Our Anniversary - May 13

BookwormLive began in 2012 to provide a place where we could continue our discussions and make contact with others who share our love of reading.  Anniversaries provide an opportunity to reflect on the past year and also to look at what can be improved or added to encourage participation.  Any site is only as good as it's input and we are so very lucky to have great contributors.  Take a bow, you know who you are.  To our Followers, thanks so much for your support.  It means much  in terms of encouragement and wonderful that you care enough to join us.  Finally to all our viewers. From Argentina to Vietnam, there have been 19,000 page views in the past year - an amazing response.  Please keep visiting and you are most welcome to share your thoughts with us.

It has been a fantastic year.  Just look at some of  Google's statistics in the comments below.  I think you will find them interesting.

MORE LISTS.......

For those, like me, who have a penchant for lists. There are a few lists scattered through the site: 'Books of the Decade' and 'Dystopian Literature' have their own posts. There is Reddit's list of the 'Best Sci-Fi' books under Award Winners and of course the Award Winners and New Releases posts.  I'll post the list title here, as more are added.  Please do add any lists you find interesting.

1. Granta: Britain's best young novelists

Group Read - THE SECRET KEEPER - Kate Morton

In a bucolic English summer at the end of the 1960s, a young girl witnesses a shocking crime. Fifty years later, she sets out to find out the truth, uncovering layers of mystery and deception. Moving from London during the Blitz to the present day, this is classic Kate Morton: a compulsively-readable, entrancing mystery with a long held secret to be uncovered at its heart.

Group Read - HEAT WAVE - Penelope Lively

Pauline is spending the summer at World's End, a cottage somewhere in the middle of England. This year the adjoining cottage is occupied by her daughter Teresa and baby grandson Luke; and, of course, Maurice, the man

eReading

Love them or hate them, eBooks are here to stay.  Although I prefer print I found a place in my reading life for an eReader.  My mantra - 'Why can't I have both?'

Featured Author - Peter Ackroyd

Ackroyd began his literary career as a poet before moving into fiction, and has also written imaginatively convincing biographies of TS Eliot, Dickens, Blake and Thomas More. He excels in the dual narrative - two voices

20 Greatest Works of Dystopian Literature

Another example of my penchant for lists.  Dystopian or speculative fiction gives a view of where the author thinks society is heading, usually by depiction of the outcome in a futuristic setting.  The best enables us to look at our world in a new way.  A notable omission is Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale.

GROUP READ - 11/22/63 - Stephen King

Synopsis:

Jake Epping is a thirty-five-year-old high school English teacher in Lisbon Falls, Maine, who makes extra money teaching adults in the GED program. He receives an essay from one of the students—a gruesome, harrowing first person story about the night 50 years ago when Harry Dunning’s father came home and killed

GROUP READ - It's Raining in Mango - Thea Astley

As there is a problem with the Group Read page, shall we continue our discussion here?  Please re-post your 'lost' comments.

Books of the Decade

Anybody remember how anxious and thrilled we were in those last months of the 20th century? When we weren't at war and we had a budget surplus and it looked like Al Gore would be president? The prospect of a 21st century filled with new technologies, new art and literature loomed large and bright. But now, as we look back at what was decidedly a shitty decade for an incredible variety of people in an equally incredible variety of ways (evictions/invasions/bombings/etc), it's surprisingly hard to be pessimistic about the books that assessed, satirized, dramatized and distracted us from the events of the past 10 years.