Hey there!  Welcome to It’s Monday, What Are You Reading!

I love being a part of this and I hope you do too!  As part of this weekly meme I love to encourage you all to go and visit the others participating in this meme. Fair warning… this meme tends to add to your reading list! 😉

By the time you are reading this I will be at the Opus and Olives event in ST Paul Minnesota.  I am so excited!!!!  This is the event that I heard about that caused the idea of Wine and Words to start to develop.  I have never been to the event, but tonight, I am going as one of the creators guests and I am SUPER EXCITED!  (I may have already said that…)

This week has been chalk full of working and writing and speaking and …. well, here is the week:

 

SPUN by Catherine McKenzie

Cemetery John by Robert Zorn

A Good Marriage by Stephen King

Three Wishes by Liane Moriarty

Weekend Cooking:  Pumpkin Butter!

Minnesota Library Association Conference

Ocean Beach by Wendy Wax

 

Pretty far week and a good mix of books and audio and bookish events.  This next week will be a little of the same with the Gone Girl movie and Book Club.  This coming week I have on tap:

 

For My Ears:

 

If life were fair, Jam Gallahue would still be at home in New Jersey with her sweet British boyfriend, Reeve Maxfield. She’d be watching old comedy sketches with him. She’d be kissing him in the library stacks.  

She certainly wouldn’t be at The Wooden Barn, a therapeutic boarding school in rural Vermont, living with a weird roommate, and signed up for an exclusive, mysterious class called Special Topics in English.

But life isn’t fair, and Reeve Maxfield is dead.

Until a journal-writing assignment leads Jam to Belzhar, where the untainted past is restored, and Jam can feel Reeve’s arms around her once again. But there are hidden truths on Jam’s path to reclaim her loss. 

 

 

A beloved star of stage, television, and film – ”one of the most fun people in show business” (Time magazine) – Alan Cumming is a successful artist whose diversity and fearlessness is unparalleled. His success masks a painful childhood growing up under the heavy rule of an emotionally and physically abusive father – a relationship that tormented him long into adulthood.

When television producers in the United Kingdom approached him to appear on a popular celebrity genealogy show in 2010, Alan enthusiastically agreed. He hoped the show would solve a family mystery involving his maternal grandfather, a celebrated World War II hero who disappeared in the Far East. But as the truth of his family ancestors revealed itself, Alan learned far more than he bargained for about himself, his past, and his own father.

 

 

Mercer Island, Washington is a bedroom community of Seattle, plopped in the middle of Lake Washington and connected to the Big City by what used to be the world’s longest floating bridge. In the mid-1960s Mercer Island was known for fancy waterfront homes, an excellent school system, inept sports teams, and teenagers with too much time on their hands and too much money in their pants. For the high school Class of ’65, a lot of that time was spent at the Samoa Drive In, the Island’s premier teen hangout, and a lot of that money was spent on the Samoa’s Cheese Deluxe, one of the world’s best burgers. CHEESE DELUXE: A Memoir by Greg Palmer, recalls that time and those people, and their mostly true, often comic, occasionally romantic, sometimes automotive adventures in the last blush of being kids on the verge of adulthood.

Among the burgered are Stackhouse, whose single erotic fantasy involves a broken down Dodge, a lonely mountain road, and a bag full of burgers; Frank, the auto shop savant whose only real crime is that the police hate him; Curtis, who has devoted his life to smoking, drinking, driving, and being deeply disappointing to his parents; Clifford, who joins the International Jewish Conspiracy primarily for the cuisine; Janelle, the dream girl of many, who learns something about herself from a dying rabbit; and Tucker, a shy young sax player who, on September 5, 1964, integrates Mercer Island High School all by himself, without any help from lawyers, cops, Federal Marshals, the National Guard, or Nicholas Katzenbach.

On the other side of the counter from this group of, if not underachievers then certainly the achievement-delayed, is the restaurant’s staff: Betty, the owner/operator, who knows enough about the Samoa to bring a sack lunch to work; DeeDee, a sophisticated (which is to say cold-as-ice) collegian believed by some of the burger eaters to be majoring in Penmanship at the University of Washington; Arlene, a professional counter personnel who takes no guff, ever, from anybody; Don, the legendary Friday night Master of the Deep Fat, who can spot the fish & chip eaters solely by the cars they drive; and the author, who was both a member of the Mercer Island Class of 1965 and the Samoa’s regular cook, as well as confessor to a group of teens who often wished they had more interesting things to confess.

 

For My Eyes:

When Molly Wizenberg married Brandon Pettit, he was a trained composer with a handful of offbeat interests: espresso machines, wooden boats, violin-building, and ice cream–making. So when Brandon decided to open a pizza restaurant, Molly was supportive—not because she wanted him to do it, but because the idea was so far-fetched that she didn’t think he would. Before she knew it, he’d signed a lease on a space. The restaurant, Delancey, was going to be a reality, and all of Molly’s assumptions about her marriage were about to change.

Together they built Delancey: gutting and renovating the space on a cobbled-together budget, developing a menu, hiring staff, and passing inspections. Delancey became a success, and Molly tried to convince herself that she was happy in their new life until—in the heat and pressure of the restaurant kitchen—she realized that she hadn’t been honest with herself or Brandon.

 

Thats the plan.  🙂  In a hurry so here is the link up for your Its Monday What Are You Reading:

 

 

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