Chick Lit - Why Pre-Ordering Books Matters

How Jennifer Weiner, Jen Lancaster and Stacey Ballis got me buying books again

Seven years ago, I stopped buying books. I moved to a city with a great library hold system. I could request all the hot new books and have them in my hands in a matter of months – and they were free.  I blogged about the ones I liked. I tried out cookbooks and even bought a couple of those that I couldn’t live without. Then, I started following Jen Lancaster and  Jennifer Weiner on twitter. Their recommendations turned me on to great authors: Alison Scotch Winn, Caroline Leavitt, Sarah Dessen, Stacey Ballis, Libby Bray , Liz Moore and the list goes on. I read their books and tweeted my delight.  And they tweeted back! It was thrilling to get an immediate answer from authors whose works had transported me to a different place or even back to times in my life with a whole new perspective. Following these women on twitter also opened a door into the publishing world.

In the past year or so, Jennifer Weiner has written about the bias against women in literary publications. She’s noted the gender disparity in the selection of books reviewed by the New York Times and the degradation of literature branded “chick lit”.   Initially, I found this annoying. Who cares? I am a person. I am reading your books. The people who are putting you on the best seller list don’t seem to care about this disparity. I don’t choose books based on reviews in the New York Times because I find the NY Times pretentious and irrelevant to my life. I want to punch people in the nose who say, “I saw in the Times yesterday….” But then I figured, these reviews must somehow be very very important. I was just missing it.

Then author Stacey Ballis spelled it out for me in her blog. Reviews matter because pre-orders matter. Pre-orders determine the size of a print run and the resources a publisher will put into promoting a book. This is a big deal in general and a very big deal for new authors or authors who haven’t previously appeared on the bestseller list. Now I got it. The bias in these literary publications could be quashing the dreams of these incredibly talented women authors simply because a lot of women read their books. That pissed me off. Thankfully, Jennifer Weiner, Jennifer Lancaster and Stacey Ballis have given me an opportunity to do something about it by recommending great new authors early enough that my pre-order can help make a difference. So I have started buying books again and if you value great books written by great woman authors may be you should too.

Jennifer Weiner tweets @jenniferweiner & blogs at http://jenniferweiner.blogspot.com/

Jennifer Lancaster tweets @altgeldshrugged & blogs at http://www.jennsylvania.com/

Stacey Ballis tweets @staceyballis &  blogs at http://thepolymathchronicles.blogspot.com/  

You should PRE-ORDER her new book Off the Menu. Go ahead. I'll wait.

2011 Cookbook challenge: Crockpot Coq Au Vin

Make It Fast, Cook It Slow: The Big Book of Everyday Slow Cookingis a great slow cooking cookbook. It evolved from Stephanie O'Dea's blog where she challenged herself to A Year of Slow Cooking- using her slow cooker every day to make healthy gluten free meals for her family. I really like this cookbook. The layout is straight forward and easy to read. She uses the slow cooker to make a lot of unconventional items such as desserts or drinks. This is a huge help when preparing a lot of dishes. Having the slow cooker, stove, oven and toaster oven all cranking at the same time definitely increases the chance that we will have everything ready to serve at the same time. She also gives a "verdict" on many of the recipes.

The recipe we tested as her Coq Au Vin recipe. The only modification was that we used dried thyme instead of fresh thyme.

Coq Au Vin

--6 to 8 frozen chicken thighs


--6 slices cooked and crumbled bacon (I used turkey, but you could use PORK)

--8 oz sliced baby portabella mushrooms (they are right next to the regular mushrooms)

--1 cup baby carrots

--1 chopped yellow onion

--3 cloves chopped or minced garlic

--1/2 t black pepper

--1/2 t kosher salt

--1/2 cup chicken broth

--1 1/2 cup cheap red wine (you can use non-alcoholic wine, if you wish)

--2 large fresh thyme sprigs (I really think the fresh thyme is the key, here. Go steal some from your neighbors garden.)

The Directions.

