Beautiful Creatures by Kami Garcia and Margaret Stohl will be hitting the big screen on Valentines’ Day!
Starring Jeremy Irons, Emma Thompson and Emmy Rossum, this film is sure to delight fans!
To celebrate the upcoming 60th anniversary of Ray Bradbury’s iconic classic Fahrenheit 451, the public was invited to design a new cover, which will be featured on the first printing of the 60th anniversary edition. Matthew Owen won the Fahrenheit 451 cover design contest from Simon & Schuster and the American Library Association’s Office for Intellectual Freedom. I love this idea and wish there were more contests for classic cover redesigns. Maybe then we wouldn’t have covers that leave people a little disgruntled and confused?
The winning cover was revealed at the ALA Midwinter Meeting. Owen’s cover beat out more than 360 submissions that were chronicled on this blog. It’s actually fun to scroll through the other entries and see the various interpretations of this classic piece of literature. Simon & Schuster and the Bradbury estate judged the entries.
What do you think? Do you like the new cover?
Bethenny Frankel is working on a new book about life as a single mom, according to Radar Online. “Bethenny has been writing and documenting her feelings in the beginning stages of the divorce,” a source close to the situation tells Radar. “The book will explore the struggles and compromises all single moms face. It will deal with the delicate balancing act that is being a single mom, and the guilt she feels because her daughter Bryn will now come from a broken home, something she never wanted for her little girl.”
Frankel is a New York Times bestselling author of five books, including one memoir, A Place Of Yes, a novel, Skinnydipping, and three books about cooking and dieting.
At Bookfinds we are all thrilled that Oprah is back making book club selections. Her second pick, following the critically acclaimed WILD by Cheryl Strayed is a debut novel by Ayana Mathis, The Twelves Tribes of Hattie. The televised interview with Ayana will appear on OWN’s Super Soul Sunday, February 3rd. The New York Times Book Review recently featured the latest Oprah 2.0 pick on their cover. Interestingly, there was no mention of Oprah or her book club in the review. The Twelve Tribes of Hattie, by Ayana Mathis (RH/Knopf) was reviewed by Isabel Wilkerson, the author of the prize-winning, The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America’s Great Migration, (Random House, 2010).”
Wilkerson wrote that Twelve Tribes was ”raw and intimate…a brutal and poetic allegory of a family beset by tribulations…Mathis tempers the more operatic elements with tenderness and knowing glimpses into the human heart struggling to love…deeply felt.” She says “The story it tells works at the rough edges of history, residing not so much within the migration itself as within a brutal and poetic allegory of a family beset by tribulations.”
Oprah is working on making her newest version of the book club much more interactive online. She is offering lots of videos and reading group questions on her website, devoting a Twitter page to discussions and leading a Goodreads forum. Here you can join the Official Oprah’s Book Club 2.0 group on Goodreads
Below are a few of the glowing endorsements that The Twelve Tribes of Hattie has received.
“The opening pages of Ayana’s debut took my breath away. I can’t remember when I read anything that moved me in quite this way, besides the work of Toni Morrison.”
-Oprah Winfrey
“Lush yet deliberate…elegant and sure…a complex and deeply humane story of a mother’s ferocious love and failures at loving…In the vivid specificity of Mathis’s tale, she is telling a universal story, and it is profoundly consoling.”
-Laura Collins-Hughes, The Boston Globe
“Mathis never loses touch with the geography and the changing national culture through which her characters move. The Twelve Tribes of Hattie is infused with African Americans’ conflicted attitudes about the North and the South during the Great Migration…In the long family arc that Mathis describes, the painful life of one remarkably resilient woman is placed against the hopes and struggles of millions of African Americans who held this nation to its promise…One of the best [novels] of 2012.”
-Ron Charles, The Washington Post
“A triumph…a stone-cold stunner of a novel…magnificently structured, and a sentence-by-sentence treasure – lyric, direct, and true.”
-David Daley, Salon
“The influence of Toni Morrison will be evident in this remarkable page-turner of a novel that spans decades and covers dreams lost, found, and denied.”
-Elizabeth Taylor, Chicago Tribune, “Editor’s Choice”
“This brutal, illuminating version of the twentieth century African-American experience belongs alongside those of Toni Morrison, Alice Walker, and Zora Neale Hurston.”
