We asked our contributors to share the best book they read this month. We’ve got fiction, nonfiction, YA, memoir, and more. Some are old, some are new, and some aren’t even out yet. Enjoy, and please tell us about the highlight of your reading month in the comments. _________________________ Assassination Vacation by Sarah Vowell I [...]
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This is a guest post by Rachel Smalter Hall. Rachel grew up in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, in a family of seven that donned bathrobes and towels for their yearly theatrical Christmas Pageant. Since then she’s lived in Minnesota, Vermont, Rome, and now Lawrence, Kansas, where she writes web content at a nearby library and wrangles a [...]
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While tootling along Fifth Avenue on a bus last week, a friend and I spotted the front windows of Bergdorf Goodman and scrabbled madly to ring for the bus to stop. The displays fused Bergdorf’s fashion and bookish design — to me, catnip and Champagne! Each window evoked a classic novel with an inventive, artistic [...]
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This is a guest post from Cariwyl Hebert. Cariwyl is the founder of Salon97, a San Francisco-based non-profit that makes classical music approachable to the uninitiated. When she’s not showing folks across the country a *really* good time at her classical music salons, she immerses herself in the world of search engine marketing and social media [...]
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In Read This Then That, we pair new books with classics that have similar themes, structures, and stories. Playing by the rules is hard, and cheating can seem so easy. So easy, in fact, that you might keep doing it even if it’s ruining your life. For the narrator of most of the stories in [...]
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Barnes & Noble is kind of having a rough time of it these days. Oh, no, it’s not because nobody’s buying books anymore and they don’t know what to do with staff puttering around in the store with nothing to do; the problem is that Barnes & Noble is having the bookstore equivalent of a [...]
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Comedy genius Jimmy Kimmel recently provided us with his list of the 11 best movies he never saw. Most of us have a similar list for books, as well, don’t we? And probably with similar reasons as Jimmy’s. (eg, Fight Club: “I’m sure this is a great movie, but it seems like a lot of [...]
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This “library house” is a one-story home in quiet residential neighborhood in Togichi, Japan. Built for a single resident, whom the architect, Shinichi Ogawa & Associates, described as a “serious reader,” the house is centered on a 20-foot high bookcase in the main living area, which includes the dining area and the kitchen. The rest of the [...]
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For six years during my twenties, I worked as one of the principal ghostwriters for a mass-market series for teenaged girls called Sweet Valley High. Years later, I’m still trying to make sense of what these books meant to me—why I wrote so many of them, and why (eventually) I stopped. The books are packed [...]
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Tuesday is New Book Day. We celebrate each week by highlighting titles we’re excited to see arrive in paperback.
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This round of Riot Recommendation is sponsored by Scarlet by Marissa Meyer. Cinder is trying to break out of prison—even though she’ll be the Commonwealth’s most wanted fugitive if she does. Halfway around the world, Scarlet Benoit’s grandmother is missing. It turns out there are many things Scarlet doesn’t know about her grandmother, or the grave [...]
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“The next morning, room service delivers a lavish breakfast to my sumptuous penthouse suite at the Hilton, and there folded on the table next to my egg white omelet and my whole-wheat toast, no butter, and my coffee, black, no sugar, is the Sunday Los Angeles Times, and on the front page is an obituary [...]
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I recently devoured Ruth Reichl’s third memoir, Garlic and Sapphires, which focuses on her six years as the chief restaurant critic for the New York Times. The position made her so sought after and recognizable that she had to resort to creating elaborate disguises and alter-egos in order to experience restaurants as regular, non-NYT-food-critic diners [...]
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While turning the pages of a few recent nonfiction reads, I’ve come across some stopped-me-in-my-reading-tracks descriptions re: bookstores of the past. Which made me really wish I had the technology to build a time machine that could go to any bookstore throughout time and space. Note: A time machine that could just go ANYWHERE at [...]
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Not ready to wallpaper your hallway with pages of print, or create a headboard out of open books? Maybe you love books, but don’t love the idea of doing something blatantly bookish with your interior design. Why not try throwing a bookish pillow somewhere that will make you smile every time you see it, but [...]
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Just as her new novel, “Doc,” was being released in 2011, she got word that her publisher was not interested in any more books from her. She had been with Random House since 1996 and published five novels with the New York house. During that time, she had won an Arthur C. Clarke Award and an [...]
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Welcome to Our Water Cooler, a collection of our favorite tweets of the previous week from authors/publishing folk/bloggers/general bookish types (and maybe your mom). Like your water cooler, the folks around ours talk about a little bit of this, that and the other thing: View the story “Our Water Cooler 4″ on Storify
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This round of the Riot Recommendation is sponsored by Fortress of Mist by Sigmund Brouwer. Following Thomas’ conquest of Magnus, the young ruler must now lead his people into a new era – one which is sure to reveal dark forces at work behind the evil undercurrent that controlled Thomas’ kingdom for so long. Who will stand with [...]
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