CRP's Blog

We asked authors of our October and November titles what books they’re squeezing in between promoting their new releases and roasting turkey, turducken, or tofurkey. Check out what they had to say below!

Amy McCullough (The Box Wine Sailors): In my recent Off-Book Q&A for the CRP blog, I mentioned a particular collection of Wilkie Collins short stories that’s been in my “to be read” pile for way too long. I came across it while working as a bookseller at Half Price Books a few years ago—the kind of place where little unexpected literary treasures pop up now and again. It has these great, spooky woodcut engravings by Fritz Eichenberg, and I’ve wanted to read Wilkie Collins ever since falling in love with The Meaning of Night, by Michael Cox; Collins is referred to in the book, and Cox himself is praised as echoing both he and Dickens. I decided to quickly move it from TBR to “currently reading” when embarking on my recent west coast reading tour. I’m a graduate student at the moment, but I can’t seem to bring myself to read for school when traveling.  So far, the Collins stories are everything I expected: gritty, gothic, mysterious, and tinged with the perfect touch of humor.

Aidan Levy (Dirty Blvd: The Life and Music of Lou Reed): I just read The Key by Junichiro Tanizaki, a Japanese erotic novel that delves deep into dark desire and voyeurism in a dying marriage, told through the fragmentary lens of a husband and wife’s diary entries detailing the same events. Tanizaki explores this theme with more candor than most, though S&M was of course familiar territory for Lou Reed, who grew up with The Story of O and the Marquis de Sade as his bedtime reading. Tanizaki’s novel predates Reed’s 2003 album Ecstasy by half a century, but it’s a vision just as searing.

Michelle Morgan (The Ice Cream Blonde): At the moment I am reading The Crossover by Kwane Alexander. It is actually a novel for young adults but was given to me by my daughter’s school librarian because she enjoyed it and thought I would too. It is a brilliant and unusual book, about twins Josh and Jordan and their love of basketball, but while that features at the centre, there is so much more going on too. I am hoping to write a book for young adults myself, and this one is inspiring me to get on with it!

Margaret Oppenheimer (The Remarkable Rise of Eliza Jumel): In honor of Eliza Jumel, I’ve been reading a biography of one of her contemporaries, Elizabeth Patterson Bonaparte. Like Jumel, the American-born Patterson turned herself into a celebrity through a strategic marriage (to Napoleon I’s youngest brother, Jerome) and knew to a T how to manage her reputation.

Constance Sublette (The American Slave Coast): Other than biographies directed at children, Bound for the Promised Land: Harriet Tubman, Portrait of An American Her by Kate Clifford Larson is the first biography published in our own era of this extraordinary woman, who brought out her family and many more enslaved to freedom in the northern states and Canada. Tubman’s and her family’s slavery time was on Maryland’s Eastern Shore, where much of what transpires in The American Slave Coast takes place, and where the early sections were first drafted.