-Marion Winik, Newsday
“A poetic novel…that focuses less on American progress than on the small but powerful moments that are strung together, like beads on a necklace, to make one long strand of a family’s history…Like Toni Morrison, the author has a gift for showing just how heavily history weighs on families, as a learned sense of hope or despair gets passed down from parents to children and dreams die little by little, generation after generation. But if the endless heartbreaks sound melodramatic, Mathis earns your sympathy by making the rare moments of happiness feel simple and true.”
-Entertainment Weekly, Grade: A-
“A stirring, soulful novel that spans 60 years and is told in many rich and varied voices. It’s the story of one formidable woman, and of her children-the ‘tribes’-at different stages of their sprawling lives. It’s the story of the Great Migration, and of its ripping, aching effects across the 20th century…The Twelve Tribes of Hattiewallops you from the first chapter, but the book’s emotional power grows with the story as the decades pass and the scope of this family’s life is revealed.”
-Shelf Awareness
“Hypnotic…evocative, ambitious…encompassing Dickinson, Morrison, and the poetry of Rita Dove…Mathis understands both heritage and craft.”
-The Cleveland Plain Dealer
“Mathis’ writing is beautiful and confident; she moves from one voice and scene to the next with ease and creates rich characters and vivid settings. She gets to the heart of these people, gets their voices just right and gives each one a unique perspective and personality…Literary readers will enjoy the craftsmanship and emotional reach, and it’s a natural choice for book clubs with lots to talk about…It’s a beautiful work with more than a dash of heartbreak and hope.”
-Boston Bibliophile
“An exploration of race, gander, and struggle…Mathis writes with power and insight. Though less lyrical, she is a more accessible writer than Toni Morrison.”
-USA Today
“The Twelve Tribes of Hattie is a vibrant and compassionate portrait of a family hardened and scattered by circumstance and yet deeply a family. Its language is elegant in its purity and rigor. The characters are full of life, mingled thing that it is, and dignified by the writer’s judicious tenderness towards them. This first novel is a work of rare maturity.”
-Marilynne Robinson
“The Twelve Tribes of Hattie is beautiful and necessary from the very first sentence. The human lives it renders are on every page lowdown and glorious, fallen and redeemed, and all at the same time. They would be too heartbreaking to follow, in fact, were they not observed in such a generous and artful spirit of hope, in a spirit of mercy, in the spirit of love. Ayana Mathis has written a treasure of a novel.”
-Paul Harding
“Writing with stunning authority, clarity, and courage, debut novelist Mathis pivots forward in time, spotlighting intensely dramatic episodes in the lives of Hattie’s nine subsequent children (and one grandchild to make the ‘twelve tribes’), galvanizing crises that expose the crushed dreams and anguished legacy of the Great Migration….Mathis writes with blazing insight into the complexities of sexuality, marriage, family relationships, backbone, fraudulence, and racism in a molten novel of lives racked with suffering yet suffused with beauty.”
-Donna Seaman, Booklist (starred)
“Remarkable…Mathis weaves this story with confidence, proving herself a gifted and powerful writer.”
-Publishers Weekly (starred)
“Cutting, emotional…pure heartbreak…though Mathis has inherited some of Toni Morrison’s poetic intonation, her own prose is appealingly earthbound and plainspoken, and the book’s structure is ingenious…an excellent debut.”
-Kirkus Reviews (starred)
SUMMARY:
A debut of extraordinary distinction: Ayana Mathis tells the story of the children of the Great Migration through the trials of one unforgettable family.
In 1923, fifteen-year-old Hattie Shepherd flees Georgia and settles in Philadelphia, hoping for a chance at a better life. Instead, she marries a man who will bring her nothing but disappointment and watches helplessly as her firstborn twins succumb to an illness a few pennies could have prevented. Hattie gives birth to nine more children whom she raises with grit and mettle and not an ounce of the tenderness they crave. She vows to prepare them for the calamitous difficulty they are sure to face in their later lives, to meet a world that will not love them, a world that will not be kind. Captured here in twelve luminous narrative threads, their lives tell the story of a mother’s monumental courage and the journey of a nation.
Beautiful and devastating, Ayana Mathis’s The Twelve Tribes of Hattie is wondrous from first to last—glorious, harrowing, unexpectedly uplifting, and blazing with life. An emotionally transfixing page-turner, a searing portrait of striving in the face of insurmountable adversity, an indelible encounter with the resilience of the human spirit and the driving force of the American dream, Mathis’s first novel heralds the arrival of a major new voice in contemporary fiction.
