Bethanne Patrick
I’m a journalist and book reviewer in the D.C. metro area. I’ve been a freelance writer, an editor at PAGES Magazine, and the AOL Books channel editor; I’m currently a contributing editor for Publishers Weekly and blog there as The Book Maven. I currently review for The Washington Post Book World and Bookreporter.com, among others. I look forward to learning more about local readers, book groups, and authors.
Whenever I tell people what I do, their first reaction is “Wow, you get paid to read for a living!” If only. Let me explain…
It’s true that I found a way, through years of different kinds of jobs, freelance gigs, and networking, to make reading pay: any book I read (and I do read many; more on that in a moment) contributes to my work. However, I don’t get paid to read; I get paid to write, I get paid to criticize, I get paid to entertain… the reading time is on my own clock.
Fortunately, that doesn’t matter — because I’d be reading as fast as I can whether I was working as a blogger and book reviewer and publishing-industry reporter, or not. Like many of you visiting this site, I discovered reading early in life. The earliest book I can remember owning and loving was one with cloth pages that were sort of waxed or coated so that they were still flexible (does anyone else remember those?); I carried it around constantly — knowing that I could hand it to my mother and hear her tell me words that connected to the bright illustrations was sheer heaven.
I still carry a book with me constantly. As long as I’ve got one, I’ve got great company. So, as I got older and began to write professionally, I found that I wanted to talk to the men and women whose creations were keeping my company. I’ve interviewed scores of today’s best authors, from Alexander McCall Smith to Luanne Rice to Julian Barnes to Jan Karon to Art Buchwald to Sue Grafton to Nelson DeMille to Alice Walker to Brad Meltzer to P.D. James to… well, you get the idea.
Here’s what I promise you if you visit Author, Author!: I’ll ask every author different questions, and I always, always read the book (so that those questions are relevant). I’ll also guarantee that every author we feature is someone (like those above) who intrigues me — and I hope their interviews will intrigue you, too.