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My Top 20 Faves from 2010
Everyone’s been posting “best” lists so here’s mine, but it’s a little different than most. It’s not my take on the best books published in 2010. It’s a list of some of the most memorable books of...
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Moms
Last Friday, Jan 14th, Shelf Awareness reviewed the new book Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother by Amy Chua and called it one of the growing genre of “momoirs,” memoirs about motherhood. It made me think...
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Writing About the Past
Later this month I’ll have the pleasure of moderating a panel on historical fiction, a genre that seems to have taken over the fiction lists this year. The New York chapter of the Women’s National Book...
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National Reading Group Month
For the past several years I’ve chaired the reading committee that selects the titles for the Great Group Reads list that comes out in September in time for National Reading Group Month (October)....
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The Books I Loved in 2012–Nonfiction
I didn’t read any political books this year, even though there were so many published. Reading the newspaper or the online news was enough politics for me. The seven books listed below are either...
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Daniyal Mueenuddin in The New Yorker
I went to a wedding in Toronto the other weekend and took along a bunch of New Yorkers that needed to be read, including the December 3rd Food Issue. Although I wasn’t certain that I’d be enchanted by...
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Another great memoir quote…
I was reading The Missing of the Somme by Geoff Dyer, and found this quote from John Updike: “Memory has a spottiness as if the film was sprinkled with developer instead of immersed in it.” A great...
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A Time of Gifts by Patrick Leigh Fermor
Sometimes you get to a book by a circuitous route. I had heard about Patrick Leigh Fermor when I was reading lots of travel writing in the 1990s but didn’t read his books then. Recently I began...
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Blood-Dark Track: A Family History by Joseph O’Neill (Knopf Doubleday, 2010)
I enjoyed O’Neill’s last 2 novels, The Dog and Netherland very much. In the latter, the protagonist is British, living in New York, but brought up in Holland. I was curious about how O’Neill came to...
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Madge Jenison and the Sunwise Turn
Last week I wrote about the book I co-authored, Women in the Literary Landscape, which contains an overview of the role of women in various fields related to books. One of the joys of doing the...
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