Why am I passionate about this?

When I was a child, I grew up in a very crowded house in suburbia with three sisters. Reading was the best way to escape all the mayhem. By the age of eight I was reading my parents’ novels, whatever books I could find. I wanted to move to a big city like the ones in their novels. At night I would tell myself Cinderella-type stories where I lived in a fabulous apartment and got to be the heroine. I took a class at Harvard Extension, and the professor read my story aloud to the group. From that day on I was hooked.


I wrote

Book cover of The Perfect Breasts

What is my book about?

Hannah Clein will always remember the day she went to a department store with her mother to buy her first…

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The books I picked & why

Book cover of The Best of Everything

Cara Bertoia Why did I love this book?

This book about five girls that live in New York City is so special because it was written in the fifties by a 25-year-old woman who worked in the publishing industry.

In 1958 when opportunities for women were limited the story resonated with a generation of women making their way in a male-dominated world. It explored dating, sex, infidelity, and sexual harassment in an honest way that changed the face of women’s fiction forever. Last year when it was rereleased by Penguin Classics I grabbed a copy, and it was even better than I remembered. 

By Rona Jaffe,

Why should I read it?

2 authors picked The Best of Everything as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

Rona Jaffe's beloved novel about 1950s NYC women in the workplace that paved the way for the #MeToo movement and iconic cultural touchstones like Sex and the City and Mad Men, now for the first time in Penguin Classics, in a 65th anniversary edition with an introduction by New Yorker staff writer Rachel Syme
 
A Penguin Classic
 
When Rona Jaffe’s superb page-turner was first published in 1958, it changed contemporary fiction forever. Some readers were shocked, but millions more were electrified when they saw themselves reflected in its story of five young employees of a New York publishing company. Sixty-five…


Book cover of Back to Blood

Cara Bertoia Why did I love this book?

I was driving across country to move to Miami. When we stopped in Austin, I picked up a copy of Back to Blood by Tom Wolfe.

I was thrilled to find a novel about the city I was moving to. A thick book meticulously researched I settled back and immersed myself into a brilliant novel about multicultural Miami. The Cuban police officer, a Creole professor, Russian criminals, artists from Miami Art Basel, retired New York Yentas, and many more call Miami home.

It was a great primer for my move. That first year I went to Art Basel, visited Little Havana for pastries, and celebrated my birthday at a Russian nightclub all because of Back to Blood.

By Tom Wolfe,

Why should I read it?

1 author picked Back to Blood as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

As a police launch speeds across Miami's Biscayne Bay - with officer Nestor Camacho on board - Tom Wolfe is off and running. Into the feverous landscape of the city, he introduces the Cuban mayor, the black police chief, an ambitious young journalist and his Yale-marinated editor; a psychiatrist who specialises in sex addiction and his Latina nurse by day, mistress by night - until lately, the love of Nestor's life; a refined, and oh-so-light-skinned young woman from Haiti and her Creole-spouting, black-gang-banger-stylin' little brother; a billionaire porn addict, crack dealers in the `hoods, `de-skilled' conceptual artists at the Miami…


Book cover of Shopgirl

Cara Bertoia Why did I love this book?

I lived in Palm Springs for a long time. My husband and I loved to go to Los Angeles, where we would roam the neighborhoods.

My favorite book about Los Angeles is Shopgirl a thin novel written by Steve Martin, yes that Steve Martin, the actor. I love his writing; it is so spare he doesn’t waste a word. What happens when new-to-the-city aspiring artist Miabelle begins to date the wealthy older Ray Porter.

This book isn’t about how to marry a millionaire but an honest look that captures the loneliness mixed with exhilaration that a young woman faces when she moves to a place where she doesn’t know anyone. I carry this book with me every place I move because I want to keep the real Los Angeles close to me.

By Steve Martin,

Why should I read it?

1 author picked Shopgirl as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it. This book is for kids age 12, 13, 14, and 15.

What is this book about?

'A delicate, poignant modern romance about a shy shopgirl' Richard Corliss

Mirabelle Buttersfield spends her days selling expensive evening gloves in Beverly Hills' finest store, and her nights watching television and drawing darkly gothic pictures.

Adrift in the world and lonely, she has few customers, so spends most of her time leaning on the counter staring into space. But then two men enter her life: Jeremy, a roadie for a band, and Mr Ray Porter, a middle-aged millionaire who invites her out to dinner.

Funny, tender, and insightful, Shop Girl is a coming of age story set against the backdrop…


Book cover of A Man in Full

Cara Bertoia Why did I love this book?

