A Time To Revisit

I read this book in 1990 at the onset of the first Gulf War and it is time to dust it off and recommend it to anyone who hasn't read it before (or those who want to read it again as I do).

Mixed

I've been blogging way more than I've been reading so am really getting ashamed of myself for not keeping totally on top of things. Here's someone else Ive missed.

I don't watch much TV, but I have managed to catch a few episodes of 'Scrubs,' and what I saw cracked me up. So when I was researching Angela Nissel, author of the recentlyt released 'Mixed,' for her appearance on More Than Words I was surprised to learn that she was a writer on the show. I'd already started reading 'Mixed' and was impressed by the honest, witty tone (she admits that her moms tried to tell her that David Hasselhoff was mixed, and that his curly fro was proof! LOL). Then I found out that she was a co-founder of Okayplayer.com. Who knew? (Quite a few people actually ... I was late!). But enough about how smitten I was with Nissel. Check out the interview, read an excerpt from the book, check out her site, and don't forget to let me (and Angela, since she'll probably check this out too) know what you thought about the interview. Listen to the interview here.

Plodding Along With Books

Truthfully, I'm not sure I knew that Harper Lee was still alive. But, she peeked out of obscurity to write for O.

Ever since Harper Lee's novel, 'To Kill a Mockingbird,' was published in 1960 and went on to sell 2.5 million copies in its first year and win the Pulitzer Prize, the author has led a low-profile life. Ms. Lee, now 80, has published virtually nothing of significance since then except a 1983 book review. But now she has written something for publication. It is a letter for O, the Oprah Winfrey magazine, about how she became a reader as a child in a rural, Depression-era Alabama town, The Associated Press reported. In the magazine's July 'special summer reading issue,' Ms. Lee recalls becoming a reader before she entered first grade. Older sisters and a brother read to her; her mother read her a story a day; her father read her newspaper articles. 'Then, of course, it was Uncle Wiggily at bedtime,' Ms. Lee writes of the popular old-time children's character, right. She notes that books were scarce in the 1930's in the town, Monroeville, where she still lives part time; and the scarcity of books in a town without movies and parks made them a special treasure. 'Now,' she writes, '75 years later in an abundant society where people have laptops, cellphones, iPods and minds like empty rooms, I still plod along with books.'