I just came back from Boston, and while I was in the airport I saw a large freestanding display outside the entrance to Hudson Booksellers, the airport bookstore chain. The sign said, If you liked Fifty Shades of Grey, try these titles, and there beneath the Shades of Grey trilogy was a veritable smorgasbord of soft core porn. My first thought was, Summer’s over now. Let it go. Read the rest of this entry »

In case you were wondering, I’m having an especially good summer. My mother, Jeanne Ray (You know her novel, Calling Invisible Women, was published in May, and that it’s very funny, right? We’ve been over this already.) had a shoulder replacement a month ago and she is doing fantastically well, but I didn’t know that she would do so well and so I had cleared my calendar for the entire summer in order to be a good and helpful daughter.  Read the rest of this entry »

I’ve got pretty much one message these days and it’s this: my mother, Jeanne Ray, has a new book out, Calling Invisible Women, in which the heroine, the slightly beleaguered fifty-something named Clover Hobart, takes a believable cocktail of pharmaceutical drugs (a little hormone replacement therapy, some calcium supplement, a pinch of anti-depressant) and is rendered invisible. You would think that would be bad enough, but the really troubling part is that no one in her family notices she’s missing. Read the rest of this entry »

I know a bad book when I see one. I can usually tell in a matter of sentences, certainly in a matter of paragraphs, when I’m not going to like something. What’s even more frustrating than the bad books are the books that are just okay, the books that seem fine but never really amount to anything. Those are the books I read all the way to the end thinking that they’re going to get better, and when they don’t get better I feel frustrated that I wasted my time. Read the rest of this entry »

A couple of weeks ago I was in the storeroom at Parnassus, which is sort of a large, messy closet where the books that come into the store are first unboxed and entered into the computer system. It’s the best place to find Tristan Hickey, because he’s so good at the whole book receiving thing. I asked Tristan what he’d been reading and he told me he’d just finished Evelyn Waugh’s The Loved One and thought it was great. Read the rest of this entry »

I’ve been traveling these past ten days, and that means I’ve been getting a lot of reading done. I believe I am at least 10% smarter at 37,000 feet, but that may be because I know the phone isn’t going to ring and I don’t need to flip the laundry and I can’t check my email (well, that’s not entirely true: I was a little horrified to discover that I can now check email on American.) Of course I brought a lot of books with me. Read the rest of this entry »