Archives - Weekly Update

I am asking my annual question: “Why does July fly by, while January has the same number of days, but it feels like we cram a year into it?” For me, it’s also a blur of cake the last week of the month as my sons have birthdays five days apart. I have made two yellow cakes with chocolate frosting!

It has been a busy week as I had two days of meetings in the city. I know, how brilliant was I to schedule these for the coldest and snowiest week of the year? I am not sure who in the city shovels the corners, but the narrow passages leave a lot to be desired. At least the frozen street meant that I was not trudging through slush on Thursday like I did on Tuesday. I am not averse to cold weather, but it has been a while since I found a need to pull out scarves, hats and gloves.

Who has their books lined up for the snowstorm or whatever unusual weather pattern seems to be planned for across the country? The weather forecasters have been beyond excited about the pending storm. Even if you are not in the path of snow, there is talk about shockingly freezing temperatures. The images of the green iguanas falling off the trees in Florida said a lot this week!

On Thursday afternoon, there was an Outlook outage that was ill-timed as we were pulling together plans for this update. It took me a couple of hours to realize that no mail had come in for a while. I am sure that some messages went into the ether and never will make it my way!

On Wednesday afternoon, after our first “Bookaccino Live” event of the year, we turned off the camera and went to questions from the audience as we always do. It ended up being a lively conversation for about 45 minutes, where readers asked Tom (Editorial Director Tom, not Husband Tom) and I questions about books, authors and review coverage. We moved briskly from topic to topic.

Afterwards we got a number of really lovely notes from attendees who appreciated our candor in describing how we select what to cover --- and so much more that goes into our thinking about what runs on the site. We definitely have honed what we do over the past (almost) 30 years.

We all had a brilliant two-week break. For me, it was lovely to move through days without a schedule. There were great family memories made, visits with good friends, football...and, yes, lots of reading time in front of the fire, though there always could be more.

I finished reading RUN FOR YOUR LIFE, CALLIE KINGMAN by Alli Frank and Asha Youmans, which was exactly the right book to wind down with over the break. I found myself smiling and laughing as I read it. We have our review below.