‘Interviews’

I had the chance to interview Kathleen Kent, the author of The Heretic’s Daughter. You can read my review of her very good book here.

Tell us a little about yourself:

I grew up in Texas, attending the University of TX at Austin before moving to New York. I worked for over twenty years in Manhattan, first for the Commodity Exchange and then as a defense contractor for the U.S. Dept. of Defense, traveling extensively through Belarus and Kazakhstan. I became a writer only after moving back to Texas with my family in 2000.

I had the pleasure of interviewing Suey from It’s All About Books as a BBAW event! She also interviewed me; you can read her interview of me on her site.

How did you get into book blogging? How long have you been doing it?

I started my blog after joining a Yahoo group connected with the TBR Challenge. Everyone kept talking about putting stuff on your blog. At the time I had a personal blog (not on Blogger) , but it didn’t seem the place to do book stuff too, so finally one day, I created the book blog. That was about 1 1/2 years ago.

For this Weekly Geek, Kim from Sophisticated Dorkiness and I interviewed each other about books we had recently read. I asked her about All the Fishes Come Home to Roost, by Rachel Manija Brown, and she interviewed me about In the Land of Invisible Women, by Qanta Ahmed, MD.

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Broadly, what is All the Fishes Come Home to Roost about?

I always get a little bit nervous when I get a book directly from an author. What if it’s horrid? What if I hurt their feelings? What if I write a negative review and the author retaliates? I mean, you hear about things like this and this and this happening, and that’s just not cool. So I think that I read books I get from authors a little differently than I read books I get from publishers or publicists… I read, perhaps, with a little more trepidation.

I literally have nothing bad to say about Steve Zipp’s Yellowknife. It’s gorgeous. The binding is beautiful. The writing glimmers. The plot is perfect. And you guys know that I don’t use those sorts of adjectives when I write reviews. I usually deal with “pretty good” and “moderately interesting” and “fairly well-paced.” But Yellowknife is — hands down — the best book I’ve read this year, and so I’m going to be be breaking out the big words. You know, “luminous” and junk like that.

Here’s the back cover:

I got to know Mary Lewis a little bit a few months ago, when she contacted me to find out if I’d be interested in reviewing a few books that she was publicizing. She’s the lady behind Blog Stop Book Tours, for whom I read (and loved) Springtime on Mars. Mary has a brief bio up on her site, but I always want to know more about people — and so I asked if she’d like to be interviewed.

If you’ve ever wondered what exactly it is that a publicist does, there might be some answers here for you. And if you’re interested in reviewing for Mary, you can write to her at blogstops[at]gmail[dot]com for more details.

[I] Review!

When I got sent Farworld: Water Keep, by J. Scott Savage, I didn’t start reading it right away. I had been in the middle of a slough of Terry Pratchett novels (well, no surprise there), and was reading for school as well, and so it hung around on my desk for a week or two before I picked it up. But when I did finally read Farworld — wow! I read it almost straight through without stopping. It’s really, really good. Perhaps it is even great; without arguing too much about loosey-goosey terms, suffice it to say that I very much enjoyed this book and would heartily recommend it to both child and adult readers.

Look, an author interview! A while back I was contacted by — or maybe contacted, I don’t remember — by Mary Lewis of Book Stop Blog Tours. Time and events passed as they usually do, and soon enough I was sent a marvellous book of short stories to review as part of the author’s blog tour.

Behold: Springtime on Mars by Susan Woodring. (The title will take you to Amazon; the author name to her personal website).

After I read Springtime on Mars, I straightaway asked whether Susan would be available for interview purposes. She most definitely was: