Julie and Julia caught my attention when I saw it mentioned by Amy of Beauty Joy Food, who is one of my favorite food bloggers, because she often includes travel and social commentary among the recipes and food porn pictures.

The book, based on the author’s blog, is about a young married woman who has become a career temp, and decides, seemingly on a whim, to cook every recipe in Julia Child’s Mastering the Art of French Cookery in a year. Described within these pages, with much wryness and just enough pathos to be interesting, are the details of the attempt, intertwined with vignettes that may or may not actually have occurred in Ms. Child’s life. If you’ve ever succumbed to tears when faced with the prospect of deboning a duck, or wondered what, exactly, one DOES with consomme, this book is for you – and even if your idea of cooking is pressing 3:00 START on the microwave, this is an entertaining read for it’s own sake.

A warning though – parts will make you hungry.
And parts will take your appetite completely away.

Danielle Steel

I’m embarrassed to admit that I read this. In my own defense, it came as a book club selection I forgot to cancel, and since it was here, I read it. The story, that of a widower and a widow connecting with the help of their handyman, is pretty formulaic, and the characters are extremely two-dimensional, but I really liked the descriptions of the houses and the main character’s yacht.

This is the sort of book one only reads when locked in a bathroom or hospital waiting room, with no other reading material.

Gillian Stokes

My friend Sky sent me this beautiful little book, and it’s quickly become a personal treasure. It’s not the sort of thing I’d ever have picked up on my own (I’d have looked at it, been intrigued, and then moved on to the fiction section), but as a gift, I appreciate it immensely.

While the text is helpful, both in a common-sense advice sort of way, and as the subject of many meditations, the quotations and art are what hooked me first, and what I love about this book is that I can pick it up anywhere, re-read it, leave it for a while, and then come back, and still get something new from it.

Thank you, Sky, for sharing this treasure.

Lynne Truss

Much fuss was made about this book a couple of years ago when it was freshly printed. It’s billed as a “zero tolerance approach to punctuation,” but the American version, at least, spends fully half the text discussing the apostrophe.

For a grammar book, it’s amusing, and author Truss has a readable, if sometimes snobbish, voice.
Grammar mavens should definitely check it out, but real writers are probably better off sticking with Strunk and White.

Rebecca Reisert

It’s The Scottish Play from the point of view of the youngest of the weird sisters, a young woman who shocks her elders by bathing twice a week, and doesn’t care for robbing the dead on the battlefield. Has all the requisite romance and heroism, as well as a fairy-tale ending. Cute, but unsubstantial.

Mary Sheepshanks

Mary Sheepshanks usually writes manor house stories laced with humor. In Off Balance, however, the humor is sadly lacking, and it ends up being an unexceptional story of relationships (mainly dysfunctional) in a country house in Scotland. Lovely scenery, depressing story.

David Sosnowski

I always enjoy a good vampire story, so when I saw Vamped staring at me from the library shelf, I had to take it home.

In this alternate future, the only humans left are farm-raised for uber-rich vampires (all the others have been vamped already), and a single box of Count Chocula goes for several hundred dollars on ebay. Then Marty, an eighty year old vampire, and the person who was responsible for the vamping of the world, finds a five year old mortal child on the run from one of the farms, and instead of killing her, or vamping her into a Screamer (as other child-vamps are called), he decides to raise her as his daughter.

Plot twists and romance are woven through the story, but the parts that I enjoyed most were the descriptions of societal changes – grocery stores selling mainly bleach and laundry detergent, and apartments built without toilets, for example.

by Ahdaf Soueif

Ahdaf Soueif’s The Map of Love is a multi-generational story that takes place in both New York and Cairo.

A woman named Isabel meets a famous Egyptian conductor at a party in Manhattan, and he offers to give her names of friends in Cairo, knowing she’s headed there to research a project. She’s found some old letters from her grandmother, and wants to trace them, and learn her family’s story.

The conductor sends her to his sister, and together the woman piece together the story of Lady Winterbourne, and her romance with Sharif Pasha al Barudi in turn-of-the-century (19th to 20th) Egypt.

It’s a great love story, as well as an interesting portrait of modern Egypt.

Author: John R. Stilgoe

In the opening paragraph of Outside Lies Magic, author John Stilgoe urges the reader to go outside, take a walk, and pay attention to everything.

And he means everything – everything from the architectural style of barns to the pattern of coffee-shop locations, to the pick-up times on blue mailboxes.

This book challenges us to go outside, explore our neighborhoods, and find the magic in everyday things.