Sherri Gallentine is one of Vroman’s Book Buyers. You may remember that she and her husband Rich hosted our Bottega Favorita Challenge dinner. This time, Sherri took on the new cookbook from the notoriously challenging Thomas Keller, Ad Hoc at Home. Keller’s last cookbook, about cooking sous vide, was too tough for many home cooks, [...]
Paria Kooklan writes the incredibly hilarious blog Stuck in the Safety Net. As you will soon learn, she’s at work on a novel. She was good enough to tend the shop while I was away: I recently started working on a novel about an Iranian-American family living in Southern California. Come to think of it, [...]
It’s going to be a light week here next week, as I’m going to be rocking the Governor’s Conference on Women down in Long Beach. Vroman’s is the official bookstore of the conference, and I’m scheduled to be down there for the first few days of the week. If you’re going to the conference, be [...]
Why is it that whenever someone posts something critical, or at least skeptical, of “THE FUTURE” everyone in the comments section has to take time out of their busy days to call that person a Luddite or a fool or to gleefully taunt the original poster that he’ll be out of the business in five [...]
A lot has happened since I last posted about what’s happening on the internet. Before we get into that, though, I must mention this Saturday’s Bookswap, co-hosted by Vroman’s and Goodreads. What is a bookswap, you ask? It’s an opportunity to bring in a book you read (or several books you read) and pick up [...]
Last week, I posted my list of favorite books of the last ten years. On Facebook, where this blog is syndicated, one reader commented that she hadn’t heard of the books on my list (other than The Corrections) but that she couldn’t understand why someone would want to read a book that reflected their own [...]
The Nobel Prize for Literature will be awarded tomorrow. I’ll be celebrating, as I always do, by eating a molten chocolate cake with marshmallow filling cooked in a mold the shape of Saul Bellow’s head. I call it Mallow Bellow. But seriously, nobody knows who will win this year’s Nobel Prize, though Book Fox has [...]
The FCC has decreed that bloggers must disclose whenever they receive a promotional copy of a book that they’ve blogged about (or, one would suppose a DVD or what have you). This is theoretically to prevent payola scams and the like, but the fact that it’s targeted at bloggers means reviving the old “who gets [...]
Monday’s are always busy. Here are the things you need to know about today: The National Book Foundation announced its “5 Under 35″ list today, and among those honored are Ceridwen Dovey and Josh Weil. Check out the full list here. The Huffington Post launched its new books section today. It’s very busy, but then [...]
Helen DeWitt, writing about the inherent flaws of The Millions’ best of the millennium series (via Lee Konstantinou): I got an email a while back from The Millions asking me to nominate my top 5 books for the new millennium, with the following constraints: they must be fiction, they must be available in English. The [...]
