It has been such a lovely weekend so far. It seems especially luxurious after having to go to work last Saturday for the big site launch (a roaring success, hooray, and worth a bottle of Veuve Clicquot at the company meeting Friday), and getting Martin Luther King Day off tomorrow will be the icing on […]

When I finally arrived home after a tiring trip to California, my wonderful boyfriend greeted me warmly and had a surprise (actually, five): a stack of beautifully wrapped books, one of which was Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic. It’s a beautifully told personal history of the author, her father, and the secrets her […]

Have you heard about this book-swapping site? The concept is great: get rid of books you no longer want (maybe never did want, but which you picked up from the book-and-magazine-trading wall in the subway station) for the cost of Media Mail postage; get others’ unwanted books for free. Neato, right?
I’ve sent out nine books […]

Been re-re-re-reading Birds of America (I tend to seek shelter in books I love during confused and fucked-up times), and melted into this:
She had already — carefully, obediently — stepped through all the stages of bereavement: anger, denial, bargaining, Häagen-Dazs, rage. Anger to rage — who said she wasn’t making progress?
Substitute bourbon balls and ginger […]

As someone who has, by dint of surname, been associated with seafaring scoundrels all my life, I was pretty much obligated to pick this up before my trip to DC. I started reading the Scientists volume (it’s two books in one!) on the flight home, with embarrassing consequences (laughter and at least one particularly loud […]