Cook your bacon. I used turkey bacon, and baked it on a broiler pan. Dump the frozen chicken into your crockpot and start layering in the rest of the ingredients. This is really a no-fuss (albeit amazingly gourmetish) preparation. Just throw it all in.

Cover and cook on low for 8 hours. You could cook it on high for 4, but it won't taste as good. The flavors meld so nicely when cooked low and slow.

We served it over pasta. We both really enjoyed this recipe. We felt it needed a little more salt added at the end of finish it. The use of fresh thyme matters. It would have given the dish that subtle, but important extra kick of flavor so make the trip to the grocery store.  Next time, we will lightly sautee the mushrooms in the bacon fat. The mushrooms released a lot of water during the cooking that diluted some of the flavors.

Because chicken thighs are so cheap and this recipe is so easy, I can see this becoming a staple in our week work menu.

Book Review: Life After Yes by Aidan Donnelley Rowley

One of the authors I read recommended Life After Yes: A Novel by Aidan Donnelley Rowley on her Twitter feed so I decided to check it out. I was pleased.

Life After Yes follows a young corporate lawyer through her post-engagement freak out. Rowley does a great job creating complex characters. We learn about their relationships with their parents, her drinking problem and the complexities of their relationships from side comments or nuanced references. Reading this novel felt like peeling back an onion layer by layer.  It's a great read to cozy up to on the plane or by the fire. 

Book Review: An Object of Beauty by Steve Martin

I was very excited to hear that Steve Martin had a new novel coming out. I loved ShopGirl so I jumped at this one.



An Object of Beauty: A Novel by Steve Martin is a fantastic novel. The story is set in New York City in the art auction community. One of my favorite things about the novel is that it features reproductions of the art pieces to highlight the nuances of the story for those of us art novices. Martin does a great job crafting complex female characters. He tells a story that manages to feel sweet and harsh - all at the same time. I definitely recommend picking this one up.

Book Review: 168 Hours and Unclutter Your Life in a Week

Today I wanted to feature two excellent books that are perfect to read as the last days of 2010 lead into the bright new beginnings of 2011 and resolutions to be better are made and hopefully, this year, kept. Thease books give you the tools to get there.




168 Hours: You Have More Time Than You Think by Laura Vanderkam



A lot of books out there discuss time management and how to achieve work/life balance. 168 hours is the best book I have read on this topic because it focuses on the core skill needed to achieve all this: prioritization. 168 hours is the number of hours in a week. The book is structured to help get the most out of those 168 hours.

Vanderkam ends each chapter with questions that help the reader focus on core competencies. Core competencies are the activities that give you joy, that you are really good at, and that you would not feel complete unless you were doing. One of the questions that really stuck with me was: If someone offered you $4 million, but you had to give up doing all of the current core competencies of your job, what one thing would give you pause? What is the one thing that it would be hard for you to never be able to do again because it gives you satisfaction or job? Program a computer? Provide help and guidance to someone? Fight a fire? Teach a child? What is that one thing? Because that is the thing you should be spending your time doing.

She also offers concrete suggestions for reworking your 168 hours. Some of her suggestions have been:

- Use those early rising morning with your kids as your quality time instead of beating yourself up for not being home at 5:00 pm.

- Use the time in the shower, the car, waiting in the car pool lane to mediate , pray and make gratitude lists.

I highly recommend this book. It is a must read for everyone.




Unclutter Your Life in One Week by Erin Doland is a fantastic book. It's more than just a simple organization book with tips like put things into bucket. She goes step by step through each room in your house and at your office on how declutter each space and make it more efficient in order to achieve a better, more peaceful life. She also tackles how to unclutter your schedule and even how to handle the holidays. I loved this book. I found her criteria for what to keep and what to re-evaluate tremendously helpful. A must read for anyone who needs some tools for organization both in their physical space and their schedule.

