I recently read a pair of books by Arkady Martine, a writer who is new to Science Fiction. A Memory Called Empire (2019) and A Desolation Called Peace (2021), each won the Hugo Award for Best Novel.I like Arkady Martine and I like her books. She is an extraordinary storyteller.But she is not yet a great writer.That was not intended as an insult. Dan Brown sold a staggering number of The DaVinci Code, but he is not yet a great writer, either. We tend to read the book of a great storyteller only once. Knowing the story, the magic is gone. This is why every thrift shop in the world is stacked with countless copies of 50 Shades of Gray and The DaVinci Code.But we read the works of great writers again and again. A great writer could write an instruction manual and make it captivating.Literary evaluation is wildly subjective, of course, so I owe an explanation to Arkady Martine and to you.I never read borrowed books because I intend to circle passages and make notes in the margins along the way. To deface my own books with circles and notes is a sign of respect for the author, but for me to deface the book of a friend would not be a sign of respect.I will not finish a book if the author is not a great storyteller. I will not circle any passages if the author is a not a great writer.The hope of every great storyteller should be to also become a great writer. To win the Pulitzer Prize or the Nobel Prize in literature, you have to be both.John Steinbeck was both.J.R.R. Tolkien was both.Tom Robbins is both.Bill Bryson is both.Barbara Kingsolver is both.I am currently on page 26 of Barbara Kingsolver’s 546-page novel, Demon Copperhead,* and I have already circled 10 passages. Indy will transcribe those passages into the rabbit hole when I have completed the book. (The Random Quotes database is now 6,108 quotes and climbing. – Indy)The stories that comprise One Thousand and One Nights were compiled a thousand years ago. In one of those stories, Prince Husain travels to Bisnagar and buys a magic carpet. Do not let Disney mislead you. Husain’s carpet is not a ‘flying’ carpet that rides the air like a raptor. His magic carpet is like a good book. All you have to do is decide where you want to be, sit down, and you are there.Good writing engages all your senses as it moves you to another place, another time, another life.You are at a spongey 100-year-old seaside resort favored by the idle rich in the tropical south.“The air was heavy with oleander and sea mist colliding with mold and wood polish and hotel soap and the metallic vapor of Diet Coke and the alcoholic ferment of generations of cougars in Chanel No. 5.”– Olivia NuzziYou are now in the brittle north.“It’s FREEZING cold; like the air is made of broken glass. Our English cold is all roly-poly snowmen and ‘woo-hoo! it’s a snow day!’ a hey-there friendly kind of cold. But this cold is mean…”“It’s getting so hard to breathe, my lungs are filling up with ants and there isn’t room for air any more. There’s a monster made of cold, hard as the edge of a pavement, coming towards us in the dark and it’s cutting through the windscreen and doors and windows and the only weapon against it is heat, but we don’t have any heat.”“…she felt it now as vastly, cruelly impersonal; a frozen darkness absorbing you into itself. She felt it filling her hollow spaces, embedding itself as icy marrow in her bones and then consciousness seeped away from her into the Arctic blackness.”– Rosamund LuptonYou stood in the rain sixty-five miles north of Seattle.“And it rained a sickness. And it rained a fear. And it rained an odor. And it...