April Reading Recap

Despite a bunch of non-reading days while I engaged in vacation-y activities with visiting family, I did pretty well on my April reads:

→ FEED by Mira Grant - Finished. A page-turner about a sister and brother working as journalists at a time when zombie infection is an everyday threat. I was sucked right into the story and couldn't stop reading. I didn't like everything about this book, but I'll be picking up the second installment of the trilogy, DEADLINE, when it's released at the end of this month.

→ THE FATES WILL FIND THEIR WAY by Hannah Pittard - Finished. A collective coming-of-age for a group of friends. When a high school girl goes missing, her male classmates (speaking in the first-person plural point of view) imagine what might have happened to her. The girl's different hypothetical futures mix with the accounts of the boys' lives as they grow up, start families of their own, and cope with the often-unwanted responsibilities of adulthood. The book jumps around in time and focus, using this odd narrative style to gradually tell the mostly-complete, mostly-sad story of the residents of a suburban neighborhood.

→ THE INTUITIONIST by Colson Whitehead - Haven't started yet. I'm looking forward to reading it next.

→ GREEN MARS by Kim Stanley Robinson - About a hundred pages in. As with the first book in the series, I expect to read this one over a few months while also reading other books.

In addition to the published books I read this month, I also reviewed and critiqued a manuscript for a friend. I'll probably be looking over a different manuscript in May.

Good Stuff Out There:

→ The Intern offers Ten Reasons You Should Rewrite That Scene: "In Draft One, you account for every minute in your characters' lives. Big scenes in which your characters experience major conflict are strung together with long, creaky suspension bridges of little scenes showing what happens in the meantime (vacuuming, taking a shower, going for a walk, etc.) Do we need to know what happens 'in the meantime'?"

→ The Guardian Books Blog is asking readers to help build 24 hours of fictional time using lines from literature.