Month: May 2011

If you’ve got a daughter active in sports – or your said girl who was/is active in sports (hello my fellow brethren!), check out Daddy's Little Goalie: A Father, His Daughters, and Sportsby Robert Strauss.

Robert is friends with my aunt and uncle, and his daughters – yes of the book – are classmates with my cousins. He is also a skilled journalists, and we often share bylines in the same section of a magazine or newspaper.

Example: for the July issue of New Jersey Monthly, he wrote a feature about Atlantic City, and I wrote the sidebar about Miss America.

Anyway, it’s a recommend.

For anyone going to the Book Expo America conference: I’ll be signing copies of my bookon Tuesday at 11am. I’ll be at booth 3424. AND I WILL HAVE SALT WATER TAFFY.

As you probably know from reading this blog, I’m a freelance journalist, and sometimes I write about books. For the last year or so, I’ve been reviewing books for American Way magazine, and I can’t review those books right after reading them because of my contract.

But now that these two stories are out, I thought you might be interested to see how two assignments from the same book came about.

In September, I get a slew of catalogs from publishers, showcasing what books will be coming out in the next season. After I think most of them have hit my mailbox, I sit down with sticky notes and a pen, and start marking what books I might want for what magazines.

One of those books was Halfway to Hollywood: Diaries 1980–1988by Monty Python’s Michael Palin.

“American Way,” I marked on the sticky, and requested the book. I pitched it to my editor who said yes. I then proceeded to read all 660+ pages of the book.

The assignment was only 125 words. I was getting paid in accordance to a short piece. Why slog through the entire book?

Of course, because that’s what I’m supposed to do. It’s what any […]

Oh HELL yeah I read another romance novel. C’mon, folks. Smart chicks read them, too, especially when they’re written by Shakespeare professors from Fordham.

Quick refresher: Eloisa James is really Mary Bly, who I wrote about here. I don’t really dig historical romance – especially when the hero is named “Darby” in an obvious one-letter difference from hero of heroes Darcy. But Bly’s books are so researched, and interesting and funny, and such a window into another time period that, when I wanted something fun to read, and couldn’t quite handle another Nora Roberts murder-mystery themed romance, picked up Fool for Love, which James published in 2003.

The heroine here is Henrietta, a country bumpkin of sorts but Heiress whose mother died in childbirth. She has also inherited her mother’s weak hip, which doctors told her was the reason her mother is dead, and warned Henrietta that she cannot have children.

Darby (yes, see?) is a bit of a city fop who stands to be disinherited because his aunt is knocked up. Since the aunt (not related to him) and his uncle essentially lived separate lives, and the uncle […]