Yesterday, Oprah Winfrey confirmed reports that she will be canceling her television program in 2011. This will leave a void in the lives of millions who watch Oprah fawn over celebrities and admonish less-than-truthful memoirists on a daily basis. That stretch, that yawning stretch between four and five pm, what will come of it? How [...]
On The Morning News today, V.L. Hartmann has a piece about Joan Didion’s resonance with a new generation of writers, many of them women: For some of us, mimicking Joan Didion has become the height of literary ambition, and not just her sentences. “Goodbye to All That” is a jumping-off point, California will fall short [...]
You didn’t think a Monday could pass without some good stuff happening on the internet, did you? Today, we have an eclectic mix of the good, the bad and the incredibly strange from around the web. Dig in: Paste Magazine is running a whole bunch of best-of lists for the past decade, including Best Memes, [...]
Today is the 115 birthday of Vroman’s Bookstore. The store was founded by A.C. Vroman on November 14, 1894. While we’ve moved locations once, we have been continuously operated and independently owned ever since. I don’t think I have to tell anyone what an accomplishment that is. It’s a testament to the incredible community here [...]
I’m not sure why but I’m a little bit down on the typical static blog at the moment (And, no, the irony of writing that on just such a blog isn’t lost on me). Every morning I open my Google Reader and see upwards of 500 unread posts, and I die a little bit. It’s [...]
The internet is all about book jackets today, and why shouldn’t it be. It’s November now, and the weather is turning cool. Books need their jackets, and so do you. Of course, it’s low-80s outside in Pasadena, so…On to the links! The Second Pass links to an upcoming show at the UCB Theater in New [...]
No, that’s not the name of a chapter from a Michael Pollan book, though it could be. In this short video, we again visit with Sherri Gallentine, as well as drop in on my wife Edan as she prepares to cook dinner. Click here to view the embedded video. [Note: the theory about animals that [...]
You may know Sherri Gallentine from her various guest posts on the Vroman’s Blog (many of them culinary in nature) or from seeing her around the store, but did you know that she raises chickens in her backyard in Altadena? I thought it would be enlightening to visit her backyard chicken farm and see how [...]
This Sunday, Jonathan Safran Foer, author of Everything is Illuminated and Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, will present his new book Eating Animals at Vroman’s Bookstore. Eating Animals is an exploration of how and why he became a vegetarian, and it investigates factory farming, modern slaughterhouses, industrial agriculture and much more. It’s a more personal [...]
It has been an insane week around here, and tomorrow is Halloween. This year, I’ll be going as Glenn Beck dressed like a communist (Turns out he’s supposed to be a communist…who knew?). Just kidding, I’m not going as anything. I’m actually kind of a Halloween downer, and that, coupled with the insane past few [...]
