Have you heard of the Page 69 test?

Nor had I. But it is, apparently, a quick test of a novel. I have decided that if a book does not capture my interest, I don’t have to continue.

Have you heard of the Page 69 test?

Nor had I. But it is, apparently, a quick test of a novel. I have decided that if a book does not capture my interest, I don’t have to continue. But I make myself continue to page 69. The point is, by page 69, the story should be well underway and the reader engaged. The idea originated with the 1960’s cultural guru Marshall McLuhan. He recommended that bookstore browsers can save time and pick an absorbing book by turning immediately to page 69. Read it, and if you like it, buy the book.

I had forgotten what exactly was on page 69 of my new novel, Joyous Lies, so I checked. How fun it was to realize that on this page the story is unfolding nicely. Here, the film-maker Pamela, who has come to the Joyous Woods commune to make a movie on “What Became of the Hippies, flirts with commune founder Neil,

My book group is reading a fascinating non-fiction book this month. It is The Treeline by Ben Rawlence. ( See review elsewhere on this website.) If I was interested in plants before I wrote Joyous Lies, my novel about a botanist, I now devour every new book about plants, including trees and their amazing properties. Trees are, as Rawlence puts it, the lungs of the earth.

My book group is reading a fascinating non-fiction book this month. It is The Treeline by Ben Rawlence. (See review elsewhere on this website.) If I was interested in plants before I wrote Joyous Lies, my novel about a botanist, I now devour every new book about plants, including trees and their amazing properties. Trees are, as Rawlence puts it, the lungs of the earth.

I wrote most of Joyous Lies in 2019 and 2020, long before The Treeline came out and a few months before the tree researcher Suzanne Simard hit the bestseller list with her wonderful book, Finding the Mother Tree. Simard, a forest scientist in British Columbia, proved that trees protect their young and their kin through a fungal network underground, the wood-wide web.

Now researchers are