You're about to curl up with that book you selected from BookBrowse's Editor's Choice, and you have tea brewing in the kitchen. It's time to dive right into another world.

Did you know that when you reemerge, you come back healthier, more empathic, and sharper? Reading also helps you live longer too. A study has shown that those who read for more than 3.5 hours per week are 23% less likely to die than those who do not read books.

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Leia Birch, the central character in Joshilyn Jackson's The Almost Sisters, is the writer of a comic books series published by DC Comics. While the characters and the comic are both fictional, in real-life, as is in the book, female writers are in the minority. The comic book world is chock full of men - they are both characters in the pages and the writers and illustrators creating those pages - but women have made significant contributions to the genre. From the early 20th century, when comics were just entering the newspaper scene and Nell Brinkley became famous for her well-loved illustrations to Becky Cloonan, who was the first woman to draw Batman for DC Comics in 2012, women have written and drawn comics for newspapers, mainstream publishers, underground and independent publishers, and many have self-published their work too.

Here are a few contemporary highlights:

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At BookBrowse we seek to help readers deepen their understanding of themselves and the world around them. We go beyond the book, providing original articles that look at cultural, historical or contextual aspects of each book we feature.

With this in mind, and with Saint Patrick's Day approaching, here we highlight some recent books that explore Ireland and Irish culture, and share each book's corresponding "Beyond the Book" article - for free!

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Ask me with a gun to my head if I believe in them, all the gods and myths that I write about, and I'd have to say no. Not literally. Not in the daylight, nor in well-lit places, with people about. But I believe in the stories we can tell with them. I believe in the reflections that they show us when they are told. And forget it or ignore it at your peril, it remains true: these stories have power.
- Neil Gaiman, from Reflections on Myth

It is through fantasy that we have always sought to make sense of the world, not through reason…It is through the fictive projections of our imaginations based on personal experience that we have sought to grasp, explain, alter, and comment on reality. This is again why such staples as the Bible and the Grimm's fairy tales have become such canonical texts: unlike reality, they allegedly open the mysteries of life and reveal ways in which we can maintain ourselves and our integrity in a conflict-ridden world.
- Jack Zipes, from Why Fantasy Matters Too Much

From myths and folklore, to fairy tales, fantasy and science fiction, people through every age and culture have turned to storytelling to reflect upon their lives. While literature, in general, helps show readers the world from different times, settings, and points of view, sometimes a decentralized setting allows readers to reflect upon an issue in a different way. Scholars such as Marina Warner, Jack Zipes, and Maria Nikolajeva, among others, have written extensively about the subversive and didactic nature of fairy tales – simply put, fairy tales have been used to both impress social values and lessons upon their readers and listeners, and to proffer an alternative to what seem like established social norms. By extension, fantasy and other speculative literary genres serve the same purpose.

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Souad Mekhennet is one of many women journalists who have entered dangerous situations to try to inform the world about conditions in a war zone. A few of the most influential and best-known, now deceased, are listed below.

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There's nothing quite like that feeling of getting a brand-new book from the bookstore, taking it home and spending hours absorbed in its pages.

People used to talk about the imminent death of reading. The internet, it was thought, would kill the book industry. But old habits die hard, and the trusty American novel continues to give readers many hours of escapism. In fact, according to Global English Editing's infographic on American reading habits published below, we're reading almost as much as we ever have.

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