Month: February 2008

Click on over to Critical Mass, the blog of the National Book Critics Circle, for my write up of Wednesday’s event. The direct link is here.

Special thanks to Daisy Fried, Kermit Roosevelt, Frank Wilson and Ben Yagoda for being part of the panel; and to Joseph Fox Bookshop and Friends Select for sponsoring the event.

If you’re American and heard of Alan Bennett, you’ll know that he is author of The History Boys a smashing Broadway success and then movie. If you’re British and heard of Alan Bennett, you’ll more likely know of him as an extraordinary playwright, novelist and all around comedic guy.

I studied Bennett’s plays while abroad at Oxford. He was a key author in my course about modern British playrights, along with Joe Orton and Tom Stoppard. Where Orton’s humor is preverse with his humor, and Stoppard is clever when slotted into his dramas (Stoppard also wrote Shakespeare in Love), I found Bennett’s comedy the most clever.

Which is why I was delighted when I picked up a copy of The Uncommon Reader at last year’s Book Expo America, and I’m berating myself for waiting to read this fun, slim novel when I’ve had it since June.

The uncommon reader is the Queen of England who, one day finds a mobile library outside her door (a mobile library is a bus loaded up with books that drives from town to town for people who can’t get to the library — Ian […]

Quick reminder before I get into the review: on Wednesday, I’m moderating a National Book Critics Circle panel on books and all the wonderful things involved with the publishing world. It’s at 7pm at Friends Select in Philadelphia. And it’s FREE. How could you pass that up?

Now onto the review of book 33 of 52: Wow. Just wow.

That was my initial reaction to finally finishing Carolyn Burke’s Lee Miller: A Lifethis evening. The book is an epic, and an exceptionally well researched and written one at that (it was a National Book Critics Circle finalist for 2005). It recounts the life Lee Miller, who has the kind of life that would seem completely unfathomable if presented as fiction.

I’d read about Lee Miller briefly in Francine Prose’s The Lives of the Muses: Nine Women & the Artists They Inspired. Miller, having been a muse for Man Ray, was one of the nine women featured (and pictured on the cover). I thought she was interesting, yes, but the profile was relatively brief and packed in with eight other people. I came across Burke’s book because I read about the Lee Miller exhibit currently on display […]

How do you make a video clip for Hedge Funds For Dummies by Annie C. Logue? Like this:

I’m glad he got his piggy.

Read more at www.annielogue.com. To learn more about the filmmaker, Steve Delahoyde, click here.

I didn’t write this piece from The Atlantic, but I caught a link of it on Trish Ryan’s blog. In the article, Lori Gottlieb writes about settling. Why am I posting it here? Because she dedicates a chunk of this rather long essay to dating books for women. A sample:

“The approaches in these books may differ, but the message is the same: more important than love is marriage. To achieve that goal, women across the country are poring over guidebooks that all boil down to determining, ‘Does he like me?,’ while completely overlooking the equally essential question, ‘Do I like him?’

I’m not giving the thumbs up or thumbs down to her opinion (though I do agree with her stance on dating books written for women). Just thought it was interesting. Plus, I’m still deep in the trenches of that wonderful-yet-dense-book. So read on!

I’m working my way through a very wonderful yet incredibly dense book, so I’m not sure when I’ll get another review up here. In the meantime, I’d like to recommend Mike McGrath’s Book of Compost, which I read before I started this project.

I, like a lot of freelancers, are under an avalanche of assignments about green living. I’m not complaining — I won’t claim to be the most green person, but I bought my house where I did with the idea that I wouldn’t have to drive everywhere (to check out how walking-friendly your town is, check out www.walkscore.com). I also wrote an article for the fall issue of Edible Jersey about composting, and in the last two weeks, I’ve had three people ask me about that article. At a party I had two weeks ago, I even gave people a tour of how I compost (not a grand tour, but they seemed to like it).

This book really helped. McGrath, who is the former editor of Organic Gardening and current voice behind You Bet Your Garden, writes in such a lively, fun way that the book doesn’t feel like a […]

I sometimes (okay, almost always) do a bit of work on the weekends, and I’m betting a bunch of you do, too, or at least spend some of your Saturday or Sunday wandering around the web. So, every weekend, I’m going to post a video related to books, and given that a lot of books now have trailers, I think I’ll have plenty to pick from. I’m running the same kind of feature (albeit about the South Jersey Shore) on my other blog, though with a slightly different name.

Anyway, our first Weekend Wandering is the trailer of Rachel C. Weingarten’s Career and Corporate Cool (TM). I read the book before I started this Book a Week project, so I couldn’t review it here, but I will say that it’s a very cool book of career advice without that “white guy in a suit” mentality.

Doesn’t it just make you want to watch a Doris Day movie?

You can read more at www.careerandcorporatecool.com.

Galleycat pointed out a few free reading downloads today.

One is “The Lovers of Vertigo” by Timothy Schaffert, which you can download for free here. It’s even formatted so you can print it and make it into a little booklet. I’ve got mine printed and ready to go so I have something to read on my train ride into Philly tonight. No sense carrying a big purse to fit a big book when I can slip this little story in a slim bag that matches my planned outfit for the evening. Here’s what the booklet looks like:

It does come in color, but I’m out of color toner, so black and white will have to do.

The Harlequin estore is also giving away free downloads of Sherryl Woods’s The Valentine Wedding Dress. I downloaded it, but couldn’t print it. Boo.

For more info about these deals and everything wonderful (and not so wonderful) in the book world, check out Galleycat here.

I wanted to include Things I’ve Learned From Women Who’ve Dumped Meedited by Ben Karlin in my Philadelphia Inquirer article about dating books for guys, but it didn’t quite fit. It’s not offering advice per say. It’s more comradery at being kicked by cupid.

It’s an anthology, so 46 different voices come to the table to give their take this thing we call love. Most of these are essays about relationships that went wrong (though must guys writing that they did eventually get married). A few comics are sprinkled in — not as on comedians (though there are a few of those — Stephen Colbert and Will Forte contributed essays) but as in drawn pictures of heartbreak. Marcellus Hall‘s “Lessons from a Cyclical Heart” is brilliant if not a reminder that no matter how well things are going, they could always come to an end.

It’s a fun book to read, but not all the essays are winners. I wasn’t too enthralled with Colbert’s entry (though, hell, if he said he’d like to contribute something to my book, I’d jump at the chance, and Karlin was an executive producer at the Daily […]

As I mentioned in my review of Having Our Say: The Delany Sisters’ First 100 Years, which was book 30 of 52, my next book is “Strong Medicine” Speaks: A Native American Elder Has Her Say. Now you can guess why I’d be reading two books by the same author back to back: I’m writing a profile of Amy Hill Hearth. And today I got to meet Hill Hearth and talk to her — for four hours. I knew within five minutes that this would be a good interview. She greeted me while holding a seven pound dwarf Boston Terrier named Dot. We jumped right into a conversation about adopting dogs, and we were off.

“Strong Medicine” Speaks is her third oral history book. This one hits close to home for me since the tribe she writes about, the Lenni Lenape, is just about in my backyard, and I grew up hearing about them. In “Strong Medicine” Speaks, Hill Hearth gives the chief’s mother, Marion “Strong Medicine” Gould a book to tell her story, from growing up learning to deny that was Native American (many said they were “colored” instead because […]