❤️❤️❤️💔 When the incomparable Ms. JK Rowling announces that a NEW HARRY POTTER BOOK 📚 would be released on HARRY Potter’s birthday 2016 (July 31… he’s 36, for those not as apt to geek out over the Boy Who Lived), Potterheads the world over let out an excited shriek! I promise, that if you aren’t…

 ❤️❤️❤️ The Yellow Wallpaper & Other Stories by Charlotte Perkins Gilman is a very slim collection (70 pages for 7 stories) of her feminist stories, with the title story being 1892’s The Yellow Wallpaper. Again, I was brought to Gilman’s work through Kate Bolick’s Spinster, as one of her Five Awakeners. Gilman’s stories are witty…

 ❤️💔 I chose The Nest as a Book Club selection for my Book Club. The Nest follows The Plumb family – a selfish, dysfunctional family consisting of Melody, Leo, Beatrice, Jack and their mother Francie. The Nest itself, is a nest egg account with their inheritance from their late, successful father, who by all accounts,…

 ❤️❤️💔 The biography of Svetlana Alliluyeva, Dictator Joseph Stalin’s only daughter, is fascinating both because of the subject herself, and because of her proximity to so much chaos. The daughter of Communism in Russia, Alliluyeva existed in a swirl of privilege and fear. I found the most fascinating part of the massive (741 pages, including…

 ❤️❤️❤️❤️ If you are like me, and had never had the pleasure of being introduced to Irish writer Maeve Brennan before 2016, I implore you to stop what you are doing and go read something. Read something now. I was first introduced, while reading Kate Bolick’s Spinster, this year, as Brennan is one of Bolick’s…

❤️❤️❤️❤️ In my lust to read all of Joan Didion’s books, articles and essays, following the completion of The Year of Magical Thinking, I came to The White Album. A collection of essays and articles written by Didion between 1968-1978, in which Didion attempted to unravel her own feelings of America in the 1960s. Often…