Links of the week January 23 2023 (04)

But for me, Twitter has and always will be a platform that helped me find my way in book publishing, and not just because my @TheBookMaven account has more than 200,000 followers or because I created #FridayReads, which is used by book professionals of all types to share current reading choices. By "finding my way in book publishing," I mean less my personal career than my overall views about our own industry and its changes in the 25 years I've written about, and worked in, the book world.

There's something tantalizing about unsolved murders and whodunnit puzzles that, when executed well, can draw even the most anxious among us away from our internal spiraling. As a lifelong reader of mysteries and thrillers, I was looking forward to staving off my fears with a familiar and comforting setup: a dead body, a plucky detective, and a clever resolution.

The only problem was that this time, crime fiction didn't take my mind off my problems. In fact, it highlighted them. That's because every suspense novel I read centered on at least one dead woman. As a result, I found myself sympathizing not with the intrepid detectives, whose mental acuity could outmatch even the cleverest of villains, but instead, with the hapless victims, whose fates were sealed just as much by circumstance as by chance.