Want to read: Agorafabulous! by Sara Benincasa

I saw Sara Benincasa's solo show Agorafabulous! and am a big fan of her work, video and writing and performing, and am excited to read this memoir, out in January from William Morrow, available for pre-order on Amazon. I think this book is going to be pretty big - I'm not sure if there've been other agoraphobia memoirs, but not only is Sarah everywhere, she's funny and she managed, in the show, at least, to make a very grave illness humorous and then kindof punch you in the gut with how severe it was. It's a little hard to reconcile who she is today (from what I know of her) and the person she describes in the show, and I think that discrepancy will make the book even more powerful. Also, I love the cover!



Via Harper Collins

She is “utterly hilarious” (NewYorkTimes.com) and “delightfully loopy” (ChicagoTribune.com). But comedian and radio host Sara Benincasa’s life hasn’t always been a funny joyride. Since childhood, she strugged with panic disorder, becoming by age twenty-one a ”full-on obsessive, cowering, trembling agoraphobe.” Terrified to leave her own apartment, she stacked empty cans and jars against the wall of her tiny studio apartment. Her fear eventually extended to everything but her bed. Afraid of even the sink, she began using cereal bowls as toilets. And always there was the siren song of the knives in the kitchen drawer, luring her to give herself over to emptiness.

As she neared the edge, friends and family, therapy and drugs intervened to help Sara build a new world from the ashes of her former life. Today, the acclaimed artist tours the world—a life inconceivable to the frightened, stick-thin young woman crouching in the dark whom she once was.

Agorafabulous! is her funny, unpretentious recollections of being a prisoner of fear and how she struggled to overcome her demons. Earthy and relatable, unabashedly incorrect and unsentimental, she will “break your heart in one sentence and leave you hunched over with laughter in the next” (Sam Apple, author of American Parent).

Want to read: With a Little Luck by Caprice Crane

Caprice Crane, when she's not writing screenplays or for TV, writes fun, lighthearted romantic novels (not romances, but I'd call them romantic). I started this book and then put it down for some crazy reason and now will have to ransack my apartment to find it or get another copy.



Her latest is With a Little Luck. Official description:

Los Angeles radio DJ Beryl “Berry” Lambert, whose name means luck, doesn’t much believe in it—although, thanks to her dear old gambling dad, she’s a bit superstitious, certain that everything happens for a reason. She keeps a four-leaf clover in her wallet, never takes off her horseshoe necklace, and won’t tempt fate by walking under a ladder or opening an umbrella indoors. Ever.

When it comes to love, though, she could use a little luck. Two disastrous relationships back-to-back can mean only one thing to a woman who knows that everything good or bad happens in threes: A third Mr. Wrong is imminent. But fellow DJ Ryan Riley goes against the odds. Their on-air battle of the sexes is a hit for the station and sparks some serious heat after hours. Ryan is funny and sexy, and he thinks Berry’s quirkiness is cute. Is their romance doomed by the numbers—or is a girl who leaves nothing to chance finally ready to gamble?

And she's on tour with it:

Wednesday, July 27 - UES New York

07:00 PM
Caprice will be reading from and signing her new book "With a Little Luck" at
Barnes & Noble
150 E. 86th St.
New York, NY 10028
Wednesday, August 03 - The Grove, LA

07:00 PM
Caprice will be reading from and signing her new book "With a Little Luck" at
Barnes & Noble
189 The Grove Drive
Los Angeles, CA 90036
Thursday, August 04 - Books Inc. in the Marina - San Francisco

07:00 PM
Caprice will be reading from and signing her new book "With a Little Luck" at
Books Inc. in the Marina
2251 Chestnut St.
San Francisco, CA 94123
Friday, August 19 - The Book Cellar - Chicago

07:00 PM
Caprice will be reading from and signing her new book "With a Little Luck" at
The Book Cellar
4736-38 N. Lincoln Ave.
Chicago, IL 60625

Caprice is also stunningly gorgeous. Here's a photo I found on her website taken by Adam Bouska of the NOH8 Campaign.



