As with all my annual end-of-year lists, the following books were new to me this year, but not necessarily new in 2024. I hope you find a few of these recommendations inspiring for your own To Read Pile in 2025 and beyond.
Read moreMy Top 10 Book of 2023
As with all my annual lists, this only pertains to books new to me in 2023, with no re-reads from previous years (and there are always a handful of re-reads…looking at you, Alan Furst). Without further ado, here are my favorites from this past year, in order.
Read moreMy Top 10 Books of 2022
As with all my annual re-caps, the book didn’t have to be released in 2022 to make the list, it just had to be my first time reading it. No re-reads allowed. My reading slowed down a lot in the last third of the year due to writing and revising a new novel and the holiday madness, but I’m excited to see what 2023 brings. Until then, these are ten can’t miss books that I highly recommend.
Read moreHeel Spurs: Top 10 San Antonio Players Who Make Great Heels and Villains
The San Antonio Spurs have had a reputations of being a straight-laced, team-first squad for decades, to the point where many fans think they’re boring. This is thanks to the humble, nice-guy leadership of legends like David Robinson, Tim Duncan, Avery Johnson, and so on. The “buy into the system” expectations for this team are as clear as the black and white on their jerseys. But there’s silver in those jerseys too, a gray area for players who are harder to tame and buck at the heavy-hand placed on them by Pop and the front office (affectionally know by Spurs fans as PATFO). Now this list is mostly tongue-in-cheek, and like great heels in wrestling, these are the Spurs players who took a turn toward villainy, providing some drama (be it entertaining or franchise threatening) for a team that is unfairly treated as vanilla, as plain paper, as drama free. They’ve been anything but over the years, thanks to these thorny Spurs in our heels.
Read moreMy Top 10 Books of 2021
As with all my annual lists, the books themselves could have been published in any year, but they must be new to me. I didn’t read as many as I had hoped this year, but I am happy I was able to broaden my reading world with a lot of new authors I hadn’t explored before. If you hadn’t read any of these yet, I highly recommend them!
Read more10 Blogging Tips for Beginners
People have been blogging since the mid-90s, so it’s not exactly a cutting-edge medium for creating and monetizing content, especially when you compare it to things like TikTok, YouTube, Instagram, and other platforms. But if you’re a wordsmith at heart and want to give blogging a try, I’ve selected ten tips to help you get your passion project off the ground. Now, if you’re looking to monetize your blog, that’s a whole other game, so for now I’m just going to focus on getting your blog up and running in order to attract enough readers to (hopefully) justify any ads you might want to allow on your site. This is advice for someone who wants to share their work, their passion, and their ideas first and foremost, and blogging remains a great way to do that and reach potentially interested readers.
Read moreMy Top 10 Books of 2020
This has been a strange year for reading. It started out with a reinvigorated love of using the local library, and then the pandemic hit. One would think that working from home would allow me extra time to burn through more books than usual, and yet I read less this year than in previous years. I also stumbled into a stunning series of DNF (did not finish) roadblocks than ever before, a whole string of books that lost me a chapter or two in. Oddly enough, many of those books took place in libraries and bookshops, much to my heartbreak. I wanted at least one of them to be good, but they weren’t. However, these books below are the ones that captivated me the most and I’d recommend any of them.
Read moreMy Top 10 Books of 2019
As with all of my annual “best books of the year” lists, these don’t have to be “new” books, but they’re all new to me, and the list includes no re-reads, only first-timers. I’m pretty happy with this year’s overall batch. These are the ones that kept me up late into the night flipping pages and reading on, and as usual, I cheated a bit and added more than 10!
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