I love your blog and all the book recommendations. I just read The Good Earth, A million little pieces, The Da Vinci Code and just started Ivy Chronicles (chick lit). So many books, so little time!

reading “sore winners” by john powers (la weekly columnist) about the bush administration and pop culture. really like it. next up is “the big oyster” by mark kurlansky about the history of new york through the history of, yes, the oyster. read his book “salt” and loved it, but never read “cod.” (sense a theme?) matteo got me the book for my birthday a couple of months ago so Im really behind.

My mom was raving over “The Red Tent” and it sounded very interesting. Have you heard of that one? That Jacob got around — and I always focused on the Leah and Rachel part. Now, I’m gonna have to read it.

I’m currently reading “Interpreter of Maladies” by Jhumpa Lahiri (finally) and I just finished “Don’t Get Too Comfortable” by David Rakoff.

I’m reading The Poisonwood Bible by Barbara Kingsolver, Shirley Jackson’s short story collection The Lottery, and Thomas Pynchon’s short story collection Slow Learner. All very good.
I LOVE The Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood and Little Alters Everywhere by Rebecca Wells. GREAT chick lit, highly recommend these books. (The movie did Ya-Ya no justice whatsoever.)
Ooh, and Patty Jane’s House of Curl by Lorna Landvik.
AND She Flew the Coop by Michael Lee West.
I have a thing for southern chick lit, if you haven’t guessed. These books make me wish I grew up with a drawl, elocution classes, and cousins with names like “Malain” and “Baylor”.

I read The Red Tent and enjoyed it very much. I highly reccomend it. Yeah that Jacob is an old school playa.

Right now I’m reading Gauguin: Letters to His Wife and Friends edited by Maurice Malingue. Some of these are very funny.

I just started Anansi Boys by Neil Gaiman. He could be my new favorite author

I finished reading The West’s Last Chance by Tony Blankley. It’s OK, but parts of it have some excellent points. It’s about the growing and disturbing influence of Islamic radicals here and abroad. I got the book as a birthday present.

I am nearly done with Prep by Curtis Sittenfeld. It is excellent! I read a book a week — the next book I have lined up is We Thought You Would Be Prettier by Laurie Notaro. I am going through what I would call “My Intelligent Chick Lit Phase” — which means no Shopoholic Books for me! A book I read a while ago, that you may like is Cynthia Kaplan’s Why I Am Like This It is a collection of personal essays, by a Jewish woman around our age. (Naturally, I read a ton of personal essays/humor short stories.) If you like, I can loan it to you.

Randi, I loved WHY I’M LIKE THIS. Loved loved loved it. I even lent it to my mom.

Have you read A Girl’s Guide to Hunting and Fishing by Melissa Bank? Her latest book is Wonderspot. I thought they both were excellent. I liked the way her first book was pieced together, going backwards and forwards in time.

I’m overdue for a Virtual Book Club post, but I did love Red Tent and also Wonderspot, which i’ll be reviewing in my next one, probably next week.
Also– The Chosen, The Killer Angels.

I second the recommendation for Jhumpa Lahiri’s “Interpreter of Maladies”. I also loved “The Namesake” by the same author.

Loved Curtis Sittenfeld’s “Prep” too.

I just finished reading Ruth Reichl’s “Tender at the Bone”, and “Comfort Me With Apples”, and recently picked up a copy of her newest book “Garlic & Sapphires”.

Next on my chick lit list is “The Year of Yes”

I’m still reading some of last month’s selections and plenty more ’stuff.

1.) Quite miserable applications for a job we have available as a analyst with our company. College grads who can’t string together a simple declarative sentence to save their lives. It’s a wonder these folks graduated from the 6th grade, really!

2.) Trying as ever to catch up on just the abstracts of interest over at NBER.org. It’s tough. And it used to be free to get reprints, and now they charge too.

3.) Prof. Jack Balkin’s Law Blog on the Constitution and the prospects of it’s survival after the damage done to it during the last few years, [http://balkin.blogspot.com/]. Wampum & Billmon on the inside skinny on Iran’s intentions & capabilities: (yes darlin’s there’s equations involved here!) [http://wampum.wabanaki.net/] & [http://billmon.org/]. Lots of other blogs political & not, and this mensch: Josh M. Marshall: [http://talkingpointsmemo.com/] for all the inside dope on Washington scandals that your TV won’t or can’t tell you about just yet. Ditto for thse guys [http://www.pogo.org/], and this mensch too: Noah Shachtman :
[http://defensetech.org/]. These guys for their excellent reporting on the South & NOLA/Katrina and cause I know Bubba: [http://southernstudies.org/facingsouth/]
This guy cause he really knows his stuff and after 20 years, still looks good on the TV even if he’s losing his TN drawl: [http://www.globalsecurity.org/]
That’s the real short list on Blogs.

4.) Books recently acquired and or read. ‘Dr. Lelia Denmark, America’s most experienced pediatrician’, our local wonderwoman of Ga. died recently I think at 107. Practiced until she was 102 or 103 I think, serving the community for 75 years. Amazing really. And if you wanted to raise up a ‘g_dly’ version of a pre war child, you’d follow her instructions carefully. That war would of course be WW1, and she was right as rain about that and more. Now how applicable this was to the mdern world remained to be seen, but she was real popular with some folks.

‘The Moral Consequences of Economic Growth, by Ben Friedman. Just starting his one about the limits of growth and how it might be done more equitably here, and why our policies have been shifting away from this stated goal for the last generation or more.

‘Jesse Stuart on Education’. Want to know how to teach very poor illiterate kids? Jesse did this successfully in Appalachia in the ’30’s up thru the 50’s. He was also the poet laureate of Kentucky during some of that time.

Also from KY: ‘A Timbered Choir: The Sabbath Poems, 1979-’97 by Wendell Berry.

Jean Ritchie’s luminous account of growing up poor but never deprived in the KY ‘backwoods’: ‘The singing family of the Cumberland’s’. If you really like good genuine folk music, she used to research old Scots-Irish Ballads that her family had been singing for generations. No one does some of these traditional songs better. Her and Doc Watson together are an American treasure.

There’s more, but that’s enough to keep me occupied. Cheers & Good Luck! ‘VJ’

I’m in the middle of Albert Camus’ ‘The Plague’. As you can imagine it’s not the most uplifting of books. Next on my list is Stuart: A life backwards.

I LOVED ‘The Red Tent’, and last time you posted this I read ‘The Myth of You and Me’ from Ari’s suggestion. Was very good. I don’t really have anything outstanding to recommend, I have been slow with reading these days! I read another of Jodi Piccult’s books and have decided that they are all too similar and wasn’t very impressed.

I just finished “The Other Boleyn Girl” by Philippa Gregory. It’s historical fiction and was really good. It’s 661 pages but a very fast read. I highly recommend it.

If you’re looking for a good page-turner, read The Delta Project by Mark Earnest. It’s a new mystery / thriller that weaves together two plots: a detective trying to solve a mystery of dead and disappearing bodies; and a post 9/11 military conspiracy. How they come together will blow you away! This is not the typical serial killer stuff. It kept me guessing and wanting more.

Ivy Chronicles was a fun read. I just started Half/Life: Jew-ish Tales from Interfaith Homes and have an Ayelet Waldman book waiting in the wings. I’ve got a nine day cruise coming up and need some great suggestions. Last year I brought 3 books for a seven day cruise and had to make a mad dash to a book store when we got to Victoria Island.