Hi Everyone!

I hope you’re holding up well under lockdown. My wild and wonderful semester is more or less over, and now I am trying to focus on my research. But of course I’m getting plenty of non-research reading done! So I thought I’d share some books I’ve enjoyed recently.

I’m currently partway through Hook: Dead to Rights, which is currently free for a limited time, FYI.

Peter Pan was one of my favorite books as a child, and I’m enjoying the heck out of this retelling of it, which involves a female, half-mermaid Captain Hook as the main character. It’s a fast-moving adventure story in which Hook is obsessed with rescuing kidnapped children from the evil Peter Pan. But will she succeed..?

Here’s that link again: https://www.melissasnark.com/captain-hook-series/

A completely different but also extremely entertaining book I recently finished is Elif Batuman’s The Idiot.

Like me, Elif Batuman studied Russian literature in grad school and combines a literary and a scholarly career. She’s just come a lot closer to getting a Pulitzer than I have…Anyway, The Idiot is the story of Selim, a young Turkish-American woman who studies linguistics and Russian at Harvard while existing in a state of deep confusion. There are many hilarious moments, especially if, for example, you know how first-year Russian is taught and you can follow along with the progression of grammatical concepts in the inserted text from Selim’s Russian class. But you don’t have to have studied Russian to appreciate The Idiot. Anyone who spent their late teens and early twenties wondering what the heck was going on will probably find something to laugh at in Selim’s journey. Or to cringe at, but it will be a cringe tinged with laughter.

What about you? What books have you been enjoying recently?

Oh, and I’m still giving out review copies of my new omnibus editions of the Zemnian Series. If you’d like to read any or all of them, just shoot me an email at epclark@epclarkauthor.net.

And here’s this week’s selection of giveaways!