Book a Week with Jen

I beat the director! I really did! On Saturday, I ran in the Collingswood "Beat the Director" 5k, which I wrote about here . If you beat the library director, you got $10 of your registration fee back. I wasn't sure how I was going to do. I've felt sluggish since shoulder surgery, and even though my miles are up, my speed is not. Still, I pulled out a 22:24 time and beat the director by 10 whole seconds. I finished 11th overall, and 4th among the women. I even placed in my age bracket! I did not, however, ask for $10 back. It's for charity, after all. Here's a picture of the start. I'm in the middle in yellow: This is a picture with fellow Collingswood writer, Matt Quick : Matt is author of The Silver Linings Playbook . It fell between my "book a week" series, so I never wrote about it on the blog, but it's a fantastic novel that he wrote in accordance with the 2006 Philadelphia Eagles football season. It's not just a football n

I didn't want it to end up this way. But, unfortunately, it's true: Cleaving: A Story of Marriage, Meat, and Obsession , Julie Powell's follow up to the best selling, immensely fun and delightful Julie and Julia: My Year of Cooking Dangerously , is not a very good book. It's dull. It's trite. And it reads more like an unbalanced woman's rambling than something being marketed as the Hot Holiday Memoir. I started my first Book a Week series with Julie & Julia . It's a charming book where Powell sets out to cook every single recipe in Julia Child's Mastering The Art of French Cooking . It started as a blog, and once the blog caught media fire, became a book, then a movie starring Meryl Streep and directed by one of my heros, Nora Ephron. That book isn't just about the cooking challenge, but also about being a 20-something stuck in the middle, and she can't get out of it. She married young, which is part of the story. The other is not knowing w

I'm not much of a mystery fan, which is why Emyl Jenkins' The Big Steal had been in my "to donate" pile. But I had nothing to read -- and I mean NOTHING. None of the books on my "to check out" shelf looked appealing. Most are non-fiction, and for Labor Day weekend, I didn't want to read about parenting skills, social networking or the power of no. So I pulled this book out of the donation pile, plunked my butt in a lawn chair, and read away on Saturday. For that purpose, it was a good choice. It's part of a series called the Sterling Glass mysteries . Sterling Glass isn't a pretty item; rather, she's a middle aged antiques appraiser who happens to get caught up in a mystery with every job she takes. In The Big Steal , she's been hired to assess the value of antiques broken and/or stolen from the estate of Hoyt and Mazie Wyndfield, who built a huge palace filled with stuff in Orange County, Virginia. But Glass doesn't just waltz i