How can we start a new decade and not talk about Oprah Winfrey? Haters, step aside, because I love my Oprah. I can’t tell you the number of things I’ve learned from the talk-show host over the years (including the proper shape of poo and how to not be a “schlumpadinka”), but one author took it a step further, following Winfrey’s advice for a whole year.
Robyn Okrant had to make sacrifices, of course, and her husband was mostly on board with the whole thing. While Oprah doesn’t intend for each of her viewers to abide by everything on her show, what if? That’s the fascinating premise of LIVING OPRAH: MY ONE-YEAR EXPERIMENT TO WALK THE WALK OF THE QUEEN OF TALK.
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In his best of 2009 list for ENTERTAINMENT WEEKLY, Stephen King recommended THE LITTLE STRANGER. The next day, I read a tweet from thriller author M.J. Rose, who was reading it and loving it. I figured a ghost story might be just the thing I needed for holiday distraction, so I purchased it. (See how powerful frequency and word of mouth are?) I was right.
What Sarah Waters has pulled off is a ghost story that may or may not be a ghost story, depending on whether or not you believe in ghosts. I happen to, full disclosure, so everything that happens in Hundreds Hall, the mansion which is the main character in the novel, feels haunted to me from the get-go.
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SOULLESS came into my life like many great books do: by referral. I knew from the cover it would be a quirky, fun read — kudos to the art director for that spot-on design. Author Gail Carriger said she knew she wanted to write urban fantasy and noticed that a lot of the genre is contemporary. But she figured these creatures — supernatural, werewolves, vampires — had to have been around for a long time, right?
So she set her story in the Victorian times in England, and gifts us with a wonderful protagonist in Alexia, who is a preternatural, meaning she has no soul. This doesn’t make her mean, but it does mean she can’t be harmed by vampires, and in fact, kills a vampire at the beginning of the book — all in self-defense, of course.
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I’ve never been to the popular PostSecret.com site, a phenomenon Frank Warren started as a project inviting people to send confessions — secrets they’ve never told anyone — to his post office box. What followed is now a global brand comprised of the website, lecture series and, of course, books.
POSTSECRET: CONFESSIONS ON LIFE, DEATH, AND GOD is an oversized postcard-format book that’s easy to gobble up in one afternoon, not only because it’s easy reading with pictures and captions, but because the confessions are thought-provoking and occasionally shocking and sad. It’s a literary potato chip: You can’t read just one postcard. With the theme of its subtitle, one might expect secrets of suicidal thoughts, faith gone awry and relationships ending in tragedy — all juicy stuff.
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When I first saw the cover of THE MICHAEL JACKSON TAPES: A TRAGIC ICON REVEALS HIS SOUL IN INTIMATE CONVERSATION, with the ominous shadow of Jackson’s face above the bold byline of Rabbi Schmuley Boteach, I thought there had to be some kind of mistake. Was this some sort of joke? You know, where a rabbi, a king of pop and a kid with cancer walk into a bar? (No, that’s not quite right, but the three of them did walk into Neverland Ranch together. Perhaps the trio isn’t as unlikely as I first suspected.)
Turns out, the rabbi was Jackson’s mentor for nearly two years in 2001 and 2002, just a year before the singer’s accuser, Gavin Arvizo, came forward with allegations of child molestation. The first of many shockers in the book is that the rabbi and his family were staying at the ranch the night the first instance of alleged abuse happened. One gets the sense that Boteach doesn’t believe Michael is guilty, but then again, he did catch him in a few lies during the tapings.
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