Your long-awaited Book Review Monday is finally here, and is coming to you from Le Pain Quotidien in Notting Hill, London, where I am sitting with a really expensive iced coffee, a sparkling water, and the remains of a really good (but again, really expensive) salmon salad. London, turns out, is expensive. But lovely! I […]
I’m in the odd position this week of having read a bunch of books since I last blogged, but no books that I’m super jazzed about. Normally, I read several books at a time and am usually pretty excited by at least one of them. But over the past few weeks, I’ve read a couple […]
I’ve been reading a lot of non-fiction lately. In fact, I’ve been craving it. There’s just something about real stories with an impact on real human lives that’s been appealing to me more than fiction. Maybe it has something to do with the fact that I just finished a first draft of my second manuscript […]
I’ve talked on my blog before about how I am a carrier of the Crime Gene — no, I’m not a criminal; I just enjoy reading about them — but I haven’t discussed any of the excellent crime journalism I’ve read over the past six months, including Richard Lloyd Parry’s outstanding People Who Eat Darkness, […]
Programming note: Book Review Tuesday is becoming Book Review Monday, because Momma’s got a brand new bag/writing gig covering The Bachelorette for Previously.TV, and I’ll need to devote my Tuesdays to watching idiots misuse personal pronouns. Links to my pieces for Previously.TV will also be posted on Twitter and on Tube Topix. Remember my post […]
When my cousin Amanda was visiting, she recommended Abraham Verghese’s novel Cutting for Stone to me one night over dinner in Cape Town. A few days later, I saw the book in the airport in Durban and felt that it was meant to be, so I bought it. I can now say, after reading it, […]
I’ll admit it: I watch morning TV. A lot of people — especially educated people who fancy themselves to be above it all — won’t admit to ever tuning into such drivel as the Today show or Good Morning America. I can’t even count how many times I’ve heard some variation of “Oh, I think it’s so sad that […]
Eleanor & Park is, in a word, delightful. Other adjectives that I’d use to describe it include charming, sweet, heartfelt, moving, emotionally satisfying, and adorable. I read it in less than a day and was enraptured the entire time, and I want everyone to go out and read this book, right now. Go! I […]
I finished Meg Wolitzer’s The Interestings last night and was so bummed out by both the ending and my own reaction to the book that I immediately had to start something more upbeat (in this case, Rainbow Rowell’s Eleanor & Park, which is excellent so far) in order to take my mind off of The […]
Quick note before I jump into the normal Tuesday book talk: I am so upset, like everyone else, by the Boston Marathon bombings. I lived in the Boston area for three years and love that city, even though its people can be a wee bit prickly – hey, that’s part of its charm. I feel […]