January 18, 2012 – 3:36 pm
Shop Indie Bookstores Fans of Downton Abbey, the UK-produced drama about the Crawley family and their servants that PBS imported for Masterpiece Classic, will be happy to know that NY publishers have taken notice. In addition to the companion book, The World of Downton Abbey by Jessica Fellowes, dozens of 20th century novels about the British aristocracy are being rushed [...]
January 4, 2012 – 4:58 pm
Happy 2012 readers! Even tho’ I can’t predict what new titles will become this year’s hot reads, I did run across a few note worthy trends that book insiders are betting on and buzzing about. Contemporary dilemma-type titles, sequels of classic tales, YA/adult crossover titles and short story collections are just a few of the fiction trends [...]
December 9, 2011 – 6:07 pm
Don’t ask me where the month of November went. Somewhere between dishing out the Halloween candy; creating a book group blog for The Mercer Island Patch; attending my first ever ACBL bridge convention over Thanksgiving weekend; finalizing the refinancing of our home; celebrating my mom’s 96th birthday and creating a family photo Christmas calendar… the days simply [...]
Photo: John Rawlings Vogue Summer Fiction “Holy Moly”, I never realized that an innocent search for Best 2011 Beach Reads could turn into a Googling nightmare. Two hours into my online search, I’m still finding sites like Geeky Beach Reads, Equestrian Beach Reads, Sci-fi Beach Reads, Boozy Beach Reads, Classic Beach Reads, Smart Summer Beach Reads, Best Summer Beach [...]
This past month I have been busy creating a new blog over at blogger.com titled The Novel Cook. It’s my attempt at peeling the layers off a book through it’s references to food. I first thought about this after reading a piece in the New Yorker by writer, essayist Adam Gopnik. According to Gopnik [...]
February 19, 2011 – 10:22 am
Shop Indie Bookstores I’m just finishing up reading Stacy Schiff’s Cleopatra. A much different book than I was expecting. It reads more like a text book and the long-g-g-g chapters and the need for a dictionary at times left me exhausted. A Pulitzer Prize winner I’m sure because of the research that went into it. [...]
February 7, 2011 – 3:15 pm
Shop Indie Bookstores Algonquin Books online book club is kick starting their 2011 event season with author Julia Alvarez discussing her book In The Time of Butterflies with author Edwidge Danticat (Brother, I’m Dying). This live webcast will be held on March 21st at 7pm EST. This is not a passive event. Readers are encouraged [...]
January 11, 2011 – 12:23 pm
When the blogging revolution started in earnest, many book bloggers started offering up reading challenges as a way to drive traffic to their site. Much like the summer reading rallies hosted by schools and libraries, online reading challenges run the gamut from Adoption to Zombies. Salon co-founder and author Laura Miller writes that she uses [...]
October 8, 2010 – 5:32 pm
The fall book season is well under way and the following newsy book items caught my eye. What books are the librarians loving this season? Emma Donoghue‘s The Room, Susan Henderson’s Up From The Blue and Tom Franklin‘s Crooked Letter, Crooked Letter. Already on the NY Times bestseller list coupled with a stellar audio version, [...]
September 22, 2010 – 6:19 pm
Shop Indie Bookstores Now that vacation time is over, I will attempt to focus on what has been happening in book world while I’ve been frolicking down under in Australia. In one word Freedom. The week before my trip, at our annual book club Pitch-a-Pick, Jonathan Franzen’s Freedom came up as a possible choice [...]
