As usual my reading wish list is miles long. I really need more hours in the day just to indulge my book habit. And perhaps a bigger bedside table. Although as I read more and more on the iPad it’s becoming easier to both store and hide the extent of my addiction, shhhhh. Lots of interesting choices for January, it just depends on what you’re in the mood for today!
Identify with the quirky misfit in Penelope by Rebecca Harrington, get inspired to write your own list of 40 things with The Picador Book of 40 edited by Charlotte Greig, learn the story behind one of the most beautiful songs ever written, Hallelujah, in The Holy Or The Broken by Alan Light, step into “five unforgettable lives” with A Possible Life by Sebastian Faulks, learn how to fake it until you become it with The As If Principle: The Radically New Approach to Changing Your Life by Richard Wiseman, observe the end of a civilization in The Hydrogen Sonata by Iain M. Banks, or take a little bit of everything approach with the “unsettling, insightful, and hilarious” stories of Tenth of December by George Saunders.
What can I say, you can take the girl out of psych class but you can’t get psych degrees out of the girl. A little list of books I have my eye on, never enough information about the brain for my liking. Love 2.o is top of my list, though I’m a bit biased since Dr. Fredrickson was a professor at Michigan while I was in the department, and for all of us who pause the screen after Chuck Lorre’s TV shows to read his hilarious vanity cards, now they are all available in a no squinting required collection in What Doesn’t Kill Us Makes Us Bitter.
If the human mind is a bit heavy for this time of year never fear, the holiday reading list is coming up soon!
Musicophilia by Oliver Sacks | Hallucinations by Oliver Sacks | The Wisdom of Psychopaths by Kevin Dutton | Love 2.0 by Barbara Fredrickson | Missing Out by Adam Phillips | The Psychopath Test by Jon Ronson | Mastermind by Maria Konnikova | What Doesn’t Kill Us Makes Us Bitter by Chuck Lorre
Today Julia Child would have been 100 years old. And can you just imagine what a feisty gourmet she would have been in her triple digits! We make recipes from her cookbook all the time (the only thing that hasn’t worked yet is mayonnaise, it just refuses to come together), but what I love most about her isn’t her food, it’s that she didn’t even start cooking until she was 36 years old. At a time when everyone makes it seem like you had better know what you want to do with the rest of your days by the time you’re 15, Julia is my proof that one can be extraordinary in more than one career per lifetime. I can’t wait to learn even more about her from Dearie.
Speaking of incredible, inspirational women, I can’t believe we will never be lucky enough to watch another Nora Ephron movie. My list of favorites is full of her creations, I just hope she knew how much her humor and talent meant to so many of us. I haven’t had a chance to read I Remember Nothing yet, so I think now is good time for a little dose of Nora. Actually it’s always a good time for a little dose of Nora.
Both Julia and Nora are on my list of people I would invite to a fantasy dinner, but since that dinner will never be I’m excited to read Hello Goodbye Hello: A Circle of 101 Remarkable Meetings. I’m particularly excited to be a fly on the wall for the meeting of Salvador Dali and Sigmund Freud, I can only imagine that the conversation was very interesting.
Featured eyeglasses – Kate Spade Rebecca
Currently on my reading wishlist…
I love “fly-on-the-wall” accounts, so I can’t wait to read The Receptionist by Janet Groth, 21 years worth of stories from a receptionist at The New Yorker. I can only imagine all she has seen and overheard! Monkey Mind sounds like the perfect description of what goes on in the anxious brain, something the author Daniel Smith and I know quite a bit about. His account has been described as both “pain filled” and “hilarious” and it’s sure to make those of us with anxiety feel like we’re not in it alone. FInally, for all the die hard Harry Potter fans J.K. Rowling’s new book The Casual Vacancy is available for pre-order! It’s safe to say we will read anything J.K. puts in front of us, no?
The Receptionist | Monkey Mind | The Casual Vacancy
The Host eyeglasses in “Honey” by Mezzmer
