Welcome to my little book blog. Here’s why I started it: I read a lot for work. Not books, unfortunately, but a lot of everything else — magazines, newspapers, websites, blogs, etc. (I track trends and have to stay on top of a lot of topics). As a result, I read a lot of reviews. While I have always followed book reviews from a range of sources and kept track of books that look interesting (and have come across many of my favorite books and authors this way), the pace has accelerated since I took this job.
Unfortunately, I don’t have time to read more than about 1% of the books that catch my eye. But that doesn’t stop me from ripping out, printing, bookmarking or otherwise saving these book titles and reviews. Rather than just let this motley crew of titles pile up, taunting me with the promise of great reading while I doze off during "Project Runway", I thought I would start a little blog so that other readers I know who don’t spend a portion of their days skimming Wired or More or EW.com or even The New York Times could maybe benefit from my efforts and find something good to read.
I got a very enthusiastic response from the 3 friends I ran this idea by (thanks SJS, TB and NL).
So here it is. The inaugural post of the Everyday I Write the Book blog. (Had to get my beloved 80s music referenced somehow). The title is purely aspirational; I have no intention of posting daily. But I do hope to post once or twice a week. One warning: I tend to follow modern fiction to the exclusion of almost every other kind of book: classics, mystery, sci-fi, historical fiction, politics, philosophy, etc. (I do like the occasional non-fiction read, but it’s pretty rare.) I am sucker for fiction centered around relationships, families, adolescence, and parenthood.
I also welcome and encourage book suggestions and comments from you — please, keep them coming! You can email them to me at [email protected] or click on the link on the right of this page.
To kick this off – here’s a new book I’ve been seeing around a lot lately: The Brambles, by Eliza Minot. I am intrigued by her because her sister Susan wrote Evening, one of my top 5 books of all time. There was also a recent NYT magazine article about the Minot family (one other sibling is a writer) and their complicated relationships with each other. From More magazine (July/August):
In the author’s lyrical second novel, a mother dies suddenly, a father falls ill, and three grown, far-flung siblings learn an astonishing secret. But they also experience a midlife commonplace: all feel compelled to take a look at what they have made of themselvess — and these little revelations are where Minot’s writing really shines.
And Entertainment Weekly says: "Eliza Minot doesn’t pull off the lame family mystery in The Brambles, but she does capture all the craziness and fleeting beauty of modern domestic life."
Looks pretty good to me.
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