The Sunday Salon – May 31, 2009

It’s quiet around here today- the hub’s out of town on business and daughter #2 went to a sleepover birthday party last night.  Daughter #1 is still in bed, so it’s just me and the dog, hanging out.  And of course, lots of book bloggers are out of town at BEA.  The silence is deafening! [...]

Review: The Virgin Suicides by Jeffrey Eugenides

I was so excited to receive The Virgin Suicides by Jeffrey Eugenides as part of the Picador Book Club on Twitter.  I read Eugenides’ Middlesex two years ago, which won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 2003, so I was really happy to get this book and started it as soon as it landed on [...]

Review: Truth & Beauty: A Friendship by Ann Patchett

Truth & Beauty by Ann Patchett is the story of the author’s friendship with troubled fellow author and poet, the late Lucy Grealy.   I read Grealy’s Autobiography of a Face last year and developed very strong, protective feelings for this brilliant girl/woman who was permanently disfigured by Ewing Sarcoma and the resultant treatment and [...]

7 Ways To Make Sure No One Reads Your Blog Posts

I picked up a few tips from the comments in Read Me and wanted to pass them along! 1.  Be longwinded.  Lots of readers will skip right over your posts if they are extra long. 2.  Write lengthy paragraphs.  Breaking up your writing into smaller chunks makes it much too easy for the reader. 3. [...]

Read Me

Are you a skimmer or a reader?  I’m guilty.  Sometimes I don’t read an entire review or blog post (gasp!)  If a post is very long, I’ll skim.  If it’s a review for a book I’m currently reading, I’ll skim and comment that I’m reading it now and was just looking to see if the [...]

Teaser Tuesdays-May 19, 2009

Miz B and Teaser Tuesdays asks you to: Grab your current read. Let the book fall open to a random page. Share with us two (2) sentences from that page, somewhere between lines 7 and 12. You also need to share the title of the book that you’re getting your “teaser” from … that way people [...]

Review: The Story of a Marriage by Andrew Sean Greer

“We think we know the ones we love.” The Story of a Marriage by Andrew Sean Greer is about Pearlie and Holland, a young couple living in San Francisco in the 1950s with their invalid son, a victim of polio. They sleep in separate rooms and don’t communicate well, but Pearlie says (in reference to [...]

Guest Post: A Little Theory of Mine by Marisa de los Santos

The lovely Marisa de los Santos, author of the New York Times Bestseller Love Walked In and Belong to Me (review and giveaway HERE), is guest posting today about balancing work and family.  Thanks, Marisa, for this wonderful essay! A Little Theory of Mine by Marisa de los Santos I get the question a lot, usually [...]

Review and Giveaway: Belong to Me by Marisa de los Santos

Belong to Me by Marisa de los Santos starts out like this:  “My fall from suburban grace, or, more accurately, my failure to achieve the merest molehill of suburban grace from which to fall, began with a dinner party and a perfectly innocent, modestly clever, and only faintly quirky remark about Armand Assante.”  It begins [...]

Summer Reading Series: August Selection

Mari and I are super excited at the response we’ve received for our Summer Reading Series!  If you missed it, you can read more about it HERE.  The books for June and July have been snapped up already, but you still have a chance to get your hands on the book for August, Two Years, [...]