I have to juggle something around but am hoping to go to her reading on Wednesday!

How can you not love a woman who passively aggressively blogs red carpet photos of a movie she wrote that got rewritten?

Want to read: The Accidental Creative

I read about The Accidental Creative: How to Be Brilliant at a Moment's Notice by Todd Berry in a guest post of his, "The Fallacy of Compartmentalization," which I found via Justine Musk and was totally intrigued. Lately, after a long period of dormancy, I'm finding myself filled with creative ideas again, and my ongoing challenge is seeing them through. I revert to seeing the flaws, the failures, or the overwhelmingness of the tasks ahead, and get sidetrack from the high of just using that creative burst to move forward.

From the post (bolding his):

The principle that I’d blown right past in my pursuit of creative invincibility was that each commitment I made, and each project I decided to take on, required something more of me than just my time. Each required my energy. And because I was not being strategic and purposeful about the number and nature of simultaneous commitments I was making, I soon found myself in energy debt. I was creatively inverted and no longer had enough energy to generate the ideas I needed just to keep my head above water.

When you are planning your life, you need to account for every commitment you make in every area.



Official description:

Have better ideas, faster, without the stress and burnout.

It isn't enough to just do your job anymore. In order to thrive in today's marketplace, all of us, regardless of our role, have to be ready to generate brilliant ideas on demand.

Business creativity expert Todd Henry explains how to establish effective practices that unleash your creative potential. Born out of his consultancy and his popular podcast, Henry has created a practical method for discovering your personal creative rhythm. He focuses on five key elements:

* Focus: Begin with your end goal in mind.
* Relationships: Build stimulating relationships and ideas will follow.
* Energy: Manage it as your most valuable resource.
* Stimuli: Structure the right "inputs" to maximize creative output.
* Hours: Focus on effectiveness, not efficiency.
This is a guide for staying inspired and experiencing greater creative productivity than you ever imagined possible.

Book trailer:

Want to read: Madonna and Me

The 2012 anthology Madonna & Me: Women Writers on the Queen of Pop is a book I definitely want to read, and especially upon seeing the kickass list of contributors is one I wish I'd gotten my act together to write an essay for (my second failure to write about Madonna...hmmm). Someday my dream anthology is to edit something like this; not about Madonna or music per se, but a topical anthology with my dream list of authors, which takes, well, I don't know what it takes, but I intend to figure it out before I die, maybe even before I turn 40! It'll happen...cooking up other stuff in the meantime. I also think that first-time anthologist Laura Barcella is someone you should emulate if you're editing an anthology. She's got a website, a a Twitter account, Facebook page for her book many months prior to publication. I will be studying it to learn how to better promote my books! And plotting how I can someday realize my dream.



From the book's about page:

Madonna and Me will be published by Soft Skull Press in March 2012.

In Madonna and Me, 40 female authors including Cintra Wilson, Gloria Feldt, Caroline Leavitt, Bee Lavender, Wendy Shanker, and Susan Shapiro write about how Madonna changed their lives.

Why? Because, for children of the '80s and ‘90s, Madonna's been nothing less than a constant companion. Maturing in the media spotlight for nearly 30 (!) years, Madonna has truly grown up with us (not to mention that she’s sold more than 200 million records worldwide). Brazen, beautiful, and balls-to-the-wall, Madonna is so much more than just the sultry architect of a few hit songs. For the MTV generation and beyond, Madonna is a living example of having it all. She's been so much more than a media darling or a “boy-toy” tartlet, even in her later incarnations as savvy businesswoman and kooky Kabbalah matriarch. Madonna has inspired us and challenged us, pushing us to be bolder, edgier versions of ourselves.

Of course, not all women love Madonna, so not every writer in Madonna and Me worships at her altar. The essays are honest, funny, engaging, and real, and they’re about more than just Her Madgesty. They delve into the hearts, souls, and memories of contemporary writers both established and up-and-coming. In Madonna and Me, they offer a broad array of perspectives on aging, sex, childhood, and more.

