When we left off last week, I was headed off to create Thanksgiving dinner. It’s not just making dinner around here; it’s about “creating the experience.” This is different from my friends, who have dinners where the food is catered. There you are “presenting the meal.” Are you a creator or a presenter? At the last minute, I got a great idea from a publishing colleague to brine the turkey, which we did with a very simple recipe of kosher salt in water. However, after we cooked up our most moist turkey ever, I already am thumbing through cookbooks for more flavorful brining tips for next year!
Read More
Here are reading recommendations with your comments and a rating of 1 to 5 stars for the contest period of December 2 - December 16.
December 2, 2011, 60 responses
December 2, 2011, 634 voters
THE JEFFERSON KEY by Steve Berry retells a historical trend in a new light: four presidents of the United States have been assassinated, each murder seemingly unrelated. But what if those presidents were all killed for the shocking same reason: a clause contained in the United States Constitution?
In LITTLE PRINCES, Conor Grennan tells his story. While volunteering at a Nepal orphanage in 2006, Grennan discovered that the children were not orphans: they were trafficked. Despite the danger, he trekked remarkable distances with photographs of the children, miraculously reuniting dozens of families.
Read more »
In Meg Waite Clayton's THE FOUR MS. BRADWELLS, Mia, Laney, Betts and Ginger have reunited to celebrate Betts’s appointment to the Supreme Court. But when Senate hearings uncover a deeply buried skeleton in the friends’ collective closet, they retreat to a summer house and end up reliving their dark past.
In SISTER by Rosamund Lupton, Bee hears that Tess, her younger sister, is missing and returns home to London immediately. She expects to find Tess and give her the usual big sister lecture scolding her flighty behavior --- but Bee never could have prepared for what really awaits her.
Read more »
Jason Bourne is searching for an elusive cadre of terrorists in Eric Van Lustbader's THE BOURNE DOMINION, and needs the help of his longtime friend, General Boris Karpov, the newly appointed head of Russia's most feared spy agency, FSB-2. What he doesn’t know is that in order to remain the head of FSB-2, Karpov must hunt down and kill Bourne.
In THE OTHER LIFE by Ellen Meister, Quinn Braverman is happy and successful --- but she also knows that an alternative reality exists in which she has an entirely different life. When Quinn travels through the portal to the life she could have had, she is faced with a critical decision.
Read more »
December 2, 2011
Posted by Katherine
Charles J. Shields spent five years researching and writing AND SO IT GOES: Kurt Vonnegut, A Life. He is also the author of MOCKINGBIRD: A Portrait of Harper Lee (Holt 2006) --- a New York Times bestseller. Two years ago, he co-founded the 400-member Biographers International Organization (BIO), and is currently associate director of the Great Lives program, which features presentations by 18-20 biographers each year at the University of Mary Washington in Fredericksburg. Shields and his wife, Guadalupe, reside in Barboursville, Virginia. Here he talks about a gift he received in college while struggling to write.
I hope you all had a fantastic Thanksgiving and enjoyed a lovely menu of festive food as well as nice times spent with loved ones. Carol brined a turkey for the first time and pronounced it a great concept. This year, kosher salt and water; next year, something more inventive!
Read More
This past weekend, I had the privilege of attending the Miami Book Fair, one of the best-run book fairs in the country (and one of the biggest—seriously, if you are a book fan, you owe it to yourself to save up for a vacation to this yearly event; it’s well worth it). One of the great things about it is how friendly they are to graphic novels. In fact, they have a pretty large and significant comics presence at the fair, with panels running all weekend long.
