A Wandering Reader

December was a crazy month with much shopping, travel, holiday festivities, and little sleep. It’s January and it’s freezing so I’ve decided to spend the month close to home and catching up on reading, writing, and other projects.

It’s year-end and all kinds of “Best of 2013″ lists are coming out. Here’s is NPR’s best books of 2013 in a nice interactive graphic. Here is the Paris Review’s list.

Whoaa! I’ve been so bad about posting this month. I hope you’ll forgive me because I made this lovely holiday collage for you. 1. Tree outside my favorite vegetarian sandwich shop, 5th Avenue, Brooklyn. 2. Yayoi Kusama’s “I Who Have Arrived In Heaven” art exhibit at the David Zwirner Gallery in Chelsea. 3.

  A recent article in BBC News Magazine asks: why don’t French books sell abroad? It got me thinking about the number of non-English speaking authors that I’ve read in the past few years. Now, name your favorite contemporary French author.

I feel like I’ve been recapping our Ireland trip f-o-r-e-v-e-r. But we packed a lot of stuff into 10 days and it was amazing and I just like sharing.

  I feel a bit conflicted about this book of short stories. The collection comprises eight stories, two of which were very strong. The others, not so much. I’m going to be purposefully wishy-washy in this review because that’s how I felt about this collection.

I hope you had a terrific Thanksgiving holiday! I ate potatoes three ways (vegetarians eat a lot of potatoes at holiday gatherings), did some Black Friday shopping (NOT on Thursday night), and had a marathon TV-watching session on Sunday. Ahhh.

Happy early Thanksgiving everyone! Here are some links to ponder while traveling in airports or digesting pumpkin pie.   Literary One of my favorite links ever. In 1963, 16-year-old Bruce McAllister wrote to 150 novelists asking if they intentionally planted symbolism in their work.

  This book received a lot of press when it came out in 2011. Jeffrey Eugenides had received the Pulitzer Prize for fiction, as well as a bunch of other awards, in 2003 for his second novel, Middlesex (which is fantastic).

I attended a reading by Augusten Burroughs a few weeks ago as part of Hunter College’s Distinguished Writers Series. Burroughs is best known for his 2002 memoir Running with Scissors, which I read a few years back (there’s a movie too).