Are you ready to be amazed?  The May, 2019 issue of Glamour carried an article about Danielle Steel, in which much was revealed about the bestselling novelist.  She was born in New York, grew up in France, was married twice, has nine children, sold her very first novel at age 19, and has published 179 books [yes, that’s 179, but it might be several more by the time you read this].  The Numbers Game, her latest, is coming out in March.  [There’s a library waiting list for it.]  She uses not a computer but a 1946 Olympia standard typewriter, works 20 to 24 hours a day, usually sleeps less than four hours a night, and often has five or six novels underway simultaneously.  If you’d like to view her custom desk, built to look like a stack of three of her bestselling novels, go to glamour.com.  

“A bad review is like baking a cake with all the best ingredients and having someone sit on it.”  Danielle Steel

Here’s a library acquisition for you if you love to read and love music, especially rock and roll——Bowie’s Bookshelf: The Hundred Books That Changed David Bowie’s Life, by John O’Connell.  In short essays, music journalist O’Connell examines how each book influenced the musician’s life and work.  In 1975, when Bowie was filming The Man Who Fell to Earth, the Sunday Times wrote:  “Bowie hates aircraft so he mostly travels across the states by train, carrying his mobile bibliotheque in special trunks which open out with all his books neatly displayed on shelves.  In New Mexico, the volumes dealt mainly with the occult, his current enthusiasm.”

“Reading is, among much else, an escape — into other people, other perspectives, other consciousnesses.  It takes you out of yourself, only to put you back there infinitely enriched.”  John O’Connell.

There are numerous books we would have been denied the pleasure of reading if the authors had not persisted in spite of harsh rejections.  For instance, Moby Dick.  An editor who disliked the concept of the whale suggested that Captain Ahab struggle instead “with a depravity toward young, perhaps voluptuous, maidens.”  Would Moby Mermaid have been a classic?