Here’s some GREAT news straight from the Associated Press. Amy Poehler has signed a deal with It Books for an ”illustrated, non-linear diary.” It Books, a pop culture imprint of HarperCollins Publishers, announced Monday that the book is currently untitled and scheduled for 2014. Financial terms were not disclosed.
“Her original twist on the conventional memoir will have universal appeal,” according to It Books. “An illustrated, non-linear diary full of humor and honesty and brimming with true stories, fictional anecdotes and life lessons, the book will be a unique and engaging experience from one of today’s most talented and beloved stars.”
It’s the first book for Poehler, who recently co-hosted the Golden Globes ceremony with Fey, her longtime friend and professional collaborator. Poehler will be edited by It Books’ Carrie Thornton, who said in a statement that after first talking to Poehler she was “blown away by her creativity and her passion.”
With huge books from Tina Fey and Mindy Kaling, Amy Poehler is sure to hit one out of the park. Can’t wait to read it!
The film adaptation of Veronica Roth’s young adult hit series Divergent (HarperCollins/Katherine Tegen, 2011) is scheduled for release on March 21, 2014. Shailene Woodley, who received accolades for her supporting role as George Clooney’s fiery daughter in The Descendants and starred in the TV series, The Secret Life of the American Teenager, has been cast in the much-coveted role. Neil Burger will be directing but the male lead, which Variety says is currently “considered one of the more sought-after roles for a young actor” has not yet been decided.
SUMMARY:
In Beatrice Prior’s dystopian Chicago world, society is divided into five factions, each dedicated to the cultivation of a particular virtue–Candor (the honest), Abnegation (the selfless), Dauntless (the brave), Amity (the peaceful), and Erudite (the intelligent). On an appointed day of every year, all sixteen-year-olds must select the faction to which they will devote the rest of their lives. For Beatrice, the decision is between staying with her family and being who she really is–she can’t have both. So she makes a choice that surprises everyone, including herself.
During the highly competitive initiation that follows, Beatrice renames herself Tris and struggles alongside her fellow initiates to live out the choice they have made. Together they must undergo extreme physical tests of endurance and intense psychological simulations, some with devastating consequences. As initiation transforms them all, Tris must determine who her friends really are–and where, exactly, a romance with a sometimes fascinating, sometimes exasperating boy fits into the life she’s chosen. But Tris also has a secret, one she’s kept hidden from everyone because she’s been warned it can mean death. And as she discovers unrest and growing conflict that threaten to unravel her seemingly perfect society, she also learns that her secret might help her save those she loves . . . or it might destroy her.
A debut novel by Seattle writer and former lawyer Tara Conklin is the #1 Indie Next Pick for February The House Girl (HarperCollins/ Morrow). Bookseller Beverly Bauer of Redbery Books, Cable, WI, describes it,
“Lina, a young, ambitious New York attorney in 2004, never knew her mother. Josephine, a young house slave in 1852, never knew her child. More than a century apart, their lives connect in unexpected ways. Corporate law offices, art museums, antebellum homes, and the Underground Railroad provide the setting for a story filled with secrets, betrayals, and love. Does the House Girl title apply to both women? The paths of these strong women will have the reader marveling at the layers Conklin has created to tell their intertwined stories.”
New Book Pick for Good Housekeeping.
Marie Claire calls The House Girl the “book-club book of 2013″.
You can also read more musings from Tara at her blog, Popcorn the Blog.
SUMMARY:
Virginia, 1852. Seventeen-year-old Josephine Bell decides to run from the failing tobacco farm where she is a slave and nurse to her ailing mistress, the aspiring artist Lu Anne Bell. New York City, 2004. Lina Sparrow, an ambitious first-year associate in an elite law firm, is given a difficult, highly sensitive assignment that could make her career: she must find the “perfect plaintiff” to lead a historic class-action lawsuit worth trillions of dollars in reparations for descendants of American slaves.
It is through her father, the renowned artist Oscar Sparrow, that Lina discovers Josephine Bell and a controversy roiling the art world: are the iconic paintings long ascribed to Lu Anne Bell really the work of her house slave, Josephine? A descendant of Josephine’s would be the perfect face for the reparations lawsuit—if Lina can find one. While following the runaway girl’s faint trail through old letters and plantation records, Lina finds herself questioning her own family history and the secrets that her father has never revealed: How did Lina’s mother die? And why will he never speak about her?
Moving between antebellum Virginia and modern-day New York, this searing, suspenseful and heartbreaking tale of art and history, love and secrets, explores what it means to repair a wrong and asks whether truth is sometimes more important than justice.
