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Gifts for Book Nerds
The best gift for a book nerd is, of course, a book. And giving books is easier than ever. Good, old-fashioned paper books are a classic gift and double as decor on a bookshelf when the recipient has finished them. But did you know that you can give specific titles to e-reader owners, too? Yep. Most titles for Kindle and Nook now have a “Give as a Gift” button that allows you to buy that specific book for your recipient. I love this instantaneous and eco-friendly approach to gift-giving. But let’s say you need a little something to go with that beach read or thriller or latest biography. Something appropriate…
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Q&A with Author Erin Celello
Today I’m thrilled to be featuring an interview with Madison author Erin Celello about her latest novel, Learning to Stay (NAL/Penguin 2013), which, as Erin describes it, explores “the question of what happens when one person in a marriage becomes someone fundamentally different.” In Learning to Stay, what triggers the change is a traumatic brain injury that the husband, Brad, suffers while serving in the Iraq war. The injury dramatically alters his personality, transforming him from a thoughtful and patient man into someone who requires much more care than his wife, Elise, can provide while also keeping up with the demands of her career as a lawyer. I’m not yet finished with the book–so…
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Love Stories We Love
Valentine’s Day has got me thinking of my favorite love stories in fiction. There are so many of them, and I’m sure even more favorites will spring to mind as soon as I publish this post. Here are just a few that stand out for me. You’ll see they are just as varied in genre as they are in publication date. What can I say? Love takes many forms. The Time Traveler’s Wife by Audrey Niffenegger. This book weaves a love story through time, as Henry journeys in and out of Clare’s life. It sounds fantastical—and it is—but Niffenegger makes the time travel element both plausible and enchanting. Her descriptions…
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Back to School Style for Grown-Ups
The hot hot summer has begun to cool and soon it’s time for back to school. Since I’m not a teacher and no longer a student, and since my son is still in diapers, I can think about the first day of school without panic. (Though I do still have that recurring dream about not knowing where any of my classes are…) Memories of the first day of school are heavy with nostalgia for me and, I imagine, for many of you. I was a nerd kid, and I used to lay out all of my school supplies on the carpet just to look at them in the weeks before…
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The “YES” (in other words, agented!)
I have a quote, framed and printed on a letterpress card, next to my desk. It’s a reminder to help me through all the “nos” and the “maybe ifs” that come with being a writer and putting my work out into the world. Today, I’m here to attest that it’s true. That after the final no, there really is a yes. And sometimes, in the midst of all the work and the worry, there is more than one yes. And then you get to be the one to say yes. YES! Today I accepted an offer of representation from a literary agent for my novel, Gently Used. And not just…
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On Style and Smarts
[Image from theberry.com] Oscar Wilde had a lot of great, pithy quotes, like this one. Do you agree? I agree with the overeducated part. Just ask my grandmother, who is working her way through the Great Books in her eighties. As for being overdressed, I have to say that it is possible, and I’ve been guilty of it once or twice. Being overdressed isn’t so much a question of what you’re wearing, though. It’s a question of whether you can pull it off.
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Blogs to Books
Yep, I’m that person. The person who buys books for everyone on her holiday list. What to get Dad who returns nearly everything I buy him? Books. What to get my nephew whose Japanamation jargon resembles a foreign language? Books. And what to get my niece who, like me when I was a kid, aspires to be a writer? Why, blank books, of course. One of my favorite blogs, Style Maniac, recently teamed up with independent bookseller Books & Books of Westhampton Beach, NY, to launch a month-long celebration of the art of giving and receiving books. The Blogs to Books challenge invited readers to choose one book and one recipient…
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Literary Looks: The Great Gatsby
There are people who live in my head. I’ve collected them over time, over thousands of pages read everywhere: on subway seats, in library cubicles, under the covers, over the moon. The best of these people are realer to me, and more enduring, than many flesh and blood faces that pass through my days. Characters they are not. Rather, they are icons. This second installment in my collection of “Literary Looks” is inspired by one of such paper icons: Daisy Buchanan of The Great Gatsby. Daisy. The socialite. The cynicist. The girl with “the voice full of money.” Her style represents all the hope and flash and fleetingness of youth.…
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Literary Looks: The Sun Also Rises
Lately, I’ve been feasting on a lot of good reads. To celebrate, I’m compiling the first of a series of literary looks inspired by books and writers. My book club recently finished The Paris Wife by Paula McLain. It’s a well-researched, fictional account of Hemingway’s relationship with his first wife, Hadley, told from her point of view. During their 5-year marriage, Hemingway wrote and sold his first novel, The Sun Also Rises (1926), which is set in Pamplona among the bullfights and running of the bulls during the Feast of San Fermin. Remembering that novel got me thinking about Spanish style, and prompted this literary look, which would be perfect for watching the festivities in…
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Book Review: An Urban Fairy Tale
The Ballad of West Tenth Street: A Novel by Marjorie Kernan My rating: 4 of 5 stars A friend from my writing group (and the fastest reader I know) recommended this book to me. The back cover of The Ballad of West Tenth Street calls the novel an “urban fairy tale.” The story revolves around two Greenwich Village brownstones and their eccentric inhabitants. In one of the houses lives Sadie Hollander, the tipsy widow of a British rock star, and her adolescent children, Deen and Hamish. Her oldest child, Gretchen, lives away from home in a mental hospital. She was the only child who truly knew her father before he…
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