If you're new here, why not subscribe to our email updates or follow us on Facebook? You can also add us to your Google Reader. Thanks for visiting!I once had a copywriting job that involved writing promotional pieces for a group of chiropractors*. My brief said very clearly that I was not to promise any sort of positive results from visiting a chiropractor....

Last year I happened across the Anne of Green Gables books in audiobook format. These were books that I’d pooh-poohed as a child purely because of their scratchy old covers and nondescript titles, and my eventual decision to read them was made with a sort of grim determination, much as how I might have approached an end-of-year examination or a...

Today’s guest post is kindly provided by Margaret Yang and Harry R Campion We are going to tell you a secret. All writers know it. None of them talk about it. The secret is this: writers hate a lot of the books we read. Not all of them, mind you, and not in a malicious way. It has nothing to do with jealousy or spite. It’s just a horrible side-effect of...

LM Montgomery’s The Story Girl features a character described as “the Awkward Man”, a man who rarely goes out into society because of his crippling shyness and difficulty in managing in social situations. However, when the Awkward Man is in his own element he’s articulate and accomplished, to the point that those who haven’t seen...

While writing my recent post about clearing out my bookshelves, I realised that one of the things that makes it so difficult to cull a book collection is that bookshelves are a reader’s photo albums. Just as someone might flip through pages of blurry and oddly posed photographs, marvelling at moustachioed grandparents and uncles bearing truly dashing...

Years ago an editor acquaintance of mine moved from the USA to Singapore. An overseas move is daunting for a number of reasons, but for bookish types one of the toughest aspects is having to commit to culling a book collection that’s been years in the making. My acquaintance confessed at the time that in order to get through this library-winnowing ordeal...