The Sunday Salon... And Crashes in Your Reading Life

What is the Sunday Salon? Imagine some university library's vast reading room. It's filled with people--students and faculty and strangers who've wandered in. They're seated at great oaken desks, books piled all around them, and they're all feverishly reading and jotting notes in their leather-bound journals as they go. Later they'll mill around the open dictionaries and compare their thoughts on the afternoon's literary intake...

Some of you out there know that a little while back I was in a pretty serious car accident. A teenager on his way home from school decided to run a stop sign, going so fast I didn't even see him when he hit me, and the rest is history. I was lucky because it could have been so much worse. I survived with cuts and big bruises and a concussion and all sorts of lumps all over, and lots of pain (still), and a leg that doesn't function anymore because my knee is torn in a zillion places, and frustration, etc. Someday, I know this will be all behind me. In the meantime, the word crash makes me cringe. SO, I thought since the "crash" is ever present in my mind these days, I'd see what kind of books I could find that had the word "crash" in them. It seems that crash can be more than a car crash...

Crash by Lisa McMann... From the back flap:
Jules lives with her family above their restaurant, which means she smells like pizza most of the time and drives their double-meatball-shaped food truck to school. It’s not a recipe for popularity, but she can handle that. What she can’t handle is the vision. Over and over, Jules sees a careening truck hit a building and explode... and nine body bags in the snow. She has no idea why this is happening to her or if she’s going crazy. It hardly matters, because the visions are everywhere--on billboards, television screens, windows--and she’s the only one who can see them. But it’s not until the vision starts coming more frequently, and revealing more clues, that Jules knows what she has to do. Because now she can see the face in one of the body bags, and it's someone she knows. Someone she’s been in love with for as long as she can remember.

I love this cover! This is a YA, that I think would appeal to the Adult Crossover crowd. The author, Lisa McMann is well known for a 2 other YA series, The Unwanteds , which is a dysptopian trilogy that sounds fantastic, and the Wake Trilogy , and has gotten rave reviews for all her writing. I like the premiss of her getting these visions and her determination to put the pieces together to make sure none of it happens. This book is available in Paperback , Kindle , or Nook!

Snow Crash by Neal Stephenson... From the publisher: Weaving virtual reality, Sumerian myth, and just about everything in between with a cool, hip cybersensibility to bring us the gigathriller of the information age. In reality, Hiro Protagonist delivers pizza for Uncle Enzo’s CosoNostra Pizza Inc., but in the Metaverse he’s a warrior prince. Plunging headlong into the enigma of a new computer virus that’s striking down hackers everywhere, he races along the neon-lit streets on a search-and-destroy mission for the shadowy virtual villain threatening to bring about infocalypse. Snow Crash is a mind-altering romp through a future America so bizarre, so outrageous…you’ll recognize it immediately.

Neal Stephenson writing is sometimes referred to as a cyberpunk, or a postmodern kind of world with a good dose of technology thrown in. How can you not like a warrior prince who delivers pizza for a living?! Sci-fi fans should like this, as well as cyberpunk enthusiasts. Snow Crash dates back to some of Neal Stephenson's earlier works, this dating back to 1994, and this book has gotten great reviews! It's available in Paperback , Kindle , or Nook!

Crash and Burn by Artie Lange... from the publisher: Veteran comedian and radio personality Artie Lange turns an unflinching eye and his signature wit on his perilous descent into drug addiction, life-threatening depression, and ultimately, his recovery, in the follow-up to his hilariously raw debut, #1 New York Times bestseller Too Fat to Fish. At a high point in his career, Artie Lange played a sold-out show in Carnegie Hall and totally killed—yet during his standing ovation, all he could think of were the two bags of heroin in his pocket. In the midst of a deep, self-destructive depression, addicted to heroin and prescription drugs, he lashed out at everyone around him— from his fellow cast members on The Howard Stern Show, to celebrity guests, his longtime friends, and even his own family. By turns dark and disturbing, hilarious and heartbreaking, and always drop-dead honest, Crash and Burn lifts the curtain on Artie’s dangerous slide, and offers a new, crystal-clear window into the mind of the addict... With the help and support of friends and family, Artie claws his way back, turning his life and career around. And despite his slipups, backslides, and permanent losses, Artie forges on. With Crash and Burn, Artie Lange goes all-in, confessing a story that is as shocking as it is funny, ever tempered by his characteristic humor, self-awareness, and inimitable way with words. 

I do enjoy a good memoir, but I burned out on celebrity tell-alls a while back. BUT, Artie Lange isn't a celebrity to me, I never heard of him. His crash on drugs is a familiar one to many celebrities, but when I read an excerpt of this from Rolling Stones magazine and I was immediately drawn in to the story and the writing! His story seems fresh and human. The story of someone who has it all, but can't see that until "you only realize how big your mountain is once you're laying motionless, helpless, and hopeless in the valley below." That is Artie Lange's story. This is definitely on my reading list. Crash and Burn will be published Oct. 29th by Touchstone, a division of Simon & Schuster. You can pre-order the Hardcover , and it will be available for the Kindle and the Nook the same day as the hardcover!

Other Bookish news... 
*Author Alice Munro, who writes short stories, won the Noble Prize for Literature on Oct. 10th! "Since 1901, the Nobel Prize in Literature has been awarded annually to an author from any country who has, in the words of the will of Alfred Nobel, produced "in the field of literature the most outstanding work in an ideal direction" Congratulations Alice Munro!

*Have you heard about the backlash of self-published erotica? Well, it seems that there is a sweeping attack & delete at the major eBook stores of their self-published erotica. A news report about finding "questionable" material in the self-published section even made WH Smith shut down their site entirely. You can read the full story at The Digital Reader

Chick with Books Blog News... Chick with Books is available on Kindle now! If you own a Kindle, YOU can subscribe to Chick with Books via Amazon and have the blog delivered to your Kindle automatically! You can get all the details at my Amazon Kindle Page!

The Week in Review...
On tuesday, Oct. 11th, I reviewed The Nine Fold Heaven by Mingmei Yip. It was a sexy fun thrill ride through the Shanghai of the 1930's! 

On friday, Oct. 14th,  I blogged about eBook subscriptions or the "Netflixing" of the eBook industry. It's coming, and I highlighted 3 of the top choices.

On saturday, Oct. 15th, I reviewed Sailor Twain by Mark Siegel. Folklore, mystery, romance & the open sea all make for a wonderful story, that also happen's to be a graphic novel beautifully rendered in soft charcoal with hand lettering of the text. Do not miss this one even if you're new to graphic novels!

NEXT WEEK, look for an update on some great books coming out this week and next! And of course there's always bookish news.

Happy reading.... Suzanne