Bugs! Awards! Your TBR! September Bookship Newsletter
Welcome to October! We hope you’re enjoying the early stages of fall and reading some great books. Recently some folks have reported the app getting “stuck”, when opening the app from a notification or after posting a comment. Our most recent app update should clear that up. Be sure to update to the most recent version. We’ve also added some fun new features!
Now you can easily add books to your TBR list just by scanning a barcode. Say you’re in a book store and you see a book you want to remember. Just go to Browse books, tap the bookmark icon (top right), tap the barcode scanner icon (bottom right), scan your book’s barcode, and it’s saved!
We now tag award-winning books with a clickable badge. Click the badge to see the awards the book won. The Browse Books page now has a browsable set of Awards Channels, with more coming soon.
Groups and Calendars, which we introduced in the last newsletter, are getting a lot of use. Any feedback? Would love to hear from you!
OK on to this month’s popular books! So, it turns out that both Educated and Where the Crawdads Sing remain atop the Bookship charts, but we’ve told you about them before. Instead here’s one book popular on Bookship now, and two books from our own reading you may find interesting.
A lot of folks are taking advantage of Bookship’s built-in reader to read free books. In particular, Dracula - in the form of a beautiful (and free) edition courtesy of Standard Ebooks. Just open the app, Browse Books, and look under Classics. Good, creepy fun. For extra creepy, listen to Philip Glass’s soundtrack to Dracula while you read (listen on Spotify).
We’re big fans of James Salter, who was a fighter pilot before he was a famous author. We just finished Solo Faces, a literary exploration wrapped inside a mountain adventure novel. Not unlike, although not quite the equal of, Wind, Sand and Stars, one of my all time favorite books. But close.
Rand is a restless mountain climber challenging himself against the mountains in Switzerland (and California), and trying to balance this drive with the people in his life. A good psychological look into someone completely driven, yet very human and imperfect. I’m disappointed this never became a movie - it reads like one. You’ll feel yourself on the mountain. Salter’s writing, as always, is exquisite. Like glass. You never get hung up on a sentence.
My bookclub is reading Salt, a history of, well, Salt. How interesting could that be, you ask? Could it be, say, salacious? Consider this excerpt:
In 1912, [Welsh Jungian psychologist Ernest] Jones published an essay about the human obsession with salt - a fixation that he found irrational and subconsciously sexual. To support his theory, he cited the curious Abyssinian custom of presenting a piece of rock salt to a guest, who would then lick it…The Romans, Jones pointed out, called a man in love salax, in a salted state, which is the origin of the word salacious.
Who knew Salt could be so interesting?
Thanks for reading and staying in touch.
If you have any trouble with Bookship, please drop me a note!
Happy Reading!