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Bethanne Patrick

Mike Greenberg is a "guy's guy" - he co-hosts the ESPN show "Mike & Mike in the Morning"- so when he decided to write a novel from the perspective of three women, he knew he'd have to rope in some "gal's gals."
In Season 3 of AMC's Mad Men, Betty Draper's father, Gene Hofstadt, moves in with the family. He and his granddaughter - the 9-year-old Sally Draper - soon bond over Edward Gibbons's The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire.
As the recipient of some 50 books a week, I'm on a first-name-basis with my UPS man. Some days he drops off just one or two packages ("Thanks, Jerry!"). More often he must lug 10 to 12 heavy padded envelopes from his truck to my door ("Thanks a lot, Jerry!").
Memoirs are tricky. The best of them, like Jeannette Walls's The Glass Castle, are brutally honest stories that have you laughing at a feckless father's shenanigans in one moment and crying over a callous mother's dismissal of her daughter in the next.
"Did you know The Paris Wife has revived 'Hadley' as a girl's name?"
Is it fair to separate "commercial" novels from "literary" ones? If anyone can answer that question it's 10-book author Meredith Maran, whose new anthology Why We Write features essays by everyone from Sue Grafton and David Baldacci to Ann Patchett and Walter Mosley. "I chose the authors to include…
Is the book experience displacing the book review? Someone wondered that recently on Twitter, and it got me thinking about the differences between reading an author on the page and hearing his or her words in person.
Greetings, readers! And welcome to my new weekly blog about the thing I love most in this world (after Mr. Bethanne, of course): Books!
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