Want to read: Anya's Ghost by Vera Brosgol

I found this book while looking up Page by Paige by Laura Lee Gulledge, which I'll be blogging about soon. I bought that yesterday at Comics Dungeon in Seattle (Wallingford). I'd met the author and was interested in the book and am super impressed with it; it's definitely going to be a gift for my cousin who is getting bat mitzvahed this summer. I'm the type who can be sucked in by a book cover, and this one did it for me:



Official description:

Anya could really use a friend. But her new BFF isn’t kidding about the “Forever” part . . .

Of all the things Anya expected to find at the bottom of an old well, a new friend was not one of them. Especially not a new friend who’s been dead for a century.

Falling down a well is bad enough, but Anya’s normal life might actually be worse. She’s embarrassed by her family, self-conscious about her body, and she’s pretty much given up on fitting in at school. A new friend—even a ghost—is just what she needs.

Or so she thinks.

Spooky, sardonic, and secretly sincere, Anya’s Ghost is a wonderfully entertaining debut from author/artist Vera Brosgol.

Book trailer:



So anyway, I know very little about it but Anya's Ghost looks great (thank you, Amazon, for your customer recommendation pages). Click here to check out a 17-page preview. Here's a little bit from author Vera Brosgol's blog, but do check out that blog post for a more in-depth look at her artistic process:

Anya’s Ghost is my first book. Consequently everything I did was a bit trial and error. Maybe wasn’t the most efficient way to get the job done, but it worked for me.

I didn’t work from a script. When I write the art and the dialogue come at the same time and one suggests the other; it’s really hard for me just to come up with dialogue onto a blank computer page. I try to show more than tell with my comics and that seems to work best starting with thumbnails rather than attempting to get it across in a script. I did work up an outline for the entire story and plotted it out very carefully, but I let each scene form itself in thumbnails with the dialogue being written as I drew. I’ll run you through a process of some sample pages from writing to drawing to final color.

Check her out @verabee on Twitter and in person:

San Diego Comic Con
July 22nd-24th

Portland Wordstock Festival
October 6-9

New York Comic-Con
October 13-16

My first article for The Grindstone, and want to read: The Gifts of Imperfection

Looks like this never posted. OOPS! Pretend it's last week. Or maybe it did and I'm reposting. I've lost track of almost everything this week, but I am excited to read this book.

I just ordered The Gifts of Imperfection by Brené Brown, after seeing this Tweet by Alina Tugend, author of Better by Mistake, who inspired my first article for The Grindstone, which went up today, "How Your Mistakes Can Make You Better at Your Job." If you like it, I'd love it if you "liked" it on Facebook, posted it on your blog, etc. I always like to look good to my editors and...traffic is one way to do so.

I hope you like the piece; I learned a lot from Tugend's book and my interviewees, and am excited to be writing for The Grindstone - next up is couples who work together and when's the right time to go back to school. The site is part of B5 Media, which runs The Gloss and Crushable, both of which I've written for, among others.

Anyway, this book looks like it'll be good airplane reading:

Want to read: Uncommon Criminals by Ally Carter

Uncommon Criminals is the second in a new Ally Carter series and it's wonderful! I both want to read it and am already reading it, almost done. It's a fast-paced read about teenage thieves; in the last book, they were stealing back stolen Holocaust art. This one involves a 97-carat emerald and all sorts of security measures, plus family and romance, but mainly heists. Click here for Ally Carter's book tour dates and visit Heist Society on Facebook to read an excerpt from Uncommon Criminals (it opens with Kat in Moscow stealing from the KGB!).

I read it while getting a pedicure:



I recommend all of Ally Carter's YA novels, both her Gallagher Girls series and this series!

