Steve Lehto: Chrysler’s Turbine Car: The Rise and Fall of Detroit’s Coolest Creation

978-1569765494 – Hardcover – Chicago Review Press – $24.95 (e-book edition available)

Steve Lehto’s portrait of the Chrysler Corporation’s amazing effort to engineer a turbine powered automobile is a terrific book, and alot of fun to read.  You don’t have to love cars to enjoy this book, though I am sure it helps.  But even if you don’t care about engines, and the dedicated engineers who spent years working on the turbine car program, you will learn a great deal about the industrial, social and cultural history of post World War II America.

Like so many kids who grew up in the 50s and 60s, I was enthralled with cars of all kinds, and when the Chrysler Turbine was first unveiled in 1964, along with millions of other Americans, I was fascinated and captivated by it – not only was it a beautifully designed car, futuristic and smooth, but it featured an engine like nothing else the world had ever seen up to that time.  It was the Jet Age in automotive design, and here was a car with an airplane inspired engine in it.

The Chrysler Turbine represents an incredible commitment on the part of a major American automobile manufacturer to develop and popularize a truly radical alternative powerplant to the American driving public.

Chrysler’s turbine could run on almost any fuel – diesel, peanut oil, perfume, even tequila.  Imagine what would have happened if the company had been able to devote hundreds of thousands more engineering and testing hours to the development of this engine over an additional 40 or 50 years.  It’s entirely possible that we would not be worrying about hybrids, diesels and electric cars today.  Reading Chrysler’s Turbine Car will give you a great understanding of the challenges any major new automotive development must face in order to become widely popular.

After a number of years of development and several generations of engine development, Chrysler hand built 50 examples of the the Turbine (that was its only name) and made them available to selected members of the general public for testing.  Drivers could keep the cars for three months and were required to keep detailed logs of their experiences.  Chrysler personnel maintained all the cars, flying all over America to repair and sometimes rescue cars that had problems, large or small.  In all, the fleet registered over a million miles of testing, and performed extraordinarily well.  Chrysler gained a huge amount of publicity and increased sales of their regular new cars, as well as learning a tremendous amount through the extensive practical use of their radically designed and built Turbine car by real drivers.

Unfortunately, for a variety of reasons, Chrysler ultimately abandoned the program completely, and destroyed most of the cars they had built.  Only a few were saved and sent to museums to be put on display – which is where most of them still are today.  Interestingly, Jay Leno was able to buy one of Chrysler’s own survivors and now drives it regularly. Author Lehto was able to drive Leno’s Turbine as part of his research for the book, and Leno contributed a foreword to this book.

Lehto interviewed every surviving member of the Chrysler team that built and maintained the cars during their short period of glory.  He also spoke to many of the people who were lucky enough to be participants in the public lending program; their stories help make the book a fun and enjoyable read.

In many ways it is understandable why the Turbine car program was killed by Chrysler, even after so much effort and money had been invested in it.  For a single car manufacturer to introduce a radical new powerplant completely outside the mainstream of engineering practice was ultimately economically unsustainable.  But it’s impossible for us not to regret that Chrysler gave up on the multi-fuel efficient turbine in 1967, especially today, as we are facing a future when do not have a viable alternative engine to replace our dependable and thirsty reciprocating gasoline dependent engines.

This is a fun and worthwhile book to read, whether you are interested in cars, American history, culture, business or general nonfiction.  Author Lehto, an adjunct professor at University of Detroit – Mercy, has written a very readable book, full of interesting characters and great stories you don’t have to be a car nut to enjoy.

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Publishing Talks: David Wilk interviews Michael Jacobs

In this series of interviews, called Publishing Talks, I have been talking to book industry professionals and other smart people about the future of publishing, books, and culture.  This is a period of disruption and change for all media businesses.  We must wonder now, how will publishing evolve as our culture is affected by technology, climate change, population density, and the ebb and flow of civilization and  economics?

I hope these Publishing Talks conversations can help us understand the outlines of what is happening in the publishing industry, and how we might ourselves interact with and influence the future of publishing as it unfolds.

These interviews give people in and around the book business a chance to talk openly about ideas and concerns that are often only talked about “around the water cooler,” at industry conventions and events, and in emails between friends and they give people inside and outside the book industry a chance to hear first hand some of the most interesting and challenging thoughts, ideas and concepts being discussed by people in the book business.

