‘Tis the season for guilty pleasures. The summer read. The blockbuster movie. Maybe it’s just me because my day job is in the education field (although I’m one of those dreaded administrators who work all year instead having the summer off [i.e., reserved for various therapies to recover from teaching]). But. I pulled my head out of my current grant deadlines and looked ahead to summer fun.
The New York Times recently published an article about The ‘It Books’ of Summers Past. I’m embarrassed to say that I’ve only read one of them. Ever. And it was the 2013 ‘It’ book Crazy Rich Asians, which I read in 2019 and found very entertaining, but as we are all story wonks of varying levels, not particularly well written in a strictly fiction craft sense. Of course, we’ve also discussed all the ways writers can ignore craft rules and still tell a wonderful story. I did see the Primary Colors movie, and of course, Love Story (which I will never watch again or read – it’s just too sad, because, spoiler alert – she dies [no HEA]). Continue reading
With the holiday weekend approaching, lots of folks in my area and around the country are heading to the beach. For our non-US friends, Memorial Day in the US is a federal holiday for remembering and honoring people who have died while serving in the United States Armed Forces. It is currently observed on the last Monday of May, which means a lot of Americans have the day off (and head out of town or have a cookout). With beaches on the mind, I was thinking about beach reads for this summer. I’m not heading out this weekend but will probably have some time to put my nose in a book. I’m looking forward to the second in Kevin Kwan’s series, China Rich Girlfriend. I read the first, Crazy Rich Asians, recently and, while not particularly well written, it was entertaining so it might be that one next.
Seriously. There’s a pill. I heard an interview with Robert Anthony Siegel on NPR Radio in which he discussed a one-man open-label placebo trial he’d undertaken with John Kelley. Siegel is a writer and Kelley is a psychology professor at Endicott College and the deputy director of Harvard’s Program in Placebo Studies and Therapeutic Encounter, a program devoted to the interdisciplinary study of the placebo effect. The goal was to get rid of Siegel’s writer’s block, and the panic attacks and insomnia that went hand-in-hand with the writer’s block. The interview was a discussion about the research and subsequent article in the Smithsonian Magazine – 
