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Jimmy Buffett

Fun is about as good a habit as there is.

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Jimmy Buffett

October 5, 2020

This Bookreporter.com Special Newsletter spotlights a book that we know people will be talking about this fall. Read more about it, and enter our Fall Preview Contest by Tuesday, October 6th at noon ET for a chance to win one of five copies of THE DEVIL AND THE DARK WATER by Stuart Turton, which releases tomorrow. Please note that each contest is only open for 24 hours, so you will need to act quickly!

Dan Salomon

Sometimes it pays to stay in bed on Monday, rather than spending the rest of the week debugging Monday's code.

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Dan Salomon

Week of October 12, 2020

Paperback releases for the week of October 12th include A MRS. MIRACLE CHRISTMAS, an uplifting holiday tale from Debbie Macomber, whose beloved protagonist, Mrs. Miracle, shows an ordinary family that they are blessed beyond belief; HOME WORK, a follow-up to Julie Andrews' critically acclaimed memoir, HOME, in which she reflects on her astonishing career, including such classics as Mary Poppins, The Sound of Music and Victor/Victoria; THE SIBERIAN DILEMMA, a continuation of Martin Cruz Smith's series featuring Arkady Renko, who travels deep into Siberia to find missing journalist Tatiana Petrovna; NO STOPPING US NOW, a lively social history of American women and aging from acclaimed New York Times columnist Gail Collins, who illustrates the ways in which age is an arbitrary concept that has swung back and forth over the centuries; and JANIS, Holly George-Warren's intimate biography of Janis Joplin that establishes the Queen of Rock & Roll as the rule-breaking musical trailblazer and complicated, gender-bending rebel she was.

Week of October 5, 2020

Paperback releases for the week of October 5th include WALK THE WIRE, the sixth entry in David Baldacci's Memory Man series, which finds Amos Decker --- the FBI consultant with a perfect memory --- trying to solve a gruesome murder in a booming North Dakota oil town; GRAND UNION, Zadie Smith's debut short story collection, which is about time and place, identity and rebirth, the persistent legacies that haunt our present selves and the uncanny futures that rush up to meet us; IMAGINARY FRIEND, Stephen Chbosky's first novel since 1999's THE PERKS OF BEING A WALLFLOWER, an epic work of literary horror about a young boy who is haunted by a voice in his head; A SINGLE THREAD by Tracy Chevalier, the story of a woman coming into her own at the dawn of the Second World War; and Susan Ronald's CONDÉ NAST: The Man and His Empire, the first biography in over 30 years of Condé Nast, the pioneering publisher of Vogue and Vanity Fair and main rival to media magnate William Randolph Hearst.

Elbert Hubbard

Reason: The arithmetic of the emotions.

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Elbert Hubbard, THE ROYCROFT DICTIONARY

Nancy Sproat

How pleasant is Saturday night,
When I've tried all the week to be good,
And not spoke a word that was bad,
And obliged everyone that I could.

Attribution

Nancy Sproat

October 2, 2020

October means that there are many leaves in the pool. Yesterday morning, I was outside dragging the leaf catcher along the bottom of the pool pulling up leaves. They kept falling; imagine that. We need a new winter pool cover. The pool is a very unusual shape (I have never seen one like it), which equals a custom cover. Has this been ordered yet? Finally today. Let’s hope that the pool cover-making elves work quickly!

Editorial Content for The Midnight Library

Contributors

Reviewer (text)

Ray Palen

Matt Haig has achieved a reputation as a keen wordsmith and purveyor of the human condition. In THE MIDNIGHT LIBRARY, his latest novel, he crosses over into the realm of existentialism. By way of metaphor, he takes a library and supposes that each book on its many stacks contains an alternate version of an individual’s life. Grab a volume, and you open up a completely new reality, giving the reader the opportunity to see “what might have been” if different choices had been made. Read More

Teaser

Somewhere out beyond the edge of the universe, there is a library that contains an infinite number of books, each one the story of another reality. One tells the story of your life as it is, along with another book for the other life you could have lived if you had made a different choice at any point in your life. While we all wonder how our lives might have been, what if you had the chance to go to the library and see for yourself? Would any of these other lives truly be better? Nora Seed finds herself faced with this decision. Confronted with the possibility of changing her life for a new one, she must search within herself as she travels through the Midnight Library to decide what is truly fulfilling in life, and what makes it worth living in the first place.

