Archives - Weekly Update

My car, which is parked in the driveway as Greg continues a Land Rover reno project in the garage (as in, he took a car apart and is rebuilding it), is covered in pollen. I feel like I need to dust it. But in better outdoor news, the lettuce plants have left the kitchen and finally are outside. May there be no rabbits in the area!

Spring is definitely fighting winter here in the northeast. Yesterday, temps were in the 20s. But hey, we did not get the snow that our colleague Jenni saw in Ohio! But the lettuce plants will be harbored in the kitchen for a little while longer. It is supposed to be 83 degrees next week; it is a very mixed-up time of year! I am more than ready to be out and about.

Last night, we hosted our third "Bookaccino Live" Book Group event with Kim Michele Richardson, the author of THE BOOK WOMAN OF TROUBLESOME CREEK, as our guest. It also was nice to have four of our readers participating live with their questions. We heard from so many readers about this program, and I wanted to share some of their comments.

I had a week where if typing was a sport, I would have won a medal. A gold one! I was juggling multiple projects, and the most exercise I got was when I moved my desk from a sitting to a standing position. I attended a couple of publisher previews and came up with a great idea. When watching those, I should ride the exercise bike in my office, but instead I was taking notes on one computer while watching on another. If only words typed equaled steps.

There have been a lot of projects that had been shuffled to the backburner that simmered and got done this week. Austin created a really fabulous new opener for the “Bookreporter Talks To” series. He had started doing a “cold open” on these a couple of months ago, where he would pull a really salient part of the interview before the opening theme. Now he has created a gem of an opener that follows the cold open. And he also put together a new outro that you can see on the latest “Bookaccino Live” video. We spent a day shooting the books for that segment back in January and just got time to edit it now. I love the way both of them came together. I hope you like them too.

This warmer sunny weather has been such a treat. My office window at the house overlooks the street, and many people are out walking every day. We have a lot going on, these days at Bookreporter, so I am "walking vicariously," if such a thing is possible. That said, our fingers have been flying on keyboards this week, and we have lots to share with you!

Yesterday I went to the launch event for The Woman in the Window, based on A. J. Finn's bestselling book. It was star-studded, with Amy Adams, Julianne Moore, Wyatt Russell, Anthony Mackie and Fred Hechinger, as well as director Joe Wright, sharing their thoughts on the filming. It was the first time that Amy and Julianne had worked together, which was a fun nugget to learn. This movie has been a long time in the making! It was originally done for Fox 2000, the studio that was sold to Disney, which in turn sold the film to Netflix, where it will drop on Friday, May 14th. You can watch the trailer here. It's very creepy!

Happy April! For the record, I will take the April showers if they bring the May flowers. Today the temperatures moved into the "more chilly than I would like" zone. Yes, the lettuce plants are still in containers in the kitchen, so it does not freeze.

Last weekend was another great reading weekend. My friend Nancy Simpson-Brice, a bookseller from Book Vault in Iowa, suggested that I read THE PHOTOGRAPHER by Mary Dixie Carter, which releases on May 25th. It’s a brisk psychological thriller about a young woman who photographs the birthday party of a child from a privileged family, and then insinuates herself into their lives. But, as you might expect from a suspense novel, she has a ton of issues. Readers spend a lot of time inside her head, and it’s one place full of dark imagination. It will be a Bookreporter.com Bets On pick as it is a total escape read, which we all need these days!