Book Review: If You Have Cry – Go Outside by Kelly Cutrone

Kelly Cutrone has appeared on the The Hills, The City and her own series Kell on Earth. She also runs People’s Evolution. If You Have to Cry, Go Outside: And Other Things Your Mother Never Told You  surprised me. I didn’t expect much but I really enjoyed some of the key messages of the book:

1. Believe in Yourself

2. Find and listen to your inner voice

3. Focus on building a Tribe

4. Work hard

5. Give back

Cutrone is unapologetic about the need to work hard and pay your dues to the extent that no one in her office eats until the people higher up than them in the hierarchy have eaten. She is deeply committed to pay it forward and breaking the cycle of women competing, backstabbing and manipulating each other in order to get ahead. She lost me a little in the passages that explained her spirituality, but inspired me as some of the chapters read as pep talks. She is also committed to telling the truth. This is a good book for someone who is going through a transition – graduation, job transition, etc. It’s not as heavy handed as some books I have read and offers some good practical advice.

Are you watching? Castle

I am really enjoying the second season of Castle. The show centers on a writer who is shadowing a New York detective. The writer becomes an asset for whole team and, of course, a source of sexual tension for the dectective. The crime solving is augmented by a glimpse into the writers' home life with his charming daughter and eccentric mother. They usually provide a nice break from the investigation plotline.

I was very intrigued when I saw copies of the novel mentioned in the show for sale.



I read Naked Heat (Nikki Heat) by "Richard Castle" over the weekend. It's a pretty thick novel that reads like an episode of the show. What makes for great television doesn't necessarily make for a great novel. For instance, introducing new characters in the last couple chapters and one of them just happens to be the villian. I thought I missed a couple chapters. I think it is a very smart marketing ploy and it does match the plot quite nicely. If you are huge fan of the show, I would pick it up just for the novelty factor.

Book Review: Sliding Into Home by Kendra Wilkinson and Priceless by Nicole Richie

This week book theme is clearly books by people who are famous for being famous. This does not make them good authors. I learned this the hard way.

Well, I think the statement that sums up this book is the question my husband posed to me when he saw I was reading it, “Is that by that idiot on TV? What is she famous for again?” Umm, yeah.

First, I don’t think Wilkinson is an idiot. She has parlayed her biggest assets into a fairly successful career and that does take a good head on a girl’s shoulders. Her time on reality TV also portrays her as a very kind girl with a good heart. Second, she is famous for being Hugh Hefner’s girlfriend and starring on the reality TV shows, “Girls Next Door” and “Kendra.”

However, that does not mean Sliding Into Home is a good book. It’s clear that the ghost writer tried his best, but it just wasn’t enough. The book is basically just the timeline of Wilkinson’s life. Missing from the book is any type of emotion or analysis of what happened to her. It was unfortunate that I read this book right after Diablo Cody’s Candy Girl because it made this omission all the more glaring. Wilkinson relates her time stripping as being crazy profitable and filled with sisterhood and rainbows and unicorns. I really have a hard time believing that. She recounts her time as a drug addict the same way. She could stop at any time, it’s just that she didn’t want to. Drugs magically appeared for free most of the time to maintain her habit. The violence and dirtiness that usually accompanies drug addict stories was suspiciously missing. And then she was able to just quit – again, magically avoiding withdrawal.

I’d give this book a pass unless you were a huge fan of the Girls Next Door. The strongest chapters of the book are where she provides the behind-the-scenes scoop on what was really going on at the Mansion during her time there. Otherwise – leave it on the shelf.

Priceless: A Novel by Nicole Richie is as good as you'd expect. I had high hopes for this book because I have really enjoyed Lauren Conrad's series of young adult fiction novels. Conrad's use of behind-the-scenes knowledge really elevates the book. In Priceless, Richie is just not bold enough. She has an okay plot and her writing style is adequate. She just doesn't take the risk and really delve into what it means to be privileged due to no doing of your own and the crossroads that many spoiled rich kids reach when they have to decide who they are going to be. She skirts around the edges of that discussion entirely. If she had really dove in, this piece of fiction would have actually been pretty good.