Michael Jacobs is the Chief Executive Officer at Abrams Books.  He started out in publishing as a page in the main branch of the Oakland (CA) Public Library and was the first sales rep hired by Bookpeople, the innovative and much missed employee-owned Berkeley wholesaler of independent press books (which is when I first met him – late 1970s).

From there Michael moved to Penguin USA, starting as a sales representative based in the Pacific Northwest and quickly rising to become President of the Viking Penguin division and a member of the board of directors. He then served as Executive Vice President of Simon and Schuster’s Trade division, Publisher of the Free Press, and Senior Vice President in Scholastic’s trade book group.

At Scholastic, Michael was responsible for the publishing, marketing, sales and distribution of the most successful books in publishing history—the first five Harry Potter books, which sold over 80 million copies in the US.  He joined Abrams in 2004, and has directed the company successfully through virtually a complete business makeover.  During his time at Abrams, the company has launched the best-selling Wimpy Kid series – which has sold 42 million copies in North America and has been published in over 36 countries, as well as a number of other highly successful books and series.

Founded by Harry N. Abrams in 1949, Abrams was the first company in the United States to specialize in the creation and distribution of art and illustrated books. It is now a subsidiary of La Martinière Groupe.   Abrams is best  known as a publisher of high quality illustrated books, especially art, photography, cooking , gardening, crafts, sports and children’s books.  In recent years, under Michael’s direction Abrams has successfully broadened its reach, especially in pop culture and comic arts.  I wanted to talk to Michael about his work at Abrams – not the least because illustrated books have faced so many different kinds of challenges in the past few years and he and his team at Abrams have been so successful throughout.  But I also think his experience across a variety of trade publishing genres and company sizes (independent press, adult, childrens and illustrated books, large companies as well as smaller ones) gives him a unique perspective on the past, present, and future of publishing, in both print and digital formats that is valuable for others in the book industry to hear.

Michael’s success at Abrams may provide ideas and inspiration to many in publishing who are looking for ways to help remake their companies as the retail landscape continues to evolve and change.  He is always cogent and incisive in his thoughts, and is someone whom I have always enjoyed talking with about books and ideas.

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Harry Hamlin: Full Frontal Nudity

978-1439169995 –  Hardcover – Scribner – $24.00 (e-book edition available)

Harry Hamlin’s autobiographical memoir is not what you might expect if you are looking for a traditional “famous actor” tells-all but really tells-very-little story.  Full Frontal Nudity is a completely honest, sometimes hilarious, sometimes sad, sometimes mind-boggling story about Hamlin’s growing up in suburban California and coming of age through two different college experiences and the beginning of his life as a professional actor.

This book is a thorough pleasure to read; Harry is a fine writer, and has a remarkable sense of the accidents and sometimes mysteries that go into making us who we are.   And it’s also true throughout, whether intentional or not, by telling his own story, he becomes part of the larger social fabric of the 50’s, 60’s and early 70’s, and thus helps us understand what it was like to be alive during that now famous era of history.  And for those many of us who were also there then, his story will remind us of some of the beauty and dangers we lived through.

The subtitle of this engaging memoir is important too: “The Making of an Accidental Actor.” Hamlin is clear that who he is today and how he got there represent the sum of a long series of accidents and choices with unintended consequences.  As the book opens, we discover that Harry has an arrest record from 40 years ago that has suddenly prevented him from traveling to Canada, where he actually now lives part of each year.

How this happened is a great story, but what I liked most about it was the way that Harry told it on himself, unafraid to bare the truth about his life.  I know that really good actors must learn how to do this, but they’re usually acting someone else’s drama, and thus are always protected on some level.  There’s no hiding here, and it’s a refreshing turn.  Hamlin is an actor, and a good one

Hamlin grew up in California, in a not quite normal household, and after high school headed for Berkeley at what some would say was just the right time – 1969.  On the way to college, he managed an accidental detour that got him, shall we say, distracted.  Intending to sign up for an architecture major, he found that there were no courses available, and the only ones available were drama, thus he embarked on what would eventually become his career.  His time at Berkeley was suitably exotic, and included the drug possession arrest that later caused him so much trouble with the Canadian immigration folks.  His time at Berkeley came to an untimely and early end because of a fire at the fraternity whose president he had become, and almost by magic, and again accidentally, he headed for Yale, where he flourished.  Then another more or less accidental turn – he gives up a safe job as a PBS production assistant and takes an offer from the American Conservatory Theater, where a role in the play Equus ultimately led him to an outstanding film and TV career (notably LA Law, many others).