Official description:

Katarina Bishop has worn a lot of labels in her short life: Friend. Niece. Daughter. Thief. But for the last two months she’s simply been known as the girl who ran the crew that robbed the greatest museum in the world. That’s why Kat isn’t surprised when she’s asked to steal the infamous Cleopatra Emerald so it can be returned to its rightful owners. There are only three problems. First, the gem hasn’t been seen in public in thirty years. Second, since the fall of the Egyptian empire and the suicide of Cleopatra, no one who holds the emerald keeps it for long — and in Kat’s world, history almost always repeats itself. But it’s the third problem that makes Kat’s crew the most nervous, and that is . . . the emerald is cursed. Kat might be in way over her head, but she’s not going down without a fight. After all, she has her best friend — the gorgeous Hale — and the rest of her crew with her as they chase the Cleopatra around the globe, dodging curses and realizing that the same tricks and cons her family has used for centuries are useless this time. Which means, this time, Katarina Bishop is making up her own rules.

Want to read: Break the Skin by Lee Martin

I have this book and plan to read it soon. I was very impressed by Lee Martin's interview at Amazon and other postings I've read on his blog about writing, aside from regarding this specific book, like this post on whether writing can be taught:

Can we teach someone how to write? That question comes up quite often within the community of folks who do exactly that for their livelihood, and I’m always a little puzzled when the answer is sometimes no.

Of course, we can teach someone how to write. We do it each year in our workshops, our literature seminars, our thesis directing, our informal conversations in this place or that, and in writing of our own. We teach technique, we teach the habits of the process and the work ethic that they require. I happen to believe that we can also teach students how to adjust their vision so that they more readily note the contradictions and complexities of the world around them. I believe we can encourage them to think in terms of opposites so they see the plurality of any one character or situation. We do it by talking about published work that does exactly that and by pointing out what a writer has done to make the vision of that story, poem, essay, novel more deeply felt and more multi-layered with different levels of emotion and intellect, often contradictory in nature.

So yes, this tattooed lady, who is just about done with the excellent tattoo mystery I don't want to end, Ink Flamingos, is looking forward to reading Break The Skin.

From the interview with Lee Martin at Amazon by Dani Shapiro that so intrigued me:

Shapiro: Miss Baby works as a tattoo artist, a profession which I imagine you didn’t know much about at the outset. Did you know you were going to write about a tattoo artist when you were first beginning the book? How did you go about your research? (Any tattoos?) Why did it seem important that Miss Baby be in this line of work?

Martin: Well now, what makes you think that I didn’t at some point work as a tattoo artist? In between the years when I cooked crystal meth, robbed banks, and worked as a hit man, maybe I was pounding ink. (Nah, that sentence was just a feeble attempt to establish my street cred.) After all, as one review of the novel says, I’m “crackling with dark deeds and bad intentions...” I love that line! I want it to be part of my introduction at future readings and events: “Here he is, crackling with dark deeds and bad intentions, Lee Martin.” Ha! I told my students that and they laughed so hard you could see how far from the truth of me such a description actually is...or is it? Hmmm...I’ll never tell, nor will I reveal my tattoos, not even the ones that glow in the dark.

My research involved a conversation here, a visit there, some things read, some things watched--just the usual methods of immersing oneself in an unfamiliar world. I’m always fascinated with the details and the lingo of someone else’s job, and as soon as Miss Baby stepped onto the corner of Fry and Oak Street in Denton, Texas, I knew she had to be coming from a tattoo parlor. Don’t ask me how I knew that. I just did. I like to think that my subconscious mind had already started to sense the rich possibilities with metaphor in this practice of drilling into the skin and leaving something to live in scar tissue.



Here's the book's official description, via Lee Martin's website:

Laney—a skinny, awkward teenager alone in the world--thinks she's found a kindred spirit in thirty-five-year old Delilah. "When I was with her," Laney says, "I felt closest to being the person I was meant to be...We could have been sisters, big and little, which some people thought we were." Then the police come to ask Laney questions and she finds herself reconstructing a story of suspense, deceit, and revenge, but also "a story of love, no matter how roughed up and ugly and stained." A story that will haunt her forever.

Seven hundred miles away, in Texas, Miss Baby has the hardened heart of a woman who has been used by men in every possible way, yet she is desperate for true love. When she meets a stranger, a man who claims he can't remember his real name or his past but who seems gentle and trusting, Miss Baby thinks she may have finally found someone to love, someone who will protect her from the abusive men who fill her past.

