Each year that I have been blogging, I take a look back at the year’s best and most memorable reads. Sometimes the list is just as I expected it to be, and other times, I am surprised by what still stands out (or doesn’t) after 12 months. Here is my list for 2011. Supernatural Fiction [...]
Holiday Recipe Exchange – Maple Bacon Chocolate Chip Cookies
Trish from Love, Laughter and a Touch of Insanity is hosting a Holiday Recipe Exchange. I figure nothing says holidays like cookies and cookie exchanges, so here is a recipe idea I got from a friend of mine. I was chatting with Jen (Devourer of Books) the other day after she came back from [...]
Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close – Movie Trailer
I had seen this trailer ahead of the last few movies I’ve gone too and I kept meaning to put it up, but then kept forgetting. Though it looks like a bit of a downer and a sort of retread of similar movies about the turmoil that happens in a child’s life at the death [...]
2011 Advent Tour: Russian Tea Cakes
Check out the Virtual Advent Tour Blog for more holiday goodness and fun! One of the fun things about the holiday season is celebrating old traditions and creating new ones. This is a really new tradition that I started with my friend Allie last year. We get together and have lunch and talk books, of course, but [...]
BOOK CLUB – Maman’s Homesick Pie by Donia Bijan
Welcome to BOOK CLUB, a joint venture between me and Jen from Devourer of Books. Today we are discussing about Maman’s Homesick Pie by Donia Bijan which was published by Algonquin Books. About Maman’s Homesick Pie: For Donia Bijan’s family, food has been the language they use to tell their stories and to communicate their love. In 1978, when [...]
This Week In Books
The end of the year is when the book world traditionally settles down for a moment after the hustle and bustle of the fall holiday shopping. There aren’t as many new releases popping up, but here are a couple of things that caught my eye, and they are out now and by the end of [...]
Dark Water by Laura McNeal – Book Review
15-year-old Pearl lives with her mother in a small house on her uncle’s property in Fallbrook, California. She is used to hanging out with her cousin Robbie and her Uncle Hoyt, an avocado farmer using both legal and illegal immigrant labor to work his ranch. When Pearl spots Amiel, a young migrant miming and juggling in the [...]
From The Memoirs Of A Non-Enemy Combatant by Alex Gilvarry – Book Trailer & Giveaway
Many authors have mentioned struggling with the titles of their books- they say they go through several titles or have books that were finally titled by someone else. Alex Gilvarry’s book trailer for Memoirs of A Non-Enemy Combatant, takes on the idea that his book suffers from an overly long and possibly unmemorable title. He discusses [...]
Stories for Nighttime and Some for the Day by Ben Loory – Book Review
Stories for the Nighttime and Some for the Day by Ben Loory is one of the strangest little collections of stories that I have ever read, and oddly, it’s really resonant. While longer than sudden fiction (though some of it really is just that), each of these short stories are dark and offered up something [...]
The Night Bookmobile, by Audrey Niffenegger – Book Review
It wasn’t until after I’d read Audrey Niffenegger’s novels The Time Traveler’s Wife and Her Fearful Symmetry that I found out she was also an illustrator and graphic novelist. She has two earlier “novels-in-pictures” The Adventuress (which I’ve since read) and The Three Incestuous Sisters. The Adventuress was really, really strange, but still I picked up a [...]
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