Quote de jour
"Reading is to the mind what exercise is to the body."
  ~Richard Steele, Tatler, 1710
In that case, my reading is like training for the Olympics.

True confession #1: I don't post pics of everything I read. You mean there's more? Yes. I skim tons more for research for myself and others. True confession #2 I  sometimes enjoy arranging the covers to create a narrative more than actually reading the magazine. How can you not love the round shapes from a happy face, to a bomb, to a cupcake?




Okay, enough fun and games. Books: I've barely cracked open any of these and unless I invent a 25th hour, they will not get more than a cursory skim. If any grab me, I'll let you know next week.

The bright slim memoir The Bag Lady Papers by Alexandra Penney is getting oodles of press. Its success should replenish the writer's coffers from losing her fortune to Bernie Madoff. I don't feel too sorry for her. Going from owning three homes to one is not poor. Perhaps she should read Priceless by William Poundstone about the hidden psychology of value and what money and prices really mean. Who knew there were jobs like "price consultants" who convince consumers to pay more for less? I feel I have my money's worth already. Cute cover too.


The bland cover design of Mentor's Muses & Monsters by Elizabeth Benedict http://www.elizabethbenedict.com hides an exciting buffet of essays by thirty writers of all stripes and flavors. Writers from Joyce Carol Oates to Jonathan Safran Foer dish about who influenced their writing. A quick skim gleaned juicy insights, and I can't wait to dig in and devour the whole book.

 
While I have a penchant for fresh off the press books. Many are bestsellers or flavors de jour. That said, I like going back and visiting old friends, or books from long, dead writers I haven't read. There's a dearth of books about cats and dogs lately, so I was delighted find a book from 1933 about a dog. Not just any dog, but a cocker spaniel given by Vita Sackville-West to poet Elizabeth Barrett Browning. It's written with sly humor and charm writer by Virgina Woolf. The dog's name and the title of the book is Flush. I bet if a modern new edition was published with a zippy cover and cute photo of a cocker spaniel, it would be a bestseller.