Easy breakfast with Difficult Women. This collection promises to be 🔥🔥🔥

This book scared the shit out of me. And I still loved it.

Wonderful collection using legalese when artfully discussing the very personal.

Defined: "Blackacre, Whiteacre, Greenacre, Brownacre, and variations are the placeholder names used for fictitious estates in land.

The names are used by professors of law in common law jurisdictions, particularly in the area of real property and occasionally in contracts, to discuss the rights of various parties to a piece of land."

Getting ready to interview Caitlin Moran in a few hours eeek!!! What should I ask her?

Loved this collection so much by 2015 Rona Jaffe winner Vanessa Hua. Also loved that I happened to match it today!

September Marie Claire now on shelves, lots of great titles coming this fall.

The glamorous life of a book reviewer.

Follow up to my last post: this collection is amazing. Joyce Carol Oates says it best when she says it's, "as if, by a rare sort of magic, Alice Munro and Shirley Jackson had conspired together to imagine a female/feminist voice for the twenty-first century"

A book with a view.

I really loved the new Kaui Hart Hemmings. It was charming, funny, and made me want to cook more.

Sorry for crappy photo quality but OMG I got to interview Jackie Woodson about Another Brooklyn and unsurprisingly she and the book are wonderful.

Saturday plan.

16 year old runs away with her 30 year old teacher in the summer of 1969, and that's just this first chapter.

"In 10 short stories, Amie Barrodale‘s debut collection, You Are Having a Good Time, initially looks like it‘s about normal people doing normal things. Then the strange or dark or unseemly things seep out..." Read the rest of the interview on Kirkus!

Ready for takeoff!

Laughing and learning: two of my favorite things to do while reading.

A friend emailed looking for a book about family drama that's not too heavy. I suggested this. It's funny, relatable if you have siblings, and actually has a great, motivating moral.

More excited about reading this book than Sophie is about being this photo. Heard Max Porter on the Lit Up podcast and had to go pick it up.

Loved this book so much. Haven't had time to read the rest because of work-reading. But love the HBO series and am watching the finale tonight NO SPOILERS PLEASE. Have you read books and watched series? Am I missing so much?

Sunday's got me like.

Had lunch with a friend who's going through some tough stuff and told her about this poem that's been a mantra for me in difficult times.

The Uses of Sorrow

Someone I loved once gave me
a box full of darkness.

It took me years to understand
that this, too, was a gift.

I read this book 2-3 years ago and still remember it very well (which says a lot). While I had little interest in the real Amanda Knox trial, I became obsessed with it because of this book. DuBois gets into her characters' heads (and therefore the readers') in such artful and cunning ways.

This book broke my heart a million times. Worth the hype. Worth the heartbreak. I loved getting to know the characters so well that their joys and sorrows were mine.

This book confirmed all my worst fears about the underbelly of highly competitive kids and their families. Total page turner.

In 2011 on an airplane reading a galley of WHERE'D YOU GO BERNADETTE by Maria Semple, the woman next to me tapped me and told me that, because of my ear plugs, I couldn't tell that I was laughing annoyingly loud. Just met the brilliant, funny author and picked up her latest which is wonderful.

Russian ballet superstar defects for opportunities in America. But the novel is really about the good, but not great, dancer, Joan, who in her youth aides the defector but now, older and retired, is living a much less astonishing life. Maggie Shipstead Skyped into my book club tonight, it was great!

A couple that audiobooks together stays together.

Finally, finally reading this!

A death of a too-young ex, launches Leigh‘s heartfelt memoir about first loves, idealism, disappointment, and toxic relationships.

Every single page is a stunner. The depth and complexities of these characters is really something!

The hype was a bit overblown for me. I read the whole thing, but a lot of it felt familiar and/or too tidy.

I finally read The Night Circus. So fun and fantastical! Such a page-turner.

Loved MariNaomi's graphic memoir!

Love this debut collection, and not just because there's a story about Kyrgyzstan AND a story about Minnesota.

The more I think about Siracusa, the darker it gets.

Incredible, educational, will stay with me for years, I'm sure.

Excited to land in LA a smarter person.

Loved talking to Karan Mahajan about his incredible new book in Kirkus. Man, I hope to live in a world where a book like this stops being timely.

"The family is like the forest: if you're outside it is dense; if you are inside you see that each tree has its own position" —Akan Proverb/ epigraph

April Marie Claire spotted at Newark! There are some great books coming out next month!

It's hard to pick just one quote but here's a few lines from the poem DOWN HERE: It means, if you‘re alone,/ when love is all around,/ We all tip our lonely hats/ in one un-lonely sound.

Happy 7th Birthday, Slaughterhouse 90210 (where this screenshot is from)! Also, I loved Fates and Furies so much.

Men's Journal features one of my favorite memoirs (outdoors-related or not), about growing up in the Alaskan outback.

The story of a new New Yorker and her foray into the restaurant industry. This book was so sexy and sumptuous, can't I recommend enough.

Yasssss. Am I allowed to live quote here? Maybe I will and see what happens.

Hadley just won Windham Campbell prize and I'd bet it's the first of many this year. Loved The Past.

Ready for takeoff!

Don't try this at home, it's totally illegal—but who hasn't had a crappy salary to match an exponentially terrible job? When a personal assistant accidentally gets an opportunity to pay off her student debt with an expense account error, she takes it

Reading The Girls makes me want to revisit amazing nonfiction book Manson by Jeff Guinn.

F. Scott Fitzgerald statue in downtown St. Paul. Was just reading about his heavy editorial influence in The Sun Also Rises in Blume's new book out this summer.

Excited about these forthcoming Coffee House books. #tbr