I lived in Atlanta for a while and this is a great novel about the New South. Reading this novel is like taking a master class in real estate investing.

As with every Tom Wolfe novel it is a huge sprawling book that explores where all classes and races that inhabit a huge city intersect. Charles Croker a prosperous real estate investor is deeply in debt but that doesn’t stop the demands of his much younger trophy wife. Race relations are shattered when Fareek Fanon a star running back for a local college is accused of raping a girl from a prominent family.

Wolfe’s attention to detail paints a full picture of a city in the midst of change. 

By Tom Wolfe,

Why should I read it?

4 authors picked A Man in Full as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

A dissection of greed-obsessed America a decade after The Bonfire of the Vanities and on the cusp of the millennium, from the master chronicler of American culture Tom Wolfe

Charlie Croker, once a fabled college football star, is now a late-middle-aged Atlanta real estate entrepreneur-turned conglomerate king. His expansionist ambitions and outsize ego have at last hit up against reality. Charlie has a 28,000 acre quail shooting plantation, a young and demanding second wife and a half-empty downtown tower with a staggering load of debt. Wolfe shows us contemporary America with all the verve, wit, and insight that have made…


Book cover of Bridget Jones's Diary

Cara Bertoia Why did I love this book?

I remember reading this novel and laughing out loud. It inspired a decade of chick lit and inspired three movies.

Bridget Jones first appeared in Bridget Jones’s Diary Column in The Independent newspaper. A modernization of Jane Austin’s Pride and Prejudice. It convinced a generation of women that if they moved to London, they could meet their own Mr. Darcy. This famous line from the book sums up life in the big city, “It is a truth universally acknowledged that when one part of your life starts going okay, another falls spectacularly to pieces.”

Follow Bridget as she changes careers, falls in and out of love, loses and gains weight, and has a jolly old time, you will too.

By Helen Fielding,

Why should I read it?

18 authors picked Bridget Jones's Diary as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

The multi-million copy number one Bestseller

A dazzlingly urban satire on modern relationships?
An ironic, tragic insight into the demise of the nuclear family?
Or the confused ramblings of a pissed thirty-something?

As Bridget documents her struggles through the social minefield of her thirties and tries to weigh up the eternal question (Daniel Cleaver or Mark Darcy?), she turns for support to four indispensable friends: Shazzer, Jude, Tom and a bottle of chardonnay.

Welcome to Bridget's first diary: mercilessly funny, endlessly touching and utterly addictive.

Helen Fielding's first Bridget Jones novel, Bridget Jones's Diary, sparked a phenomenon that has seen…


Explore my book 😀

Book cover of The Perfect Breasts

What is my book about?

Hannah Clein will always remember the day she went to a department store with her mother to buy her first bra as her last best day, “B.C.” before the cancer. She considered herself an ordinary child who loved challah bread, reading, and her family. We follow Hannah over three decades, as she navigates the tricky transition from girlhood to womanhood. All her life, she just wants to belong. Be normal. In a tale that explores a woman’s complicated relationships with her body we learn the psyche is a funny thing.

The Perfect Breasts is a personal and raw short story about boobs, written to honor breast cancer awareness month. All proceeds from Kindle Unlimited to every book bought will be donated to cancer research.

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Book cover of Girl of Light

Elana Gomel Author Of Nine Levels

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Why am I passionate about this?

Author

Elana's 3 favorite reads in 2024

What is my book about?

A girl of Light in a world of darkness.

In Svetlana's country, it’s a felony to break a mirror. Mirrors are conduits of the Voice, the deity worshiped by all who follow Light. The Voice protects humans of MotherLand from the dangers that beset them on all sides: an invading army of wolf-headed men on their borders and the infectious, ever-evolving, zombie-like Enemy that plagues them at home. When Svetlana meets Andrei, a traumatized and amnesiac soldier from another war, she embarks on a harrowing journey of adventure and self-discovery that leads her to question everything she was taught to…

Girl of Light

By Elana Gomel,

What is this book about?

A voice through Svetlana's mirror guides her beloved MotherLand from behind its' electric tower. The war with Wulfstan is not going as well as Sveta and her parents hope, but Sveta trusts the Voice. When her best friend Tattie goes missing, and Sveta saves Andrei, a soldier in summer uniform in the dead of winter, it takes Sveta through a crucible of Light, doubt, and back to the altar of true belief. Girl of Light unravels Sveta's beloved MotherLand in a war-torn adventure through monsters, missing eyes and broken mirrors.

Girl of Light is a dark fantasy with a Slavic…


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