Archives - Weekly Update

The windows are open, and the air conditioners are off. This really feels nice! Inhale. Exhale.

On Monday, it will be 22 years since The Book Report Network (TBRN) launched with one site on AOL. I am so grateful to our readers who subscribe to this newsletter and those who visit our websites, giving us the opportunity to do what we do, discovering books and authors to share with you. Through the years we have a built a network of readers, as much as we have built a network of websites. I love hearing from you and am happy that so many of you have become friends. Our staff is “lean and mean (well, actually they are really nice, but you get what I am saying here), and I am grateful to them for all their hard work week in and week out. Tom, Nicole, Rebecca, Greg and Jenni bring their best game to the table, and all strive to get every detail right every single week. I am so proud to work with them.

Do I remember a day when there was no humidity? Not sure. What a sultry summer this has been, with a collection of rainy weekends. I am ready to ask for a summer do-over! Luckily, weather has no impact on my reading.

Last weekend was a terrific reading weekend. I finished AN ACCIDENTAL CORPSE by Helen A. Harrison, and loved the period details and the brisk storytelling. Next up, I started Jodi Picoult’s A SPARK OF LIGHT, which releases on October 2nd. Jodi is never one to shy away from a controversial topic, and here her story involves a shooter at a women’s reproductive health services clinic. This gunman takes hostages, among them a doctor, a nurse, a wounded woman, a pro-life protestor --- and the 15-year-old daughter of the police hostage negotiator. The book is structured to tell the story backwards through the hours of the day, and as it unwinds we learn why each of these people were at the clinic on that particular day. I am 100 pages in and am looking forward to reading more of it this weekend.

It was so steamy this week. I felt like we lived in the Deep South. I am waiting for Spanish moss to start growing. The dinner plate hibiscus are in full bloom, as you can see above. It’s been sheer bliss swimming at night; the upside to a hot summer is that the pool water is 85 degrees. On Wednesday night, I was paddling around the lighted pool, and the pool light went out. My first thought: Tom and the boys are playing a trick on me. My second thought: Wow, someone finally remembered to turn the lights off and hit the pool light too. Then I realized that the pool light bulb burned out. Cory has an idea that we can get one that turns the pool colors; I just want to see the other end when I am kicking around!

On Wednesday afternoon, I headed to Avalon, NJ for one of my favorite events: a night with readers at the Avalon Public Library. I was introduced to this library by two fabulous women who read this newsletter, Deb Martinelli and Jen Gensemer, when they first invited me to speak at the Stone Harbor Women’s Club in 2016. Last year, the event moved to the library where we again found ourselves this year.