Tina Fey and Paul Rudd team up for the first time in this adaptation of Jean Hanff Korelitz‘s debut about the college admissions process. The movie hits theaters March 8, 2013. Do you think it will stay true to the plot?
SUMMARY:
“Admissions. Admission. Aren’t there two sides to the word? And two opposing sides…It’s what we let in, but it’s also what we let out.”
For years, 38-year-old Portia Nathan has avoided the past, hiding behind her busy (and sometimes punishing) career as a Princeton University admissions officer and her dependable domestic life. Her reluctance to confront the truth is suddenly overwhelmed by the resurfacing of a life-altering decision, and Portia is faced with an extraordinary test. Just as thousands of the nation’s brightest students await her decision regarding their academic admission, so too must Portia decide whether to make her own ultimate admission.
Admission is at once a fascinating look at the complex college admissions process and an emotional examination of what happens when the secrets of the past return and shake a woman’s life to its core.
People Magazine calls it “deeply moving and inventive historical novel…[that is] ultimately a tribute to the beauty of sisterly love.” It’s also an Indie Next Pick, with one reviewer saying, “At the end of the 19th century, Paris was the center of the world for all arts, and humanity struggled with massive changes in the very structure of society. Degas and Zola were players on this stage as were three sisters who aspired to the world of ballet. Based on historical figures and incidents, this novel delivers great atmosphere and fully realized characters who weave through the harsh yet rich tapestry of the times and tell a story of family, romance, degradation, and fulfillment.” —Karen Frank, Northshire Bookstore, Manchester Center, VT
The Washington Post ran a review of Painted Girls by Susan Vreeland. She writes that Buchanan “paints the girls who spring from the page as vibrantly as a dancer’s leap across a stage.” Buchanan details Belle Epoque Paris, a space and time that I have not explored in fiction and the three poor sisters dreaming of being ballerinas. “Through their bad decisions, lying, thieving and prostitution of one sort or another, one reads on, compelled by love for these girls whom Buchanan describes so compassionately.”
SUMMARY:
A gripping novel set in Belle Époque Paris and inspired by the real-life model for Degas’s Little Dancer Aged Fourteen and a notorious criminal trial of the era.
Paris. 1878. Following their father’s sudden death, the van Goethem sisters find their lives upended. Without his wages, and with the small amount their laundress mother earns disappearing into the absinthe bottle, eviction from their lodgings seems imminent. With few options for work, Marie is dispatched to the Paris Opéra, where for a scant seventy francs a month, she will be trained to enter the famous ballet. Her older sister, Antoinette, finds work—and the love of a dangerous
young man—as an extra in a stage adaptation of Émile Zola’s naturalist masterpiece L’Assommoir.
Marie throws herself into dance and is soon modelling in the studio of Edgar Degas, where her
image will forever be immortalized as Little Dancer
Aged Fourteen. Antoinette, meanwhile, descends
lower and lower in society, and must make the choice between a life of honest labor and the more profitable avenues open to a young woman of the Parisian demimonde—that is, unless her love affair derails her completely.
Set at a moment of profound artistic, cultural,
and societal change, The Painted Girls is a tale of two remarkable sisters rendered uniquely vulnerable to the darker impulses of “civilized society.”
Yikes! Sylvia Plath’s infamous (and only) novel, THE BELL JAR, received a 50th Anniversary makeover and it’s not making people happy. Apparently the publisher tried to make it more appealing to women’s fiction fans. Get ready for an uprising on the internet. This is certainly going to spark a dialogue.
Entertainment Weekly gave Jujitsu Rabbi and the Godless Blonde by Rebecca Dana an A- saying, “When Dana lands at Penn Station with $20 and the promise of a journalism job, she feels the weight of “everyone else’s stories falling like fresh soot from the skyscrapers above.” She knows there’s no new New York tale to tell — though Manhattan does give her all the glitter and heartbreak that a suburban Pittsburgh girl who dreamed of Truman Capote and Carrie Bradshaw could ask for. But like the martial-arts-obsessed Hasid of the title, her take on being young and smart and emotionally adrift in the city is odd and charming enough to be that elusive thing: a true original.”
Oprah Magazine calls it an “insightful tale of two fish out of water, an odd couple who together confront their very different God issues.”
Summary:
The ultimate fish-out-of-water tale . . .
