CRP's Blog

Inspired by last week’s Staff Reads we asked our authors with books pubbing in the early months of 2016 what they read over the holidays.

Tim Hanley (Investigating Lois Lane): Inspired by Chinese mythology, Cindy Pon’s Serpentine is unique and dark, and a wonderful read. This YA novel deals with issues such as friendship, young love, and being gay in a conservative environment, as well as the perils of finding out that you’re a snake demon who thinks she’s a teenage girl.

Kerrie Logan Hollihan (In the Fields and the Trenches): At Christmas I read short stories written over the years. Among them are tales by Anthony Trollope, John Cheever, Maeve Binchey, Jeannette Winterson, and Muriel Spark. Of course, a guy named Charles Dickens wrote several cool Christmas stories—featuring ghosts!

(Check out our Q&A with Kerrie here)

Ronald Reis (Henry Ford for Kids): Over the holiday, I read Presence: Bringing Your Boldest Self to Your Biggest Challenges by Amy Cuddy, published by Little/Brown. While the book is light read, it is written by a Harvard social psychologist who did solid research on the subject. “Presence,” as described in the book, means being in the moment and in doing so listening a lot more than talking. I recommend the book highly.

(Check out our Q&A with Ron here)

Nick Soulsby (Cobain on Cobain): In an era where business thinking has poured concrete over ever more of life’s more flamboyant possibilities, where there’s ever more focus on certainty and predictability of outcome, it’s an eye-opener to read of this Welsh patriot’s wild ride from a rural backwater, through London, and onward to the wild New World driven entirely by hope and an illusion. American Interior: The Quixotic Journey of John Evans, His Search for a Lost Tribe and How, Fuelled by Fantasy and (Possibly) Booze, He Accidentally Annexed a Third of North America by Gruff Rhys is a fun and amusing jaunt and if there’s an end moral it’d be that plunging into the waters of life up to one’s neck; immersing oneself; pushing, and being pushed, by the messy and unpredictable tides; that’s the fastest path to the exceptional and the extraordinary. Take a trip.

(Check out our Q&A with Nick here)