Overall Full Frontal Nudity is a terrific and wonderfully enjoyable book, and unsurprisingly, we had a thoroughly interesting and revealing conversation about the book and many of the stories he wrote about.

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Publishing Talks: David Wilk interviews Phil Ollila

In this series of interviews, called Publishing Talks, I have been talking to book industry professionals and other smart people about the future of publishing, books, and culture.  This is a period of disruption and change for all media businesses.  We must wonder now, how will publishing evolve as our culture is affected by technology, climate change, population density, and the ebb and flow of civilization and  economics?

I hope these Publishing Talks conversations can help us understand the outlines of what is happening in the publishing industry, and how we might ourselves interact with and influence the future of publishing as it unfolds.

These interviews give people in and around the book business a chance to talk openly about ideas and concerns that are often only talked about “around the water cooler,” at industry conventions and events, and in emails between friends and they give people inside and outside the book industry a chance to hear first hand some of the most interesting and challenging thoughts, ideas and concepts being discussed by people in the book business.

Philip Ollila (widely known as Phil in the book industry) is the Chief Content Officer of Ingram Content Group Inc., one of the largest distributors of book content and providers of digital printing in the North American book industry.  Phil is responsible for Ingram Content Group’s publisher facing business, and has been instrumental in leading the transformation of Ingram from a traditional wholesale service provider, into what is now a fully integrated solutions company for clients. Ingram combines wholesale distribution, print-on-demand, digital distribution, inventory management and comprehensive worldwide services for both physical and digital content.

Phil leads a number of Ingram business units including wholesale merchandising, Lightning Source, Ingram Publisher Services and digital distribution through CoreSource® and also heads up Ingram Content Group marketing.  Before joining Ingram, where he has held several leadership positions, he was Vice President of Marketing and Merchandising for Borders.

Anyone in the book business, and many people outside it know about Ingram.  It is one of the two large book wholesalers transitioning from a key role in the physical supply chain between publishers and retailers.  Perhaps earlier than any other large company in the industry, Ingram had the foresight to invest in a range of services that would enhance their offerings to both their suppliers (mainly publishers) and their customers (bookstores, libraries and many other retailers).  In many ways, it is only the two large former traditional wholesalers, Ingram and its competitor Baker & Taylor that have the unique perspective and ability to act as really powerful and influential transformative agencies as the book business evolves into a combination of print and digital products.

Phil Ollila is therefore now in a key role at a tremendously interesting and  fast moving business that possesses a great deal of information valuable to publishers and to anyone interested in how publishing, books and readers will interact in the future, both near term and much, much farther into the future.

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Lou Aronica: Blue

978-1936558001  – paperback – The Fiction Studio –  $16.95 (e-book versions available $7.99)

Lou Aronica’s Blue is an unusual novel, combining elements of science fiction, fantasy, romance and serious fiction, to create a moving story that focuses on the relationship between a daughter and her father in a terrifically moving and affecting way.  Lou is an experienced and skillful writer who deftly manages to tell a story that is full of sadness and emotion and manages to avoid the deeply sentimental that might otherwise overtake the reader.  Which is not to say it is not a story that will affect the reader – and some may find it difficult going, to say the least.

Reviewers and interviewers must always be careful in describing any novel’s storyline, to avoid ruining the book for prospective readers.  For those who don’t want to know too much, let’s just say that Blue takes on family relationships in the face of grave illness in a beautifully imagined way.  There is plenty of sadness in this novel, but Aronica succeeds in the true storyteller’s art, the transformation within a story to something greater than the experience itself.

The book is set in a contemporary suburban Connecticut much like the one the author actually lives in, so the characters and settings are all familiar and well told.  At the heart of the story is the relationship between Chris Astor and his fourteen-year-old daughter, Becky, and her mother, from whom Chris is now divorced.   Facing the greatest challenge of their lives, they must all learn to trust each other, and ultimately to believe in imagination and its transformational power, in order to come to terms with what is happening to them.

Blue is a remarkable and uplifting novel.  I think Lou Aronica has succeeded in his goal for this book (from his website): “I wanted to write a novel that conveyed my feelings about the incomparable value of imagination and hope. Blue puts its characters through the wringer, but it is at its heart an extremely optimistic novel.”

