As you may or may not know, I’m a very strong believer in that in order to be a good writer, you MUST be a good reader.  That doesn’t mean reading only your genre and only in your industry but reading everything and anything that interests you.  Here’s what’s on my bookshelf for December:

My daughter turned 12 last month.  That, combined with some parenting issues we’ve been having prompted me to purchase  Parenting With Love And Logic (Updated and Expanded Edition)
I also bought the edition for parenting teens.

Don’t get me wrong, she’s a great kid. Good grades, good friends, confident and kind.  We just knock heads from time to time and I wasn’t sure we were handling those situations the best way possible.  I did a kind of drive by reading of the first Love and Logic book, whipping through it and reading all the tips and chapter summaries.  Actually learned a bit just from doing that so I’d recommend the book if you EVER have any parenting doubts.  I disagreed with some things, like allowance, however by and large it’s a very good book with a solid foundation in good parenting.  I’m actually going to get it for my sister and her husband for Christmas because they just had a new baby and you can’t start too early!

I’m also reading Into Thin Air: A Personal Account of the Mt. Everest Disaster by Jon Krakauer.  It’s an amazing story written by a fantastic author (I actually have a bit of an author crush on him)  Reading it is, I admit, partially motivated by the fact that I tend to see him from time to time at the climbing gym and well, gosh, you really should read books by people you’ve said, “we’ll be off this route in just a minute” to, right?

Lastly, and completely unrelated to all the other books on my bookshelf is the The Guide to Getting It On, 6th Edition which I purchased not because I’m looking for instruction but because I have a heck of a time writing the more intimate scenes in my fiction projects and I thought a book on the subject might help me figure out some unique yet completely plausible positions for the characters to be in (blush)

So….What’s on your bookshelf this month?