Book Review: Delivering Happiness by Tony Hseih

Delivering Happiness: A Path to Profits, Passion, and Purpose by Tony Hsieh is a great inspiring book. It is part biography, part employee handbook and part company history. Tony Hsieh is the CEO of zappos.com. As a frequent online shopper, I am well acquainted with Zappos and their free shipping and 365 day return policy.


In the book, Hsieh details how he has followed his passion and created Zappos. It is an incredible story. For me, it was very inspiring to read how he made it through the tough times – going from a $20 million buyout to having to sell everything he owned to make Zappos’ payroll. He highlights the core values of Zappos and the huge gains that can be made by being honest, have a singular goal, and creating a fantastic work culture. He realized early on in Zappos development that the niche for Zappos was to be the best at customer service. He then weighed all of the major decisions that followed on that key principle. Later that principle has evolved into the tag line of Delivering Happiness. He challenges all his readers to evaluate how they are measuring up to Zappos core values.

Hsieh’s writing is straight-forward and sometimes even funny. He also includes vignettes from other members’ of the Zappos team. I highly recommend this book.

Cooking for Isaiah

So I had plans. Big huge plans. I was going to cook a recipe from this cookbook and then post pictures of what I created next to the pictures from the book and it was going to be lovely and inspiring and you were going to buy the cookbook and make recipes too and then we would all be happy.

Then I substituted brown rice for arborio rice and my dreams were shattered. This is NOT, I repeat, NOT  a good substitution because brown rice isn't as starchy. This creates irreparable damage if you are trying to make risotto cakes, which I was. So instead we got a very flavorful bowl of brown rice. Oops.

BUT - that doesn't mean this cookbook isn't fantastic, because it is. It is the 100% best gluten free cookbooks I have ever seen. And it is now one of my top ten favorite cookbooks. I present you:


Cooking for Isaiah: Gluten-Free & Dairy-Free Recipes for Easy Delicious Meals by Silvana Nardone

The recipes are approachable, but not something you would think of yourself. She offers easy substitutions for gluten free flour or pancake mix and covers all parts of the meal. She also has pictures. I love pictures. They inspire, but also let you know if you are on the right track.

 This is a must buy, people. Give it to anyone you know with a gluten or dairy allergy or a commitment to good food. Just don't substitute brown rice for arborio rice. That is a BAD idea.

Book Review: Candy Girl by Diablo Cody

I took a break from business books to finally get around to reading Diablo Cody’s book: Candy Girl: A Year in the Life of an Unlikely Stripper. I really love the scripts for Juno and United States of Tara so I was looking forward to this book. I was not disappointed.


The book details the year that Cody entered the world of stripping, exotic dancing, entertaining, whatever it is you want to call it. Her perspective is very unique. She loved stripping, craved it. The book details her time at several strip clubs in the great Minneapolis area. The parts I found most interesting were how she details the economics of the job and how hard girls had to hustle to meet quotas so that they didn’t owe the management money at the end of the night. It’s interesting that the work she found most degrading was trying to get men to buy a drink coupon or a t-shirt. I generally like her writing style. Sometimes the pace gets stymied by a lengthy description, but overall it’s a fast read. I especially liked that she wasn’t trying to impart a moral or teach a lesson. She set out to tell the story of her year as a stripper and she did that well.

Book Review: Good Boss/Bad Boss and the No Asshole Rule

I have been on a business-related book reading bender lately. Don’t worry I’ll get back to fun fiction in the next couple weeks. I was really looking forward to the Good Boss/Bad Boss and the No Asshole Rule books by Robert Sutton. I was pretty disappointed.





The No Asshole Rule: Building a Civilized Workplace and Surviving One That Isn't is basically just chapter after chapter of why not to hire assholes. Yeah, kinda figured that out myself. I would have appreciated more guidance on how to change the culture at your worksite so that isn’t tolerated beyond just citing the studies and case studies of where it has been implemented. I find it incredibly difficult to move from a culture of “At least he/she turns in the work on time” to “we won’t tolerate any behavior that negatively impacts our business or our employees.” The reasons for why this shift is important are clearly laid out in the book, but I am missing how to get from point A to point B.