Full disclosure: I am happy to say that Lou is someone whose friendship I value.  I do want to say, also, that even if I just like a book and don’t love it, I’m unlikely to want to write about it and certainly won’t want to talk about it with the author.  I feel my responsibility as an interviewer requires that I really get into a book in order to be able to ask meaningful questions about it and talk about it intelligently.  I don’t love every book I read, but I truly do deeply enjoy and admire every book I write about here and talk about with their authors.  For me, there is no question that Blue is a terrific book and my conversation with Lou reflects that assessment. This is a book I am happy to recommend to readers, and I think it will be especially moving to anyone who is the parent of children of any age.

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Publishing Talks: David Wilk interviews Mike Shatzkin

In this series of interviews, called Publishing Talks, I have been talking to book industry professionals and other smart people about the future of publishing, books, and culture.  This is a period of disruption and change for all media businesses.  We must wonder now, how will publishing evolve as our culture is affected by technology, climate change, population density, and the ebb and flow of civilization and  economics?

I hope these Publishing Talks conversations can help us understand the outlines of what is happening in the publishing industry, and how we might ourselves interact with and influence the future of publishing as it unfolds.

These interviews give people in and around the book business a chance to talk openly about ideas and concerns that are often only talked about “around the water cooler,” at industry conventions and events, and in emails between friends and they give people inside and outside the book industry a chance to hear first hand some of the most interesting and challenging thoughts, ideas and concepts being discussed by people in the book business.

Mike Shatzkin, is the founder and operator of a well known book industry consulting business called The Idea Logical Company.  He’s also a blogger extraordinaire who writes incisively about issues in the book industry at The Shatzkin Files and who is never afraid to make public predictions about the future of books and the book business he knows so well, having essentially grown up in the business from an early age.  He is an organizer of conferences, and a frequent speaker at publishing industry gatherings large and small.

The description of Idea Logical on its website sums up Mike’s role pretty succinctly: “The Idea Logical Company consults to book publishers and their trading partners about the changes engendered by digital transformation to every component of the value chain.”  Mike has spent thirty years addressing all sorts of issues and problems for publishing and retailing clients of all sizes.  In recent years, his work has focused on the changes created for the publishing industry by a variety of new and emerging digital technologies.  He was an early advocate of digital publishing, and also established the concept of “verticality” or subject specific publishing as a way to organize publishing around digital technologies.

Beyond his interest and expertise in publishing, Mike is also a writer and an active entrepreneur.  In this interview, we did not discuss any of his baseball related writing, editing, publishing and website development – if we had, it’s likely we would have used up all our time talking about our mutually shared passion, a subject in which Mike has also had an entire career simultaneously with his consulting work and constant thinking and analysis about books, publishers, readers and the business that serves them.

In my opinion, Mike talks just as clearly and intelligently, if not more so, than he writes, which given his writing talents, is saying alot.  We certainly had a lot of fun in this conversation, which I think will be useful and interesting to anyone interested in the future of books and reading.  As Mike says in his latest blog post: “Sometimes, and it would seem quite often these days, the future comes faster than you expected it.”

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Brom: The Child Thief

978-0061671340 – paperback – Harper Voyager – $19.99 (ebook editions available at $9.99)

The Child Thief by well known illustrator and writer Brom is an absolutely stunning book.   It is the Peter Pan story retold in a brilliantly imagined fashion that is completely captivating.  So, yes, I did love reading this book.  It is immersive, scary, and dark, but it is also wildly creative, and mashes up some of our most powerful mythological story lines to create its own narrative drive and a world inside, aside, and connected to our own that is fantastic (literally) and wonderfully psychological, and even political.

I really do not want to tell too much about the world that Brom has created, its characters or the story line as it is so much fun to discover it on one’s own.  The genesis for the story was Brom’s discovery of a line in James Barrie’s original Peter Pan he found frightening but crucial, where Barrie mentions that Peter Pan would “thin out” the Lost Boys when the island population got too big.  This single statement sheds a very dark light on the entire construct of the mythology of Neverland.  And as he says about the character of Peter Pan himself, who kidnaps children and kills pirates (among others) – he is not really such a nice character as we imagine him now: “And more chilling is Peter’s ability to do all these things—the kidnapping, the murder—all without a trace of conscience: “I forget them after I kill them,” he (Peter) replied carelessly.”

In The Child Thief, Peter is indeed a boy who will never grow up, but his existence is oh so much more complicated than the movie and stage versions we know.  Peter travels to modern day New York City to find new members for his tribe, who fight real battles in a Neverland that is now a part of Avalon and includes a great deal of real danger – even just to get there requires a frightening and challenging journey (a true rite of passage for the lost adolescents Peter has convinced to join him).