A child who never quite fit in, Rebecca Dana worshipped at the altar of Truman Capote and Nora Ephron, dreaming of one day ditching Pittsburgh and moving to New York, her Jerusalem. After graduating from college, she made her way to the city to begin her destiny. For a time, life turned out exactly as she’d planned: glamorous parties; beautiful people; the perfect job, apartment, and man. But when it all came crashing down, she found herself catapulted into another world. She moves into Brooklyn’s enormous Lubavitch community, and lives with Cosmo, a thirty-year-old Russian rabbi who practices jujitsu on the side.
While Cosmo, disenchanted with Orthodoxy, flirts with leaving the community, Rebecca faces the fact that her religion—the books, magazines, TV shows, and movies that made New York seem like salvation—has also failed her. As she shuttles between the world of religious extremism and the world of secular excess, Rebecca goes on a search for meaning.
Trenchantly observant, entertaining as hell, a mix of Shalom Auslander and The Odd Couple, Jujitsu Rabbi and the Godless Blonde is a thought-provoking coming-of-age story for the twenty-first century.
There are so many enticing books releasing over the next few months and I literally can’t wait to get my hands on ALL of them. Debut novels and returning favorites are topping the lists of my BOOKS TO PINE FOR. I also threw in a bibliophile journal to keep track of all my reading. Make sure to put these on your lists.
BOOKS I’VE READ: A Bibliophile’s Journal
For avid readers who see books as a vital part of their lives and homes, this beautifully illustrated reading journal is a decorative object in itself. Conceived by Deborah Needleman and illustrated by Virginia Johnson, the author/illustrator team behind The Perfectly Imperfect Home, this journal reflects the same aesthetic and spirit that made the book so successful.
Whether you read print books, ebooks, or a bit of both, Books I’ve Read will serve as a tangible keepsake of your reading experiences. The journal features an elegant three-piece case and is filled with full-color illustrations of impressive home libraries and cozy reading corners from Deborah Needleman’s home décor guide The Perfectly Imperfect Home. It also contains recommended reading lists from a variety of reputable sources (Pulitzer Prize, Man Booker, and National Book Award winners, Modern Library’s 100 Best Novels, BBC’s Best Novels, etc.), as well as prompts for making your own lists (Most Beautiful Books, Books I’ve Given as Gifts, Books I Loved as a Child).
{Adorable illustrations in a journal for keeping track of the books you read…yes, please!}
Release Date: June 25, 2013
The Engagements by J. Courtney Sullivan
From the New York Times best-selling author of Maine and Commencement comes a big, sprawling novel about marriage-about those who marry in a white heat of passion, those who marry for partnership and comfort, and those who live together, love each other, and have absolutely no intention of ruining it all with a wedding.
Evelyn has been married to her husband for forty years-forty years since he slipped off her first wedding ring and put his own in its place. Delphine knows both sides of love-the ecstatic, glorious highs of seduction and the bitter, spiteful fury that descends when it’s over. James, a paramedic who works the night shift, knows his wife’s family thinks she could have done better. Kate, partnered with Dan for ten years, has seen every kind of wedding-from the Nantucket beach wedding to the Irish castle wedding-and has vowed never, ever, to have one of her own. And Mary Frances Gerety, a young advertising copywriter, knows exactly what marriage is: it’s a diamond ring on a girl’s finger-and it’s her job to make sure everyone believes that. Weaving these lives together, Sullivan gives us a sharply observed, witty, irresistible portrait of the thorny, joyful, and complicated union that is marriage.
{Loved, loved, loved Maine. This one is topping my list of Books to Pine For!}
Release Date: June 4, 2013
Someday, Someday, Maybe by Lauren Graham
A charming and laugh-out-loud novel by Lauren Graham, beloved star of Parenthood and Gilmore Girls, about an aspiring actress trying to make it in mid-nineties New York City.
Franny Banks is a struggling actress in New York City, with just six months left of the three year deadline she gave herself to succeed. But so far, all she has to show for her efforts is a single line in an ad for ugly Christmas sweaters and a degrading waitressing job. She lives in Brooklyn with two roommates-Jane, her best friend from college, and Dan, a sci-fi writer, who is very definitely not boyfriend material-and is struggling with her feelings for a suspiciously charming guy in her acting class, all while trying to find a hair-product cocktail that actually works. Meanwhile, she dreams of doing “important” work, but only ever seems to get auditions for dishwashing liquid and peanut butter commercials. It’s hard to tell if she’ll run out of time or money first, but either way, failure would mean facing the fact that she has absolutely no skills to make it in the real world. Her father wants her to come home and teach, her agent won’t call her back, and her classmate Penelope, who seems supportive, might just turn out to be her toughest competition yet. Someday, Someday, Maybe is a funny and charming debut about finding yourself, finding love, and, most difficult of all, finding an acting job.
