Happy New Year, 2015!

This year is the first year of my own blog, Best Books By Beth.com!  I will be sharing links to reading and writing sites, reviews of children’s literature as well as great adult titles, both new and classic.  Links will be shared to other writers’ blogs.  Today,  I am motivated to write more myself as I send in stories to contests, publishers, magazines and maybe find a writing group and an agent.  Are these too many goals?  C. S. Lewis said, “We read to know we’re not alone.”  A well-known children’s writer, Richard Peck, mentioned that “…nobody but a reader ever became a writer.”  I have discovered great inspiration from his book Invitations to the World:  Teaching and Writing to the Young. (NY:  Dell, 2002) So as I work on Best Books By Beth, my goal is to share great reading and writing with my followers.
When I decided to write my own blog, I thought about my best skills. What do I love to do daily? I cannot go a day without recommending at least one book to a friend, a friend I just met or a golden one. Today I started reading one of the books in Betty G. Birnam’s series of “Humphrey” books for middle grade readers. This reading started as research for my own writing, but I fall in love with Humphrey, the golden hamster, each time I read his narration. Do you need a light-hearted read today, the beginning of a new year? I recommend Surprises according to Humphrey. If you have never been introduced to this great character, you will be in for a treat. Today may be the day you laugh out loud while reading silently or when you decide to share this book with a loved one of any age.
Maybe you are looking for a new book for your adult book club. Remember CAMEL! C= Complex Characters; A= Ambiguity; M= Meaty Issues; E= Exceptional Setting; and L= Language and Literary Devices.
Let the CAMEL acronym fill you up with the best you can find. Would you like some examples?
C= The Elegance of the Hedgehog by Muriel Spark! A= Hemingway’s Girl by Erika Robuck! M= Still Alice by Lisa Genovese! E= Someone Knows My Name by Lawrence Hill! and L= The Last Letter from My Lover by Jojo Moyes! You can see I enjoy reading many genres of fiction with literary fiction, historical fiction, mysteries and women’s popular fiction all included in my tastes.
In the next post I will write about my favorite mystery writers for each age of reader. Until then, happy reading in this new year of potential and possibilities.