But Miss Baby and Laney are connected by a terrible crime and bit by bit, the complex web of deceptions and seemingly small misjudgments they've each helped to create starts to unravel. Action, speculation, and contradiction play off one another as the story is told through their first-person voices, which keep you nervously guessing all the way to the shocking, tragic climax. BREAK THE SKIN is a novel about "wanting to matter to someone, wanting it so badly that you did things you never could have imagined, and you swore they were right, all for the sake of love."

Want to read: What We Keep Is Not Always What Will Stay

Found this YA novel, What We Keep Is Not Always What Will Stay by Amanda Cockrell, via her guest post The Contemps. Dear Wall Street Journal - YA fucking matters.



Description from Amazon:

Angie never used to think much about God—until things started getting strange. Like the statue of St. Felix, her secret confidant, suddenly coming off his pedestal and talking to her. And Jesse Francis, sent home from Afghanistan at age nineteen with his leg blown off. Now he's expected to finish high school and fit right back in. Is God even paying attention to this?

Against the advice of St. Felix (who knows a thing or two about war), Angie falls for Jesse—who's a lot deeper than most high school guys. But Jesse is battling some major demons. As his behavior starts to become unpredictable, and even dangerous, Angie finds herself losing control of the situation. And she's starting to wonder . . . can one person ever make things right for someone else?

From the post:

The germ of the plot was my college senior thesis, a play in verse heavily under the influence of Christopher Fry. It concerned a girl who has been praying to the statue of a saint, which suddenly comes alive, claiming that God has de-sainted him for not being holy enough. I don’t write blank verse nearly as well as Christopher Fry did, and there is not a lot of market for historical plays in verse. But years later I thought the premise still had possibilities, and we were in the middle of a war - again - and I thought the saint probably had some old battle scars of his own.

War is a very different thing when you are fighting it than when you are supporting the troops on the home front with “Power of Pride” bumper stickers and magnetic ribbons on your car. Angie, my heroine, is fifteen, and anyone her age has grown up with these wars. Even Jesse, who was hot to join the Army at seventeen, was a child when it started. For them, it’s always been there. And yet I wonder how real it seems to teens if they aren’t in a military family. I’m reasonably sure that Jesse didn’t know what he was getting into. I looked at the pictures of young people cheering when Osama Bin Laden was killed, as if they were at a football game, and I had a sense that to them it was a game.

During the Vietnam War, it was clearly no game because any male might get drafted and sent to fight. At first you could get a deferment by staying in college, but after a while it became clear that the war was unfairly taking the boys who couldn’t afford college, and so they began a lottery – literally. Numbers were drawn once a year corresponding to birthdays. If your birthday got a low number, you were gone. Every man I know of that generation has some scar left over from it, whether he was drafted, volunteered, protested the war, or even went to Canada with the draft board and the FBI on his heels. Even the unscathed ones have a sort of survivor guilt about that. But now, I wonder. We have no draft, and I thought that it was likely that for someone like Angie the war would only get suddenly and extremely real when someone she knew got hurt or killed.

Want to read: Ink Flamingos by Karen E. Olson

Ink Flamingos is the fourth and final (boo) book in Karen E. Olsen's tattoo mystery series starring Las Vegas tattoo artist and amateur sleuth Brett Kavanaugh. I discovered the series at Bookpeople in Austin (before I'd gotten my tattoo) last year and have been hooked ever since. I'm six chapters in and totally hooked!

I love that there are elements of romance, family (her brother is her landlord), Brett running her own business, Las Vegas life, and, of course, tattoos and artwork and how selling your art when it's inked on someone's body becomes so personal, plus that tattoos always play an intimate role in the murders. These are fast-paced and wild and fun and I'm sad this is the last of the series but highly recommend them. I look forward to reading Olson's other mysteries as well.