{I always have to check out a celebrity’s novel…and Lauren Graham is always funny so this might be a hit!}
Release Date: April 30, 2013
SISTERLAND by Curtis Sittenfeld
From nationally bestselling author of Prep and American Wife, an expressive novel centered on a natural disaster that shakes a family to its core and forces a woman to confront the identity she’s been fleeing since adolescence.
St. Louis, 2009-Kate and Jeremy are caught unawares after being woken by a series of tremors just hours south of the strongest earthquake in U.S. history. The quake has taken a toll on Kate’s nerves, but it’s nothing compared with her identical twin sister, Vi-a self-proclaimed psychic medium-having broadcast a prediction that a more powerful earthquake would strike. While her sister’s performance is embarrassing to say the least, Kate can’t dismiss the hunch as wholly ungrounded, for to do so would be to deny a part of herself that exists no matter how hard she’s tried to suppress it. Faced with the question of whether she hopes her sister’s prophecy will ring false, though it would put her in the line of public scrutiny, or true, though it could mean widespread destruction and even death, Kate must decide whether or not to hone in on her long-ignored faculties to predict what will happen, and admit to her friends, family and community that she has this unusual ability.
{I loved Prep and American Wife so I can’t wait to see what else she has in store for us.}
Release Date: June 25, 2013
THE LIFE LIST by Lori Nelson
Perfect for readers of Allison Winn Scotch, Jill Smolinski, and Cecilia Ahern’s PS, I Love You, this debut novel is the emotionally resonant, utterly charming story of a woman who must reevaluate her life when her mother passes away, leaving her the task of completing a list of life goals she wrote as a teenager.
When her mother dies, Brett is grief stricken, but it comforts her to know that her future is mapped out before her. She will step into her mother’s role as the CEO of Bohlinger Cosmetics, and will continue dating her boyfriend, the detached but deliciously handsome Andrew. But her mother had a different plan for her. When the will is read, Brett gets the shock of her life. Not only will she NOT be the CEO of Bohlinger Cosmetics, but she also will only get her inheritance if she fulfills a set of life goals she wrote-and then threw out-twenty years ago. At first Brett is outraged-she long ago stopped wanting the things she desired as a teen, and she likes her life just fine. But as she begins to follow “the life list,” she realizes that her mother might just have known her better than she knows herself.
{Sounds like women’s fiction at its best!}
Release Date: July 30, 2013
THE GIRL IN THE BLUE DRESS by Emma McLaughlin & Nicola Kraus
Following college, Jamie McAllister wins a prestigious internship at the White House that she has no idea will irrevocably alter her life. An unexpected flirtation with the handsome and charismatic Gregory Rutland quickly leads to an emotional relationship she is ill equipped to handle at twenty-two. Each time she tries to extricate herself Greg is unable to find the strength to let her go. Meanwhile, the opposing party mobilizes to annihilate his presidency by any means necessary.
As Greg’s conflicting desires drive her to the breaking point, Jamie can’t help but reveal intimate details to those closest to her. But she must have unburdened herself to the wrong person—because within a matter of weeks Jamie finds herself, and everyone she loves, facing highly calculated destruction at the hands of Greg’s political enemies.
With her every mistake dragged out for the world to judge, Jamie has to endure an unprecedented trial in the court of public opinion—with the fate of the President, his party, and the country at stake.
Now, years later, can the woman infamously known as the “girl in the blue dress” make sense of this affair, and the trauma it wrought, for the world—and for herself?
{I wonder who the character is based on?}
Release Date: August 27, 2013
Amelia Bedelia by Peggy Parish
Amelia Bedelia turns 50 this year! Harper Collins is releasing a 50th Anniversary Edition of Peggy Parish’s first book about this lovable and slightly befuddled housekeeper.
Green Willow Books has a glimpse into the early sketches of Fritz Seibel’s Amelia Bedelia with editorial notes from Susan Hirschman.
I love, love, love this book! It’s so much fun to flip through! Swiss artist Ursus Wehril is a man of obsessive order, as he demonstrates with eye-catching surprise in The Art of Clean Up. This compulsive title from Chronicle Books is already a bestseller in Europe, and the fastidiously arranged images have garnered blog love from NPR, Brain Pickings, A Cup of Jo, swissmiss, and more. This truly is a book for ALL ages!
image of David Foster Wallace’s Notes via Harry Ransom Center
Here’s the question I am posing today over on The Huffington Post. Do you openly embrace writing in books or do you frown on it? Click on over to the Books section and let me know your thoughts.
