Book discussion groups
October 26, 2009
- "The four most dangerous words in investing are: This time it's different" So says Barbara Ehrenreich, the American feminist author, sociologist, and political activist, who has a new book out called: Bright Sided: How the Relentless Promotion of Positive Thinking Has Undermined America (Metropolitan Books, October 2009)I haven't read the book yet, but I did hear her speak at the ...
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October 11, 2009
- If you are planning a book discussion of The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo, the Swedish noir, "closed room... or in this case, closed island" mystery by Stiegg Larsson, this blog entry is for you. It will save you hundreds of dollars in book group leader fees (the going rate now in SF for private groups is between $200 and $250) and distills years of my book group leadership ...
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October 6, 2009
- I still can't figure out why eighteen people showed up last Tuesday night at the Menlo Park Library to discuss Stieg Larsson's Swedish noir mystery The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo. Add in two librarians--me and youth services librarian Jennifer Wilkins--who made a cameo appearance to talk about the Girl With the D.T.'s more wholesome Swedish forebearer, Pippi Longstocking---and you've got twenty ...
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August 14, 2009
- If I had more energy after a day of book slinging…and owned a different sort of wardrobe, I would be attending THE social/literary event of the fall season: Litquake’s (www.litquake.org) Goth Hop at The Verdi Club, located at 2424 Mariposa Street, San Francisco. The fun begins tonight, Friday August 14th at 8:30 p.m. and is slated to end at “the witching hour of Midnight.”A ...
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August 4, 2009
- Writing and reading are as private an activity as using the closet. The writer, shut off in their shed/studio, frowns at the ring of the telephone or the knock on their door; and who would risk disturbing a reader sunk deep in the pages of a novel? Writer and reader have ‘gone away’; they’re both off surfing the cyberspace of their brain, the non-physical imaginative world that exists only ...
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June 20, 2009
- Novelist/social satirist Christopher Buckley 's new memoir Losing Mum and Pup--is my suggested read for Father's Day...and beyond. Here's what it's about. In the course of a year (2007-2008), only-child Christo (his family nickname) lost both of his charismatic, extraordinary parents, Pat and Bill Buckley. If you read Vanity Fair and the New York Times and Washington Post society and/or ...
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May 25, 2009
- Senator Ransom Stoddard: You're not going to use the story, Mr. Scott? Reporter Maxwell Scott: No, sir. This is the West, sir. When the legend becomes fact, print the legend. The lines were delivered in the 1962 film, The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, in which John Ford directed John Wayne, Lee Marvin, and Jimmy Stewart. I saw the film over Memorial Day Weekend at the magnificently restored ...
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May 5, 2009
- My long gone grandmothers would never have written essays about being grandmothers. For one thing, Grandma Rose, a seamstress born in Shepetovker, Ukraine, could not read or write. Thoroughly modern American-born Grandma Becky, a ballerina in her youth and Bloomingdales salesperson in an era when there was only the one store in Manhattan--rarely wrote more than a few lines on a greeting card. ...
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