Author Karen E. Olson writes on her blog:

I have a lot of people emailing me, telling me they love the series and would love to see it continue. There are two things going on here. First, the publisher has not extended my contract. Second, I'm done with the series. I think four books is perfectly fine for a cozy, amateur sleuth mystery series. Sometimes I have issues with those cozy series that go on and on and on, and I wonder why the amateur sleuth doesn't decide to move out of town, disappear for a while because once you've got dead bodies piling up in your life, I'd think you'd get a real complex about it. I know Brett does. That's why this has to be the last one. She's done. Done with solving crimes. She's onto bigger and better things in her life.

I hope you'll check out the book. It's a fun, fast read and Brett is dodging tattoo bloggers and stalkers. The plot is intensely personal for her.

Want to read: What Would My Cell Phone Do?

I've actually started this YA novel, What Would My Cell Phone Do?, by Micol Ostow and it's a fun sendup of Dr. Phil and a cute romance. I recommend it! The back cover is also pretty chihuahua-tastic.

From YA Book Central:

When Aggie Eckhart's family moves from Miami, Florida, to Denville, Alaska, because of her father's job, Aggie feels like a fish out of water.

Not only is frozen Denville a far cry from sunny Miami, but she's got no friends, her mother is driving her crazy, and she loses her cell phone within the first month - cutting off her lifeline to civilization.

But when an online search for her phone (using the schmancy built-in GPS tracker) reveals that the cell is enjoying life up north much more than Aggie is, she adopts a whole new outlook. No more woe-is-me, now it's all WWMCPD (What Would My Cell Phone Do)? And before Aggie knows it, things are looking a whole lot brighter in this charming, fun, and lighthearted YA romance.

Want to read: A Pug's Tale by Alison Pace

I've been a fan of Alison Pace's dog-themed novels since the beginning, and interviewed her for Gothamistback in the day. She has a new book out called A Pug's Tale. Below is the official description; click here to read an excerpt.



There are pugs in the Metropolitan Museum of Art!

Hope McNeill has worked at the Metropolitan Museum of Art for years, but this is the first time she's been able to bring along her pug, Max. (Officially at least. Previously she's had to smuggle him in inside her tote bag.)

The occasion: a special "Pug Night" party in honor of a deep-pocketed donor. Max and his friends are having a ball stalking the hors d'oeuvres and getting rambunctious, and making Hope wonder if this is also the last time she gets to bring Max to the museum.

But when a prized painting goes missing, the Met needs Hope's--and Max's--help. In her quest for the culprit, Hope searches for answers with an enigmatic detective, a larger-than-life society heiress, a lady with a shih tzu in a stroller, and her arguably intuitive canine. With luck, she'll find some inspiration on her trips to Pug Hill before the investigation starts going downhill...

And the book trailer about the book and why Alison Pace loves pugs:

Want to read: A La Carte by Tanita Davis

I found out about A La Carte by Tanita Davis because I'm on a bunch of publisher newsletters regarding teen books. The first cover is the new paperback one, the other is the hardcover version. This looks wonderful and I love the unique subject matter. I have plans to write my own YA novel, which I will not say any more about until the manuscript is done and it's sold (my goal is by the time I'm 36th in November, or end of this year), but either way, I love reading books for kids, from board books to tween and YA.

Official desscription via Amazon, where you can also read an excerpt (paperback is out June 14th):

SEVENTEEN-YEAR-OLD LAINEY DREAMS of becoming a world famous chef one day and maybe even having her own cooking show. (Do you know how many African American female chefs there aren’t? And how many vegetarian chefs have their own shows? The field is wide open for stardom!) But when her best friend—and secret crush—suddenly leaves town, Lainey finds herself alone in the kitchen. With a little help from Saint Julia (Child, of course), Lainey finds solace in her cooking as she comes to terms with the past and begins a new recipe for the future.

Peppered with recipes from Lainey’s notebooks, this delicious debut novel finishes the same way one feels finishing a good meal—satiated, content, and hopeful.