Lena Dunham had a big weekend. She won a Golden Globe for best actress in a television show (comedy or musical). GIRLS won a Golden Globe for best television series, comedy or musical. And season 2 of GIRLS premiered last night to rave reviews. So what better time to share the reading choices of Lena Dunham than after her whirlwind weekend!? Lena’s “Ideal Bookshelf” was recently created by artist Jane Mount as part of her ongoing series (and wildly popular book).
Here’s the breakdown of Lena’s eclectic selection:
Golden Globe winner Ben Affleck is already hard at work on his next BIG PROJECT and it’s based on a book by Dennis Lehane! Affleck will write, produce, direct and star in LIVE BY NIGHT, which is the story of a young man during the time of prohibition who falls into a life of organized crime. The book takes place in Ben Affleck’s hometown of Boston. Here is further information on LIVE BY NIGHT.
Boston, 1926. The ’20s are roaring. Liquor is flowing, bullets are flying, and one man sets out to make his mark on the world.
Prohibition has given rise to an endless network of underground distilleries, speakeasies, gangsters, and corrupt cops. Joe Coughlin, the youngest son of a prominent Boston police captain, has long since turned his back on his strict and proper upbringing. Now having graduated from a childhood of petty theft to a career in the pay of the city’s most fearsome mobsters, Joe enjoys the spoils, thrills, and notoriety of being an outlaw.
But life on the dark side carries a heavy price. In a time when ruthless men of ambition, armed with cash, illegal booze, and guns, battle for control, no one—neither family nor friend, enemy nor lover—can be trusted. Beyond money and power, even the threat of prison, one fate seems most likely for men like Joe: an early death. But until that day, he and his friends are determined to live life to the hilt.
Joe embarks on a dizzying journey up the ladder of organized crime that takes him from the flash of Jazz Age Boston to the sensual shimmer of Tampa’s Latin Quarter to the sizzling streets of Cuba. Live by Night is a riveting epic layered with a diverse cast of loyal friends and callous enemies, tough rumrunners and sultry femmes fatales, Bible-quoting evangelists and cruel Klansmen, all battling for survival and their piece of the American dream. At once a sweeping love story and a compelling saga of revenge, it is a spellbinding tour de force of betrayal and redemption, music and murder, that brings fully to life a bygone era when sin was cause for celebration and vice was a national virtue.
Lullaby by Robert B. Parker is the first book written for the Spenser series by Ace Atkins who was hand-picked to carry on the legacy, $15.
A Fistful of Collars by Spencer Quinn is narrated by a dog, enough said, $16.
The Invisible Ones by Stef Penney is highly recommended by Library Journal and Tana French calls it utterly enthralling, $16.
Phantom by Jo Nesbo is an international bestseller and bound to be a hit with Stieg Larsson fans, $17.
The Buzzard Table by Margaret Maron is the 18th in her critically acclaimed series and she’s a NYTimes bestselling author, $26.
The Playdate by Louise Millar got a starred review in Publishers Weekly where they wrote, “British author Millar’s engrossing debut offers an unsettling, realistic view of friendships, gossip and loneliness,” $15.
The Art Forger by B.A. Shapiro is “wickedly fun, entertaining, and cleverly engrossing,” $24.
Learn more about how you can participate in Oprah’s Book Club 2.0.
Brain On Fire: My Month of Madness by Susannah Cahalan was one of O, The Oprah Magazine’s “10 Titles to Pick Up Now,” $25.
Hallucinations by Oliver Sacks. Have you ever seen something that wasn’t there? Heard someone call your name in an empty house? Sensed someone following you? Then definitely read this book! $27.
Far From The Tree: Parents, Children and the Search for Identity by Andrew Solomon is one of the New York Times Best Books of 2012. It tells the stories of parents coping with severe disabilities in their children and how they come to see these challenges as blessings. A beautiful and inspiring book. $21.
Buy Shoes on Wednesday and Tweet at 4:00 by Mark Di Vincenzo lets you know the best time to do EVERYTHING, $11.
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According to NA Alley, a site dedicated to the New Adult Fiction genre, “New adult fiction encompasses the transition between adolescence – a life stage often depicted in Young Adult fiction – and true adulthood. Protagonists typically fall between the ages of eighteen and twenty-six, though exceptions may apply. Other terms for NA include: Upper YA, Crossover Fiction, and Mature YA.”