Brom’s Avalon is going through a very difficult time and there are many painful moments in this book.  Death and suffering are everywhere here – this is not a book for the faint of heart or those looking for escapist fiction.  By conjoining the world of Avalon to our own, and especially to the painful and bloody history of the conquering of the North American continent by European soldiers and settlers, the author has brought us face to face with the darkest elements of the modern industrial society to which we have evolved.  Even at the end he avoids the easy and satisfying resolution of his story that many readers may be seeking.  It’s not entirely a dark ending, but neither is it thoroughly uplifting.  Personally, I loved the ambiguity throughout the book.

Brom is indeed a terrific artist – there is a section of his beautiful, evocative and sometimes chilling illustrations of all the characters in the middle of the book that is truly compelling.  You can see more of his work at his website.

It was a pleasure to have a chance to speak with Brom about his work and specifically about this book.  It’s so richly imagined and has so many layers, it’s easy to talk about.  Brom is a wonderful story teller with a great deal to say.  This is a compelling book for anyone who loves to get lost in a fully imagined alternate universe – and this one happens to be very familiar and therefore powerful, as it shatters all of our expectations so beautifully.

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Publishing Talks: David Wilk interviews Don Leeper

In this series of interviews, called Publishing Talks, I have been talking to book industry professionals and other smart people about the future of publishing, books, and culture.  This is a period of disruption and change for all media businesses.  We must wonder now, how will publishing evolve as our culture is affected by technology, climate change, population density, and the ebb and flow of civilization and  economics?

I believe these Publishing Talks conversations can help us understand the outlines of what is happening in the publishing industry, and how we might ourselves interact with and influence the future of publishing as it unfolds.

These interviews give people in and around the book business a chance to talk openly about ideas and concerns that are often only talked about “around the water cooler,” at industry conventions and events, and in emails between friends and they give people inside and outside the book industry a chance to hear first hand some of the most interesting and challenging thoughts, ideas and concepts being discussed by people in the book business.

Don Leeper is the founder of Bookmobile, based outside of Minneapolis, providing outsourced production services to independent and academic publishers all over the world.  The company was founded as Stanton Publication Services in 1982, and has grown significantly over the years, now offering not only pre-press services for print books, as well as growing digital printing business, an expanding range of digital book production services, including ebooks and apps, and even an off-shoot business for book distribution.  OR Books has hired Bookmobile to provide all of its production services, as some other publishers have also done.

What attracted my attention most recently to this company is their announcement of Ampersand, an iPad app created to preserve the layout and pagination of poetry (and of course any other book for which specific line and page layouts are critical).  It’s been one of the raps on ebooks that poetry essentially does not work in the Kindle (mobi) and other popular reading devices or platforms that use ePub as the format for their content.  Ampersand enables publishers (and poets who want to publish their own work) to preserve complex page compositions easily and as an app provides both a reading environment and a sales structure on the iPad (and presumably the iPhone and iPod as well).

Clearly Leeper and his crew are creative and working hard to provide a wide range of needed services for independent and academic publishers, for whom the fast changing digital environment presents significant challenges.  He’s also a great example of someone who has been agile in moving from traditional publishing workflows into new digital realms while retaining a strong commitment to the important values of design and interface that will always be necessary for writers, publishers and readers, whatever the devices or delivery systems they use for reading.

Ampersand shows alot of promise for many independent publishers of poetry and other types of work where the actual page concept still matters, especially because cost of production matters most for small circulation content (there are certainly other PDF based e-book publishing methods available, but most are more costly and not highly automated).  A few poetry publishers are on board with Bookmobile to pilot the Ampersand project, and we’ll be interested to see some finished work in coming months.

In this interview, Don and I had a wide ranging and lively conversation about digital publishing, poetry, and the future of print and ebooks.

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James Howard Kunstler: World Made by Hand

World Made by Hand – 978-0802144010 – paperback – Grove Press – $14.95 (e-book edition available)

The Witch of Hebron: a World Made by Hand novel –  978-0802119612 – hardcover – Atlantic Monthly Press – $24.00 (e-book edition available)

This is an unusual podcast for me as it covers two books, World Made by Hand and the next in what looks to be at least a trilogy for author Kunstler, The Witch of Hebron.  I had heard of, but never read any of Jim Kunstler’s books before these two, which I read much the way I read science fiction and fantasy novels when I was young, voraciously, entering and imaginatively inhabiting the world the author has created, joyfully, and always wanting more.