And two reviews, via Amazon as well:

From School Library Journal

Grade 8 Up—Seventeen-year-old Lainey has an uncommon dream: to be the first African-American celebrity vegetarian chef. She shows promise, helping out in the kitchen at her mother's Bay Area restaurant and concocting mouthwatering dishes in her spare time. (Hand-written recipes are included.) Cooking is her salvation; she turns to the kitchen when things aren't going well, particularly in her precarious relationship with Simeon Keller. While she cares for him as a friend, she overlooks the way he uses her. When he runs away from a bad situation at home, she offers him brief sanctuary in her home, giving him $500 and food before he jets out of town. Lainey's mom hounds her for details about his disappearance, details that she withholds for weeks. When Sim returns, months later, she's more self-assured and certain of her own plans for success. While Davis's first novel at times suffers from awkward wording and slow moments, it's still a book with a lot of heart. Readers will relate to Lainey, who doesn't always say the right thing, who has a love-hate relationship with her mother, and who finds her dreams realized at the novel's end. Secondary characters, like Lainey's formerly dorky family friend, ring true and add depth to the novel.—Jennifer Barnes, Homewood Library, IL
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From Booklist

How many African American female chefs have their own vegetarian cooking shows? High-school senior Lainey, with help from her mom’s gourmet restaurant and St. Julia (Child), is well on her way to being the first. Though she never wavers in her dedication to her culinary future, Lainey suffers a blow when her lifelong friend, Simeon, borrows $500 and runs away. Sim’s departure leaves Lainey feeling alone and strains her relationship with her mother, who disapproves of Lainey’s loan. When Sim finally returns, thoughtful, likable Lainey faces the truth about her friend’s character and the role she really played in his life. Davis’ first novel shows much promise for good things to come. Too few novels feature well-drawn, well-educated, middle-class African American characters like Lainey and her family. The text is seasoned with Lainey’s original recipes, and Lainey’s use of cooking as a means of meditation and self-expression may encourage readers to embark on their own kitchen experiments. Grades 7-10. --Heather Booth

Next on my reading list: Cami Ostman's marathon memoir Second Wind

I like working with publishers, such as Harlequin, Cleis Press and Seal Press, to name three, that publish books I like to read. They all do, and while I don't have time to read everything they publish, I try to keep up and have discovered some amazing authors that way. While Seal always has lots of titles I'm interested in (I'm basically the target audience for Pretty Neat, you know?), what I love about discovering books the most is just that: the discovery. The act of hearing about a book in some fashion, usually through a friend, review, via social media or, in this case, via the publisher, and thinking, Wow, that sounds amazing. Also in this case, thinking, And that is the perfect gift for my marathon-running stepfather.

So I haven't read it yet, but I look forward to the memoir Second Wind: One Woman's Midlife Quest to Run Seven Marathons on Seven Continents. Her official site is 7marathons7continents.com and you can also keep track of her goal to run a marathon in each of the 50 United States by 2017!

Publisher's description:

Second Wind is the story of an unlikely athlete and an unlikely heroine: Cami Ostman, a woman edging toward midlife who decides to take on a challenge that stretches her way outside of her comfort zone. That challenge presents itself when an old friend suggests she go for a run to distract her from the grief of her recent divorce. Excited by the clarity of mind and breathing space running offers her, she keeps it up—albeit slowly. Soon the old friend, Bill, now a romantic interest, invites her to Prague to run a marathon. Little does either of them know that this race will be the first of many international marathons, and that it will ignite a quest to run seven marathons on seven continents.

Up hills and through flash floods, more often alone than with company, Cami forges a path through some of the most exotic places in the world—and into some of the most enlightened, and darkest, places in the psyche. Insightful and uplifting, Second Wind carries the reader along for the ride as Cami runs her way out of compliance with the patriarchal rules about “being a woman” that long held her captive and into authenticity and self-love. Her adventures—and the personal revelations that accompany them—will inspire readers to take chances, find truth in their lives, and learn to listen to the voice inside them that’s been there all along.



I liked the book trailer because she said some things like "You need to find your own authentic pace in life" that transcend running, even though her book is about running. Of course it's about more than that (okay, maybe not "of course," but as an avid memoir reader, there is almost always something more going on that the surface topic).