What are you up to this weekend? After a September heat wave followed by a string of rainy days, I am looking forward to some glorious fall weather, and getting to hang with one of my college kids. Maybe I’ll finally finish The Power Broker (I’m getting so close!) and make some progress in this classic I started early this week; I’ve been meaning to read it for decades but I’m having a hard time building momentum.
Fall Book Preview
The MMD team is still flying high from last week’s Fall Book Preview! We shared a sneak peek into this year’s event on What Should I Read Next that includes the first three books in our literary and contemporary fiction category. If this excerpt has you longing for more book talk, you can access your own copy of this year’s Fall Book Preview and the Unboxing replay immediately.
My favorite finds from around the web:
I offer gift links for articles whenever possible (you may still need to create an account with the publication); if there’s no gift link and you’re not a subscriber, check to see if your library carries the publication or use a bookmarking service.
What Pride and Prejudice Tells Us About British History, Class, and Women’s Leisure Time. (Literary Hub) “To read Pride and Prejudice is to enter a world where marriage is as tied to property and social status as it is to romantic ideas about love and desire.”
Celebrate love at any age with these 10 seasoned romance novels. (MMD) Because people older than 35 deserve love too.
A New Exhibition on Marie Antoinette Re-Examines Her Cake-Eating Legacy. (Harper’s Bazaar) At the V&A: “Archival research is placed alongside an exploration of the design, fashion, and wider culture to which Marie Antoinette proved influential. A wide range of media will be exhibited to retell the ill-fated queen’s story and ask visitors whether we should reconsider how we perceive such a complex and widely misunderstood figure in history.”
Nordstrom Rack again has this great cable knit sweater at a great price! (XXS–XXL) Mine is in taupe (sadly not available now) and it’s an excellent summer-to-fall transition piece. I’m 5’9″ and wear a small.
How Wikipedia survives while the rest of the internet breaks. (The Verge) “A 2019 study published in Nature found that Wikipedia’s most polarizing articles — eugenics, global warming, Leonardo DiCaprio — are the highest quality, because each side keeps adding citations in support of their views. Wikipedia: a machine for turning conflict into bibliographies.”
How Samin Nosrat Learned to Love the Recipe. (The New Yorker) Inspired by her new cookbook Good Things, a fascinating conversation about (in my words) how recipes are bossy at their core, and how that imperative is a great gift to the home cook. Innovating is hard, decision making is hard—but recipes make it easier, and a good recipe makes it delicious, too.
Eight years after ‘If We Were Villains,’ M.L. Rio hits the road. (BookPage) “I wanted to prove that a book about something ‘low brow’ could still have a lot of the elements of high art.” Interesting profile of Rio, complete with behind-the-scenes details about her new novel, Hot Wax.
San Francisco’s last video rental store tucked away in Noe Valley neighborhood. (CBS News) Will told me about this link, summing it up as: we miss browsing! “There’s been a real resurgence in tangible media….There’s also hunger for people who grew up with social media, who grew up with the Internet, to actually have in person interactions.”
Craftsy’s End-of-Summer Deal is almost over—and you don’t want to miss it! New crafters can still get a 1-year Premium Membership for only $0.99, through Sunday, September 28. This has proved popular with MMD readers not just for the cooking, crafting, photography, and home decor, but for the options found under “writing” like journaling, hand lettering, memoir writing, and fiction writing.
5 ways search engines enhance my everyday reading life. (MMD) Shannan shares five things she loves to find out more about while she’s reading.
Is This the End of the Dictionary? (The Atlantic gift link) “Call it the paradox of the modern dictionary. We’re in a golden age for the study and appreciation of words—a time of “meta awareness” of language, as one lexicographer put it to me. Dictionaries are more accessible than ever, available on your laptop or phone…But these advances are also strangling the business of the dictionary.”
The October 2025 MMD Book Club pick is The Correspondent by Virginia Evans. I hope you’ll join us for a discussion with the author on October 23!
I’ve Written About Loads of Scams. This One Almost Got Me. (New York Times gift link) “I should be able to spot a scam in under 16 seconds, I thought — but 16 minutes? I wanted to know why this scam seemed to work so much better than others.”
From Cocoa Puffs to Cheerios — How Cereal Stopped Being Fun. (Food & Wine) “When I was a kid at the grocery store, my favorite part of the trip was when my mom would let my brothers and me run loose down the cereal aisle to each choose which box we wanted.” Now I have to know: what was your favorite cereal growing up?
