Month: September 2009

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 novel, though — the main character, Pat Peoples, is trying to get his life back together, and does so by moving into […]

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 what she wants to do in life. Together, those conflicts and a fun true life story formed a very funny blog and […]

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 in, give a value, and go home. What kind of book would that be?

This isn’t high art here, but a […]