Reviewing and rating books: A deeply personal act

The following Tweet popped up in my Twitter feed the other day and it got me thinking… There are a couple of issues within this tweet, including the concept of authors trying to influence reviews/ratings of their books, but the one I want to focus on is the act of rating and reviewing books, and…

Opinion: Teen Reading in the Digital Era Report Update

The Teen Reading in the Digital Era project is a fabulous project that is run by a team of researchers from Deakin University and is all about understanding teen reading habits. Findings of this research provide valuable insights into the reading lives of teens. They have recently released a report with an update on their…

Reading for me

The past 12 months have been incredibly liberating in terms of my reading material. From Dec 2015 to Dec 2021, I read nothing but books I could recommend to my students. Since leaving the school library/classroom and moving into the world of academia, I decided to read only that which got me super excited. Don’t…

Defining digital literature

I am currently the subject coordinator of ETL533 Literature in Digital Environments, an elective subject for the Master of Education (Teacher Librarianship), Master of Information Studies, and Graduate Certificate of Information Studies courses. We are exploring different aspects of digital literature and in our meeting last night, we started to consider the question of “what…

Reviews of Rainbow Reads

I’ve been reading a bit of LGBTQIA+ fiction lately and thought I’d do some quick reviews! Clearly I’ve been reading lots of MLM (man loves man) fiction and need to discover some other reads – suggestions welcome in the comments please! Young Adult Fiction Heartstopper is an oldy but a goody and is widely acknowledged…

Diversity matters

For a long time I have been tossing up whether or not to write about the importance of reading diverse stories. I’m taking the leap because this is something that I am very passionate about and I think needs discussing. I will contain my focus for this post specifically on books and stories. Without getting…

Click’d – Stone

We recently purchased “Click’d” by Tamara Ireland Stone for the iCentre at Mount Alvernia College, and it has sat in my #tbr (to be read) pile since then. I finally got around to reading it this past week and I really enjoyed it. Synopsis: Allie loves to code. She attended CodeGirls Summer Camp over the…

What I like about me – Guillaume

I had seen this book all over Instagram and I was very intrigued. So many of the captions were saying how much they loved this book and how it made them laugh and cry. It’s been a while since I’ve read a book that made me laugh AND cry so I decided to give it…

Four Dead Queens – Scholte

I had seen this book all over Instagram and so when my colleague, Marg, handed me our new copy to read I didn’t think twice; I took it home and started it over the holidays. However, when the first queen died I got such a shock. I then thought to myself “hang on a minute,…

The Survival Game – Singer

I picked up The Survival Game by Nicky Singer because the cover and title reminded me of The Hunger Games. As I started reading I realised very quickly that even though this is a dystopian novel about survival, it is very different from The Hunger Games. I thoroughly enjoyed this book, in fact, it’s the…