Book Report: Volume 14

I just finished the YA book  When You Reach Me and loved it. It's got a little bit of a mystery and a little bit of sci-fi mixed with a lot of coming-of-age, plus some retro touches.  It totally deserved to win the Newbery. 

I'm on the last disc of Paul Shaffer's autobiography, We'll Be Here for the Rest of Our Lives, and I love that one, too. I highly recommend getting the audio version, which is read by Shaffer himself. I'm enjoying not only his name-dropping but also his (pretty spot-on) vocal impersonations of said showbiz luminaries. 

Another recent read: Jane Bites Back, which name-checks but is infinitely superior to Pride and Prejudice and Zombies. Instead of just grafting the latest pop-culture craze (zombies!) onto an existing work, this author takes the latest pop-culture craze (vampires!) and comes up with some semblance of a new concept: Jane Austen is a vampire who runs a bookstore in upstate New York, is ticked that she's not making a dime off of the resurgence in all things Austen, and is trying to find a publisher for her manuscript. It's hi-larious and I'm glad it's apparently the first in a series.