The popular HBO show Girls features young women in their early twenties navigating the difficult dating scene and the newly entered workforce. According to the Lulu Blog, “New Adult was coined by St. Martin’s Press as a midway between adult literary fiction and young adult books.”
XOJane defines this “new adult” period as the stage in a person’s life when they have left the safety and confines of their parents and are now in the “real world.” Using those parameters, The Devil Wears Prada by Lauren Weisberger, and Sloppy Firsts (as well as the entire Jessica Darling series) by Megan McCafferty also fall into the New Adult genre.
This is encouraging for many authors who have found themselves rejected by publishing houses because their characters didn’t fit into an appropriate niche, too old for YA, too young for mainstream. Readers and characters between the ages of 18-26 seems to be that missing piece of the publishing puzzle and New Adult is hoping to create a targeted approach that will resonate strongly with them.
Will this new label help define or alienate readers? What are your thoughts on New Adult Fiction?
image via Perpetual Page Turner
Top Ten Tuesday was started by The Broke & The Bookish but I really learned about it through my all time favorite new book blogger, The Perpetual Page Turner. So without further ado, here is my list of TOP TEN BOOKISH RESOLUTIONS.
1. I RESOLVE TO FINISH EVERY BOOK I START.
I will call this the “No Bookmark Left Behind” movement. I’m so sick and tired of starting books, really enjoying them, and then getting distracted by some new shiny book. I then abandon one good book for another. And then my bookmark sits, lonely and lost within the pages of a deserving book. Don’t worry, if I start a book and after ten pages I realize it is NOT FOR ME, I will feel no qualms about abandoning it. That’s not what I mean by finishing every book I start. I mean finishing every book that I get fully invested in, finishing every book I enjoy.
2. CONTINUE READING EVERY OPRAH BOOK CLUB SELECTION.
I have, up until this point in my life, read every single Oprah Book Club selection. Yes, I’m proud. Yes, it resulted in me traveling to Australia with Oprah. Yes, I will continue doing it.
3. WRITE A REVIEW FOR EVERY BOOK I READ.
You would think that running a book review website would mean that I write a review for every book I read. Unfortunately, I do not. The demands of life and work get in the way. Not anymore.
4. WRITE MORE HONEST REVIEWS.
They don’t have to be perfect. They don’t have to be English AP essays. They can be real and honest and straightforward. They can feature my voice. They can be written in first person. Anything goes.
5. LINK TO MORE BOOK BLOGS.
I read so many book blogs on a daily basis. There are some that I return to again and again. But I stay quiet, hidden. I don’t comment and I don’t link to them. I’m like the kid at the party in the corner. I need to venture out, introduce myself and make some book blog friends.
6.READ MORE YA.
I love it. I really do. And now with the new “New Adult” genre, it’s getting very interesting in the world of YA.
7. READ MORE CLASSICS.
The books that I know I would love but have never read because I “missed the boat.” I want to delve into more classics. I want to read all of Jane Austen because I can’t believe I haven’t!
8. BE A BETTER BOOK BLOGGER.
This means DAILY! No excuses. 2013 is Bookfinds year!
9. SHARE THE LOVE.
If I love a book, set it free. Share it. Give it to friends. Give it away here.
10. ENJOY IT!
Don’t stress so much about reading for the site. Reading the latest and greatest. I will read what I want to read, when I want to read it. I will share my thoughts and feelings here.
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Looking for suggestions for what to read next. Any thoughts?
TIME FLIES by Claire Cook is the story of a recently separated woman who faces her highway driving phobia and takes a road trip with her best friend to their high school reunion. Years ago, Melanie followed her husband, Kurt, from the New England beach town where their two young sons were thriving to the suburbs of Atlanta. She’s carved out a life as a successful metal sculptor, but when Kurt leaves her for another woman, having the tools to cut up their marriage bed is small consolation. She’s old enough to know that high school reunions are often a big disappointment, but when her best friend makes her buy a ticket and an old flame gets in touch to see whether she’ll be going, she fantasizes that returning to her past might help her find her future…until her driving phobia resurfaces and threatens to hold her back from the adventure of a lifetime. TIME FLIES is an epic road trip filled with fun, heartbreak, and friendship, and explores what it takes to conquer your worst fears…so you can start living your future.
Publication Date: June 2013
You can find Claire on:
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If I bought it based on the cover, I’d be upset!
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