Don’t miss these posts:
31 mystery novels avid readers recommend again and again. Calling all mystery readers!
The favorite mugs I’ll be reaching for during Serious Cozy Drink Season (and all year round). When it comes to great mugs, there’s always room for one more.
Assigned reading we actually enjoyed. Required reading doesn’t have to be boring!
Have a great weekend!
14 comments
I have finished David Wroblewski’s “Familiaris,” very long, but not boring. It’s the pre-story to “The Story of Edgar Sawtelle.”
Fruity Pebbles was my favorite growing up! To this day, I avoid eating it unless I am taking a trip on the coast; trusting that my activity on the beach will burn all that excess carbs!
When I was little (for reference I’m 49) my mom was pretty liberal with cereal and I remember my sisters and I loved Sugar Pops. But when I asked for the cereal that’s basically chocolate chip cookies she cracked down and we we were limited to cereals like Cheerios (Honey Nut her outer limit for sugar), Rice Krispies, Chex. My favorite “fancy” cereal was Cracklin’ Oat Bran, and I also remember when Special K debuted the version with the freeze-dried strawberries – that was big in our household!
I got to choose whatever cereal I liked when I visited my grandparents! I vividly remember that my brother and I once ate an entire box of Froot Loops in one sitting.
I just finished the Correspondent and it was so good. Books of letters are my favorite. This will be a re-read for sure.
Lucky Charms was THE go-to cereal in our house. 🙂
Froot Loops all the way! We ate it with milk for breakfast, but ate it dry with our fingers while we watched cartoons. Imagine all that sugar and carbs! Junk! Then my mother “got religion” (in the form of Prevention Health magazine) and no more Froot Loops. We were forced to eat wheat germ with bananas, yogurt, oatmeal or cream of wheat. (I ended up a big oatmeal fan. With brown sugar and maple syrup, of course!)
I adore The Correspondent. Can’t wait to read it again.
About a past post, the one on Assigned Reading in school: Boy, they really tried to kill reading joy. I was reading voraciously anyway, outside of school, as well as reading classics on my own, but MY choices were a lot better! School: Come on—Lord of the Flies, Canterbury Tales, Shakespeare, Gulliver’s Travels, Moby Dick, Brave New World, Wuthering Heights! Some were “interesting” but hardly enjoyable! My own reading: Jane Austen, Jane Eyre, Tess of the D’Urbervilles, Vanity Fair, Doctor Zhivago, Great Expectations, The Three Musketeers, 84 Charing Cross Rd, Arms and the Man, Giants in the Earth, Cyrano de Bergerac, Around the World in 80 Days, Frankenstein, Gone With the Wind, Rebecca….and I loved them so much!!
Even in the 70s, my mom only let me have low-sugar multigrain cereals like Cheerios. Sometimes corn flakes. So I usually preferred when she made hot cereal with maple syrup or made myself toast with jam, which were both for some reason allowed, even though sugary cereals weren’t.
Anne, can you share how and when you wear short-sleeved sweaters? Maybe it’s where I live (Hudson Valley in a drafty old house), but when it’s cold enough to wear a sweater, i need long sleeves. I really like the sweater you shared and another similar one there, but I can’t imagine how I would wear them.
Maybe the 70s were a time of more restriction around cereal than we both imply, Deirdre. I mean, we ate carob back then after all! LOL
We could only choose non-sugary cereal (back in the 70s) unless we were on vacation. Then, I’d trade in my cornflakes for Frosted Flakes. 🙂
My favorite cereal was BooBerries, and I still get nostalgic when it hits the shelves in the Fall. My mom let us pick any cereal at the store and didn’t mention the sugar content at all. It was probably because cereal was about the only processed food we had. Most of our food came from our farm and garden.
We didn’t have cereal on a regular basis when I was growing up and if we did, it was usually the store brand of Honey Nut Cheerios. But when I spent a week at my grandparents’ every summer my grandma would take me grocery shopping and let me pick out whatever cereal I wanted, which was usually Reese’s Puffs or Rice Krispie Treats!
My parents didn’t believe in sugar cereals. But every birthday we would get our favorite sugar cereal wrapped up as a present. I loved Fruit Loops!
Ahhh…the joy of childhood in a box for me was also Cheerios! And the price has been staggering this last year or two, but I’m glad to see the price starting to come down a bit because it is my lifetime favorite. I have also started to enjoy Honey Nut Cheerios more. I hate to say I sometimes buy the store brand because of the price. But nothing beats Cheerios in the classic yellow box.
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