It wasn’t a terrible month for reading, or a bad to start to a new year of books.
We’re still in this phase of life where we read and reread H’s favorite books on a loop, so even with our trips to the library, we don’t read that many new books. She could have Winnie-the-Pooh read to her every night and be completely happy, and…honestly we’re also pretty happy. Adam loves reading Pooh to her. But we did read some new stuff this month.
It was so gray and grim today. But even with the weather, it was a great day! Tuesdays are The Days around here. We already had a lot going on, but since the new year it’s gotten even busier. This is a good part of my view every Tuesday, just out the car window. And not always raining.
So Kathy co-wrote Commissary Kitchen: My Infamous Prison Cookbook with Prodigy from Mobb Deep. The book’s release was this past Tuesday, the 11th, and they had a book signing at the Barnes & Noble in Union Square. I am so stinking proud of that lady, she is just the best.
My in-laws used to get nervous that they gave me too many books as gifts, that I’d get tired of them. They have learned by now that nothing makes me happier, and they’ve joined my own family in helping me build my library every year. And this year, the selection of books I was given was pretty astoundingly good. Some of these were on my own wishlist, some of them were given with great thought and care, and one of them was a gift to myself.
I went out to Lambertville, NJ today for my sorority alumni’s Founders Day luncheon. I love this area, Adam and I spent our 1st wedding anniversary in New Hope and Lambertville (across a walkable bridge from each other).
The best thing about lunch at Lambertville Station was this chocolate truffle dessert.
By complete coincidence, I finished the audio book of Sara Gruen’s astounding Water for Elephants the same day that my copy of Philip and Erin Stead’s A Sick Day for Amos McGee arrived in the mail. That book is hard to get your hands on these days, so it was the first chance I’d actually had to read this year’s Caldecott medalist. And something about experiencing these books on the same day made me feel so euphoric that I couldn’t escape how similar the experiences were.
Read more on Water for Elephants and A Sick Day for Amos McGee…
Holy apocalypse, these books scared the pants off of me. And not in a cover-my-eyes-and-scream-in-terror kind of way. They were perfect October reading, they definitely got me into the Halloween spirit. These books are so bleak, so dark and creepy, so hard to put down that I found myself coming up for air and breathing with relief that we weren’t really in the middle of a vampire zombie apocalypse.
Yes. A vampire zombie apocalypse. Because that’s basically what the 1st two books in this new trilogy are about. The Strain, to me, was pure, delicious creepiness (if you like that kind of thing). A plane arrives at JFK and stops suddenly on the runway. The CDC is called in to investigate and finds all but 4 of the people on board dead. With no obvious cause of death. As CDC epidemiologists Ephraim Goodweather and Nora Martinez investigate, they discover a deadly and fast-acting new virus. And the 4 survivors are not as well as they seem. Then Abraham Setrakian, an old Holocaust survivor and NYC pawnbroker, sneaks into their lab and tells them to burn all of the bodies immediately, and this begins the (slow) realization by the scientists that vampires are real and a Master has arrived in New York. They join forces with Setrakian and an exterminator named Vasily Fet to fight the vampire virus.
Read more on The Strain and The Fall by Guillermo del Toro and Chuck Hogan…
…as a Marc Jacobs fan. Thanks to Kathy, who met me in the West Village today to visit BookMarc, Jacobs’s new stationery/bookstore across the street from Magnolia. We had a time and did a little economy boosting.
Back in March I reviewed the first book in Stieg Larsson’s Millennium Trilogy, The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo. I finished the rest of the trilogy earlier this month, and while neither of the later books quite lived up to everything that the first one had, overall I thought this trilogy was phenomenal. And it makes me very sad that Stieg Larsson is no longer with us, because I would have loved to read more Lisbeth Salander/Mikael Bloomkvist novels like he’d originally planned.
Read more on The Girl Who Played With Fire AND The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest…
I’ve really been in love with all of the books for adults I’ve read lately. Ian McEwan’s Atonement is no exception. I’ve still never seen the movie, and even though by now word of mouth has revealed a lot of the secrets of this book there is still a lot to be savored here.