Book a Week with Jen

This is a curious book. Joyce Carol Oates called Curtis Sittenfeld's third book, American Wife: A Novel , her most ambitious project. I might agree with her there. But I'm not sure I agree that the ambitionof this novel quite followed through. American Wife is about Alice, a small town girl who lives a dull, normal life. As a teenager, she kills a classmate in a car accident. She eventually because a librarian. At 31, she meets Charlie Blackwell, a loveable but somewhat dim man who has inherited fortune as part of a well known political family name. They marry. They falter. He buys a baseball team. He drinks. He stops drinking. And he eventually becomes President of the United States. Sound familiar? That's because Alice's story mimics that of former first lady Laura Bush. Sure, Charlie works in meat packing and lives in Wisconsin. But there is no way to not see the similarities, right on down to Laura causing the death of a classmate in a car accident. Sittenfe

Check out the August issue of New Jersey Monthly for my interview with Michael Uslan about his new book, The Boy Who Loved Batman: A Memoir Uslan is responsible for getting every modern Batman movie - from 1989 to today - on screen, and the book is about his journey in making that happen. Believe it or not, it was not an easy road. But it's more than just a "my life in movies" book. It's a wonderful memoir about being a kid growing up in New Jersey. The writing is vivid and lively, and I devoured this book in three days - three very stressful, busy days where all I wanted to do was drop everything to finish the book. It's a great read.

So apparently this is still happening. Those were all taken yesterday at Barnes & Noble. I didn't go looking for them - they were all in the same "new releases" shelf. I barely even had to move to take a picture of all of them. Why? No clue. Any thoughts?