Book a Day

I finished a book a day last week. All were nice solid reads. Nothing that's going on my Best of 2011 list (the two best reads were rereads and therefore not eligible), but nothing I wish I'd abandoned at chapter one either.

Here are my seven Very Quick Reviews:

Anna and the French Kiss...Anna is forced by her parents to spend her final high school year at a school in Paris. Oh poor Anna. The miseries of adolescents these days. She meets a clever and cute boy (those are always the best) but he seems to be taken. Sigh. Still, they can be friends. Very good friends.

My Reading Life by Pat Conroy...On the cover, the author's name is significantly larger than the title. This is important, fellow readers. Alarms always go off in my head when I see the author's name displayed in type that is significantly larger than that of the title. Silly me, I had assumed this was a new Conroy book. Wrong. It's a collection of recycled essays that are (mostly) about Conroy's reading life. Lots of nice pieces.

Paris to the Moon by Adam Gopnik...I loved this book when I first read it about ten years ago. This time, not only was I murmuring, "Oh, lucky ducks, this family is in Paris," but I was also gushing, "Yes, yes, I went there, too!"

The Phantom Tollbooth by Norton Juster...A reread, a happy reread. You must bear in mind that I adore silly wordplay and this book is the King of Silly Wordplay.

The Devil in the White City...I don't like scary books and this book has the subplot of a mass murderer with the kinds of gruesome details that give me bad dreams. I must honestly say that I raced through the scary parts as fast as I could and spent most of my time relishing the parts about the world's fair. The world's fair was a very cool idea. Do we still have these world's fairs?

Table of Contents...Short chapters of interviews with authors about the writing process and what motivates the authors to write and, best of all, favorite recipes of the authors. I was surprised to see that most of the recipes were very elaborate; the recipes are probably more fun to read about than to actually cook. Thank you to the publishers for sending me a copy of this book.

One Day by David Nicholls...A novel that is getting a lot of buzz these days as it is being made into a movie. Our main characters, our contemporary Harry and Sally if you will, meet in college and continue to bump into one another as the years pass. Dexter, our Harry, spends way too much time pursuing drugs and women for my taste, and Emma, our Sally, falls into writing and fame and fortune way too easily for my belief system to accept, but, other than these flaws, it's a nice little read.

That's it. A lovely reading week. What did you finish this week?