Promo

Somewhere out beyond the edge of the universe, there is a library that contains an infinite number of books, each one the story of another reality. One tells the story of your life as it is, along with another book for the other life you could have lived if you had made a different choice at any point in your life. While we all wonder how our lives might have been, what if you had the chance to go to the library and see for yourself? Would any of these other lives truly be better? Nora Seed finds herself faced with this decision. Confronted with the possibility of changing her life for a new one, she must search within herself as she travels through the Midnight Library to decide what is truly fulfilling in life, and what makes it worth living in the first place.

About the Book

The dazzling reader-favorite about the choices that go into a life well lived, from the acclaimed author of HOW TO STOP TIME and THE COMFORT BOOK.

Somewhere out beyond the edge of the universe, there is a library that contains an infinite number of books, each one the story of another reality. One tells the story of your life as it is, along with another book for the other life you could have lived if you had made a different choice at any point in your life. While we all wonder how our lives might have been, what if you had the chance to go to the library and see for yourself? Would any of these other lives truly be better?

In THE MIDNIGHT LIBRARY, Matt Haig's enchanting new novel, Nora Seed finds herself faced with this decision. Confronted with the possibility of changing her life for a new one, following a different career, undoing old breakups, realizing her dreams of becoming a glaciologist, she must search within herself as she travels through the Midnight Library to decide what is truly fulfilling in life, and what makes it worth living in the first place.

Audiobook available, read by Carey Mulligan

Editorial Content for The Talented Miss Farwell

Contributors

Reviewer (text)

Rebecca Munro

Combining the sharp ingenuity of Sherlock Holmes and the bad-girl attitude of a classic literary femme fatale, THE TALENTED MISS FARWELL by Emily Gray Tedrowe is a fast-paced and compulsively readable novel, a magnetic character study about one unforgettable woman. Read More

Teaser

At the end of the 1990s, with the art market finally recovered from its disastrous collapse, Miss Rebecca Farwell has made a killing at Christie’s in New York City, selling a portion of her extraordinary art collection for a rumored 900 percent profit. To some, the elusive Miss Farwell is a shark with outstanding business acumen. To others, she’s a heartless capitalist whose only interest in art is how much she can make. But a thousand miles from the Big Apple, in the small town of Pierson, Illinois, Miss Farwell is someone else entirely --- a quiet single woman known as Becky who works tirelessly as the town’s treasurer and controller. How long can the talented Miss Farwell continue to pull off her double life?

Promo

At the end of the 1990s, with the art market finally recovered from its disastrous collapse, Miss Rebecca Farwell has made a killing at Christie’s in New York City, selling a portion of her extraordinary art collection for a rumored 900 percent profit. To some, the elusive Miss Farwell is a shark with outstanding business acumen. To others, she’s a heartless capitalist whose only interest in art is how much she can make. But a thousand miles from the Big Apple, in the small town of Pierson, Illinois, Miss Farwell is someone else entirely --- a quiet single woman known as Becky who works tirelessly as the town’s treasurer and controller. How long can the talented Miss Farwell continue to pull off her double life?

About the Book

CATCH ME IF YOU CAN meets Patricia Highsmith in this “stylish” (New York Times Book Review) page-turner of greed and obsession, survival and self-invention that is a piercing character study of one unforgettable female con artist.

At the end of the 1990s, with the art market finally recovered from its disastrous collapse, Miss Rebecca Farwell has made a killing at Christie’s in New York City, selling a portion of her extraordinary art collection for a rumored 900 percent profit. Dressed in couture YSL, drinking the finest champagne at trendy Balthazar, Reba, as she’s known, is the picture of a wealthy art collector. To some, the elusive Miss Farwell is a shark with outstanding business acumen. To others, she’s a heartless capitalist whose only interest in art is how much she can make.

But a thousand miles from the Big Apple, in the small town of Pierson, Illinois, Miss Farwell is someone else entirely --- a quiet single woman known as Becky who still lives in her family’s farmhouse, wears sensible shoes, and works tirelessly as the town’s treasurer and controller.

No one understands the ins and outs of Pierson’s accounts better than Becky; she’s the last one in the office every night, crunching the numbers. Somehow, her neighbors marvel, she always finds a way to get the struggling town just a little more money. What Pierson doesn’t see --- and can never discover --- is that much of that money is shifted into a separate account that she controls, “borrowed” funds used to finance her art habit. Though she quietly repays Pierson when she can, the business of art is cutthroat and unpredictable.

But as Reba Farwell’s deals get bigger and bigger, Becky Farwell’s debt to Pierson spirals out of control. How long can the talented Miss Farwell continue to pull off her double life?

Audiobook available, read by Allyson Ryan