We hope you are staying safe and well during this challenging time.
Books educate us, they inspire and comfort us, they entertain us, they bind us together. Which is why I created Bookship: Book relationships. There’s never been a better time to be reading, by yourself or with your friends and family.
With Bookship or not, we hope part of your routine is reading. Your library may be a great resource now, depending on where you live. We love the Libby app (not all countries, unfortunately), with access to a wealth of free eBooks.
This month’s tip: Too many Bookship emails? Go to Accounts, under Settings you can turn off email notifications, or app notifications, or both (but then you won’t know when people post!).
A quick update on Bookship: we’re exploring public social features for Bookship – like Instagram or Twitter, but for books. If you want to chime in, we have a survey going, it will take you about 2 minutes to finish:
https://mark579.typeform.com/to/xlUBbF
Bookship has always been completely free, but that’s not sustainable for the long term.
The basic product will remain free, but we’re working on a (low cost) monthly subscription product, Bookship Premium, to help us keep Bookship alive. It doesn’t feel like a great time to be asking for money, so the Premium version will be free for you, our existing customers, at least for some period of time. It will provide:
* Access to a much-improved Bookship Briefings feature (the paper clip) for any book you’re reading.
* Readings and Groups with 10 or more people.
* Guaranteed ad-free experience.
Before it launches, we’ll provide more details.
OK, on to the books! The most popular books on Bookship in the last 30 days are:
Station Eleven
Emily St. John Mandel’s post-pandemic novel is eerily timely, and follows a Shakespearean performing troupe as they travel the post-apocalyptic landscape, with periodic flashbacks to the time before the disaster. Not surprising people are reading it right now, I suppose. Mandel’s book is ultimately hopeful (at least I hope it is, I’m not done yet đŸ™‚ ).
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Hidden Figures
Margot Lee Shetterly’s multi-award-winning Hidden Figures tells the inspiring true story of four black women who helped NASA launch people into space. It chronicles their careers over nearly three decades they faced challenges, forged alliances and used their intellect to change their own lives, and their country’s future. It’s also a movie starring Taraji P. Henson, Octavia Spencer, and Janelle MonĂ¡e.
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Where the Crawdads Sing
This books seems to be near the top of our lists every month!
Kya Clark has survived for years alone in the marshes of North Carolina, only to be suspected in a murder. An ode to nature and a unique coming of age story, Where the Crawdads Sing is, as the New York Times says, “a painfully beautiful first novel“. Reese Witherspoon is making the movie….
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I can’t resist sharing some of my personal quarantine reading, they’re all great.
The Odyssey: Emily Wilson’s new translation reads like glass. The greatest adventure story ever told.
The Good Shepherd: a gripping novel of WWII U-boat warfare, soon to be a Tom Hanks movie.
The Last Good Kiss, a darkly comic noir private eye roadtrip. Raymond Chandler meets Hunter S. Thompson.
Thanks for reading and staying in touch. If you have any trouble with Bookship, please drop me a note! And Happy Reading!
Oh. Bookship social might look something like this….
