This is the Brené Brown book best suited to the beach, and since you need to read at least one Brené Brown book in your lifetime, go ahead and throw it in your swim bag. Brown is a researcher and a storyteller: while she’s educating you about vulnerability and courage, you’ll find yourself thinking she’d make a great girlfriend. Funny, insightful, and wise.
From the publisher: “Only a farmer could delve so deeply into the origins of food, and only a writer of Wendell Berry’s caliber could convey it with such conviction and eloquence. Long before Whole Foods organic produce was available at your local supermarket, Berry was farming with the purity of food in mind. In recognition of that influence, Michael Pollan here offers an introduction to this wonderful collection. This collection joins bestsellers The Omnivore’s Dilemma and Animal, Vegetable, Miracle as essential reading for anyone who cares about what they eat. The essays address such concerns as: How does organic measure up against locally grown? What are the differences between small and large farms, and how does that affect what you put on your dinner table? What can you do to support sustainable agriculture?”
Read With Jenna picked this for a Today Show Book Club Pick and the New York Times called it “literary sunshine.” From the publisher: “When Astrid Strick witnesses a school bus accident in the center of town, it jostles loose a repressed memory from her young parenting days decades earlier. Suddenly, Astrid realizes she was not quite the parent she thought she’d been to her three, now-grown children. Astrid’s youngest son is drifting and unfocused, making parenting mistakes of his own. Her daughter is pregnant yet struggling to give up her own adolescence. And her eldest seems to measure his adult life according to standards no one else shares. But who gets to decide, so many years later, which long-ago lapses were the ones that mattered? Emma Straub’s unique alchemy of wisdom, humor, and insight come together in a deeply satisfying story about adult siblings, aging parents, high school boyfriends, middle school mean girls, the lifelong effects of birth order, and all the other things that follow us into adulthood, whether we like them to or not.”
From the publisher: “As the book opens in 2001, it is the evening of sixteen-year-old Melody’s coming of age ceremony in her grandparents’ Brooklyn brownstone. Watched lovingly by her relatives and friends, making her entrance to the music of Prince, she wears a special custom-made dress. Sixteen years earlier, that very dress was measured and sewn for a different wearer: Melody’s mother, for her own ceremony– a celebration that ultimately never took place. Unfurling the history of Melody’s parents and grandparents to show how they all arrived at this moment, Woodson considers not just their ambitions and successes but also the costs, the tolls they’ve paid for striving to overcome expectations and escape the pull of history. As it explores sexual desire and identity, ambition, gentrification, education, class and status, and the life-altering facts of parenthood, Red at the Bone most strikingly looks at the ways in which young people must so often make long-lasting decisions about their lives–even before they have begun to figure out who they are and what they want to be.” Add the audio Whispersync narration, read by Jacqueline Woodson, Quincy Tyler Bernstine, Peter Francis James, Shayna Small, and Bahni Turpin.
From the publisher: “The story of a life determined, enhanced, and defined in equal measure by unforgettable people, the love of tales well told, and a passion for food. In other words, the stuff of the best literature. The journey begins with Reichl’s mother, the notorious food-poisoner known for-evermore as the Queen of Mold, and moves on to the fabled Mrs. Peavey, onetime Baltimore socialite millionaress, who, for a brief but poignant moment, was retained as the Reichls’ maid. Then we are introduced to Monsieur du Croix, the gourmand, who so understood and yet was awed by this prodigious child at his dinner table that when he introduced Ruth to the soufflé, he could only exclaim, “What a pleasure to watch a child eat her first soufflé!” Then, fast-forward to the politically correct table set in Berkeley in the 1970s, and the food revolution that Ruth watched and participated in as organic became the norm. Tender at the Bone is a remembrance of Ruth Reichl’s childhood into young adulthood, redolent with the atmosphere, good humor, and angst of a sensualist coming-of-age.”
Happy Friday, readers. Today, the 19th anniversary of 9/11, is a day to remember, in the midst of a trying
Today’s guest has a story that sounds like the beginning of a juicy historical fiction novel. As a teenager, Liz
This contemporary romance debut is going to make you hungry. Moving from NYC to Ithaca, Dominican Republic immigrant Nesto gives himself six months to make a real go of his Afro-Caribbean food truck business. Youth services librarian Jude is trying to get funding for a library bookmobile as a way of getting services to more rural areas. Neither man can afford the distraction but some chances are worth taking. The food descriptions are amazing, as is Nesto’s philosophy of food as a way of maintaining cultural roots and nourishing his community in the US. You’ll wish you could get in on the meals he makes for Jude, too. (Open door.)
Happy Friday, readers! I have to confess, the weekend vibes are already in full effect at my house. We’ve been
For years, I’ve been dreaming of hosting a longform reader event for our community—a gathering where you can get together
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