Good Boss, Bad Boss: How to Be the Best... and Learn from the Worst by Robert Sutton is better. The book devotes its chapters to the qualities of a good boss: good listener, asks questions, listens to employees, confident, decision-maker, etc. This book would be very helpful for someone who has not found a good mentor or example of “good boss” within his/her organization. It provides a good amount of material to help you reflect on your own leadership style and the case studies illustrate the points very well. Again, the person reading would have to be open to changing it up or evaluating their performance. I could see it being used as a tool by a supervisor to help a manager evaluate their own performance.

Book Review: Switch by Chip and Dan Heath

Switch: How to Change Things When Change Is Hard by Chip Heath and Dan Heath

I found this book to be a revelation. It’s smart and delivers on its promise. By the end of the book, I had a much clearer perspective on to make change. One of the reasons that I like this book so much is that it focuses on the systems in place – not the people. Too many books focuses on the people and start from the assumption that there is something wrong with them: they are lazy or they are dumb. These assumptions lead only to two solutions: inspiring pep talks or more training.

Switch focuses on the environment and the systems that are in place that lead to a given result. The Heath brothers argue that to be successful you have to change the systems, the environment or the person’s mindset. They go through all the emotional pieces that make people resistant to change.

A great example of the book’s ideology takes place at a factory. This factory has struggled with safety. Workers are getting their hands caught in one particular rate at an unacceptable rate. Now, some ways to deal with this could have been to “educate” the workers on the dangers of getting their hands caught in the machine, or to create a punishment/incentive scheme. The managers look at the problem and realized that no one wants to get their hand stuck so they devised a safety mechanism where in order to operate the machine, two buttons a arms length apart had to be pressed. If both buttons were not pressed, the machine would turn off. Now it was impossible to both run the machine and get your hand caught. Genius.


I highly recommend this book. It is one of the few management books I plan to purchase and go back to over and over.

Whatcha Reading? The case for going vegan

The idea of going vegan is very intriguing to me. I don’t think I would ever do it, but recently I read a couple books that made a very compelling case:



Clean: The Revolutionary Program to Restore the Body's Natural Ability to Heal Itself by Alejandro Junger


The Kind Diet: A Simple Guide to Feeling Great, Losing Weight, and Saving the Planet by Alicia Silverstone

The Kind Diet begins with a very strong case for going vegan both from the environmental/animal rights and health standpoints. The tone is persuasive. Preach Alicia Preach! The book succeeded in getting me to think about the food choices I make. The cookbook aspect of the book I found more challenging. This is not a lean into veganism cookbook. The ingredients are very specific to vegan cooking and may be difficult to locate in a local supermarket. The recipes also take quite a bit of prep. It would be a great cookbook for someone who had been vegan for years and was looking to take their meal preparations up a notch.



Clean: The Revolutionary Program to Restore the Body's Natural Ability to Heal Itself
I picked up this book at the library after reading that it is the new fad cleanse program a la the Master Cleanse and the Martha Vineyard diet. This book actually made a lot of sense. The early chapters focus on the “science” of why the body needs to detoxify. I put “science” in quotations because I don’t have the inclination to figure out if what the authors claim is true. True or not – some of the claims make sense. For instance, the author explains how our cells aren’t meant to deal with all these toxins from our food - toxins like pesticides, steroids, chemically created foods. The process that cells go through to rid the body of these toxins creates byproducts like mucus and that creates inflammation. There have been links between people with increased inflammation and cancer. Logically that makes sense to me. The rest of the book discusses prepping for a cleanse and the actual clean diet regime. Of all the books I have read on detoxification – this was by far the best and seemed the safest. I am even considering purchasing it as a reference guide to which foods are more suited to decreasing inflammation. If the cleanse movement is something that has caught your attention, I would definitely pick up this book to educate yourself on one method of doing. Obviously, don’t make any major changes to your diet or exercise regime without consulting your physician. (Apparently, webmd.com does not count as a physician – so keep that in mind.)