2010

You will occasionally hear book people or librarians sneer at those of us who are big Harry Potter fans, as they say, condescendingly, "well, you should really try Cornelia Funke or Phillip Pullman."

The Martian Chronicles is on the list of books I would have never read if I wasn't in a book club. The resident sci-fi fan in my book club tends to pick things that the rest of us initially groan about. But reading The Martian Chronicles is good example of why I love being in a book club - new horizons and whatnot.

 

If you didn't know how much of Heartburn was based on Nora Ephron's life, you wouldn't believe it.

Is there anything more enjoyable than opening your issue of the New Yorker and seeing Malcolm Gladwell's byline?

Someday I really will stop being attracted to sad stories of women abused by men. But today is not that day.

 

I cannot recommend a better way to bond with your teenager than for both of you to read The Hunger Games (The Hunger Games, Book 1) and the sequel, Catching Fire (The Hunger Games, Book 2) .

I finally broke down and read The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo because of the number of people who recommended it to me. Plus, there's only so much of being left out of the pop-culture loop that I can take.

 

When a book starts off with a quote from Proust, I'm always wary that I'm about to embark on a ship of pretension. Luckily, after a bit of a slow start, Jennifer Egan takes the reader on a fascinating ride that explores time, loss, and aging, all filtered through a backdrop of music.