These two books are set in a fictional town in a real region of upstate New York, near the Hudson River, several hours north of Albany, in a period that Kunstler has dubbed The Long Emergency. That is the title of his most recent and best-selling work of nonfiction, a book I subsequently read and now believe is one of the most important books of our time.

In The Long Emergency, Kunstler describes why our current civilization is inevitably going to collapse.  This is by no means a joyful prediction, but as his novels illustrate, the world ahead as we might imagine it, is not completely grim or devoid of joy and earthly human pleasure either.  It is a post-fossil fuel world, and therefore much, much larger – humans do not travel thousands of miles in a day any longer.  Governments have, for the most part, collapsed along with the great powerful corporations that have come to dominate our landscape.  There is effectively no interstate commerce.  Agriculture based on human and animal power is the dominant feature of daily life for most people.

There is a rise in human suffering, but a massive decline in human population, and during the period in which these novels are set, relatively soon after the collapse of modern civilization, there is a great deal of rediscovery of the tools and methods on which human life was built over the many centuries preceding the 21st.  There are still many who remember how things were, and their beings are marked by what they knew, and lost, and now, as they are relearning how to live, by rediscovery of a different set of values.  The younger generations know nothing directly of the world we now take for granted.  Their lives have always been slower than ours, more physically challenging, and much more about adaptation to one’s direct physical environment.   In addition to the daily necessities, it is personal relationships, family, community and local culture that this world revolves around.  It is a world made by hand, and sometimes much rougher and more painful for being so, but there is a palpable sense of redemption and concern for what is good and right that underlies the world that Kunstler has imagined, that gives meaning to the struggles his characters must face throughout these two books.

Kunstler is a terrific writer and storyteller. These are fully imagined characters living in a plausible future.  I can’t wait to read the next book in the series, and since it won’t be published for some time, I have been reading Kunstler’s older novels (most of which are sadly, out of print).  When we talked, I had not read The Long Emergency, so our conversation is focused solely on the two novels which followed it.  I’d recommend to anyone who has not read these books to start with the fiction as I did, and then go back to the nonfiction.  It’s important for us to have an understanding of where we are headed, and I think it helps us to face the difficulties ahead if we can imagine ourselves into a better place, just as Jim Kunstler has done with A World Made by Hand and The Witch of Hebron.

Do visit Jim’s website, which continuously presents valuable information about where we are and what we can do about it.  Make sure you take a side trip to the mini-site for these novels, which is a beautifully put together experience in and of itself.  A great author biography here. We had a fantastic wide-ranging conversation about the novels, the world they are set in, and how these characters and their stories illustrate the future Kunstler has so beautifully imagined and portrayed.

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Read All Day

Nina Sankovitch has been an inspiration for me.  From October 2008 to October 2009 she read a book a day and wrote about it (intelligently and cogently) at her website ReadAllDay.  Here’s what she says about why she did it: “I began my year in an effort to come to terms with the tragic death of my oldest sister, Anne-Marie, and to find purpose and meaning in my life. I called my year of reading The 365 Project.”

I’ve sent her some books to read and she has given me lots of suggestions for books I have read, and in some cases then interviewed authors for Writerscast.  We’ve liked some of the same books, but judging from her site, she and I have very different reading interests.  Knowing that has helped me choose some new directions, which I think is a great way to keep from falling into a reading rut.

Meanwhile, Nina’s year of reading adventure was discovered and written about by the New York Times and a number of other media outlets, and she even got a book deal.  Her book is called Tolstoy and the Magic Chair: My year of magical reading will be published in June by Harper.  I certainly plan to read it and interview her about it too.  I’m jealous and dumbstruck with admiration for what she has done.

Anyway, the reason I am writing about Nina is because she has launched a redesigned website that I think is worth a visit.  She is continuing to read and write reviews about books of all sizes and shapes – not every day of course, but more books than most people can read and write about intelligently.  Here’s how she does it:

HOW TO READ All DAY
Always have a book with you.
Read while waiting.
Read while eating.
Read while exercising.
Read before bed.
Read before getting out of bed.
Read instead of updating FB.
Read instead of watching TV.
Read instead of vacuuming.
Read while vacuuming.
Read with a book group.
Read with your kid.
Read with your cat.
Read to your dog.
Read on a schedule.
Always have a book with you.

Thank you Nina!

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