Which are your go-to cookbooks? Name up to five.
November 20, 2009
November 20, 2009
This is the fourth Friday that I have been traveling. It’s been a different city every week, thus I have been writing you from various hotel rooms and airport lounges. Today I am tapping away as I sit on a chaise in my hotel that feels very swanky and chic, and reminds me somehow of film stars in the '50s. I have a wonderful view of Philadelphia out my window, and I am enjoying watching the city come alive as I type. This is a “repeat hotel,” meaning I have been here before. Traveling as much as I do, I love it when I repeat hotels that I like. It just makes it easier. I remember where the pool is and how to get to the convention center. It saves time. For amusement, yesterday when I plugged in my GPS to drive here, it first told me it would take 20 hours to arrive. I thought Philly had moved until I realized that “Fiona” (as I call the British chick who chirps my directions out) thought I still was in Miami! She needed a few moments to reorient.
Editorial content for Past Imperfect
Book
About the Book
“Damian Baxter was a friend of mine at Cambridge. We met around the time when I was doing the Season at the end of the Sixties. I introduced him to some of the girls. They took him up, and we ran about together in London for a while….”
Nearly 40 years later, the narrator hates Damian Baxter and would gladly forget their disastrous last encounter. But if it is pleasant to hear from an old friend, it is more interesting to hear from an old enemy, and so he accepts an invitation from the rich and dying Damian, who begs him to track down the past girlfriend whose anonymous letter claimed he had fathered a child during that ruinous debutante season.
The search takes the narrator back to the extraordinary world of swinging London, where aristocratic parents schemed to find suitable matches for their daughters while someone was putting hash in the brownies at a ball at Madame Tussaud’s. It was a time when everything seemed to be changing --- and it was, but not always quite as expected.
PAST IMPERFECT © Copyright 2011 by Julian Fellowes. Reprinted with permission by St. Martin’s Griffin. All rights reserved.
Editorial content for Lit: A Memoir
Book
About the Book
THE LIAR’S CLUB brought to vivid, indelible life Mary Karr's hardscrabble Texas childhood. CHERRY, her account of her adolescence, "continued to set the literary standard for making the personal universal" (Entertainment Weekly). Now LIT follows the self-professed blackbelt sinner's descent into the inferno of alcoholism and madness --- and to her astonishing resurrection.
Karr's longing for a solid family seems secure when her marriage to a handsome, Shakespeare-quoting blueblood poet produces a son they adore. But she can't outrun her apocalyptic past. She drinks herself into the same numbness that nearly devoured her charismatic but troubled mother, reaching the brink of suicide. A hair-raising stint in "The Mental Marriott," with an oddball tribe of gurus and saviors, awakens her to the possibility of joy and leads her to an unlikely faith. Not since Saint Augustine cried, "Give me chastity, Lord --- but not yet!" has a conversion story rung with such dark hilarity.
LIT is about getting drunk and getting sober; becoming a mother by letting go of a mother; learning to write by learning to live. Written with Karr's relentless honesty, unflinching self-scrutiny, and irreverent, lacerating humor, it is a truly electrifying story of how to grow up --- as only Mary Karr can tell it.
LIT: A Memoir © Copyright 2011 by Mary Karr. Reprinted with permission by Harper Perennial. All rights reserved.
November 13, 2009
I am in Miami for the Miami Book Fair, one of my favorite events of the year. This is my fifth year attending this wonderfully jam-packed weekend of author talks and book conversation. My schedule started with a dinner last night with panelists for the Day of Comics and Graphic Novels Education program, and I am jotting this note before I head over to that since I know this day will be hectic. I actually hopped into town on Wednesday to score some much-needed reading time by the pool yesterday. The way I see it, reading is wonderful, but reading by the pool is just over the top. And I had a HUGE stack of reading to do, thus I needed a big pool to sit by --- and my hotel has a 110’ one. And yes, this does make sense to a reader who is a swimmer.
Do you always consider the price when buying your books? Which of the following best describes how you buy your books?
November 6, 2009, 574 voters
