"Waiting On" Wednesday: Bound

"Waiting On" Wednesday is a weekly event, hosted here, that spotlights upcoming releases that we're eagerly anticipating.

This week's pre-publication "can't-wait-to-read" selection is:

Bound
By Antonya Nelson
Publication Date: September 28

From Amazon:

Catherine and Oliver, young wife and older entrepreneurial husband, are negotiating their difference in age and a plethora of well-concealed secrets. Oliver, now in his sixties, is a serial adulterer and has just fallen giddily in love yet again. Catherine, seemingly placid and content, has ghosts of a past she scarcely remembers. When Catherine's long-forgotten high school friend dies and leaves Catherine the guardian of her teenage daughter, that past comes rushing back. As Oliver manages his new love, and Catherine her new charge and darker past, local news reports turn up the volume on a serial killer who has reappeared after years of quiet. In a time of hauntings and new revelations, Nelson's characters grapple with their public and private obligations, continually choosing between the suppression or indulgence of wild desires. Which way they turn, and what balance they find, may only be determined by those who love them most.

What's your "waiting on" pick this week?

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"Waiting On" Wednesday: The Weekend

"Waiting On" Wednesday is a weekly event, hosted here, that spotlights upcoming releases that we're eagerly anticipating.

This week's pre-publication "can't-wait-to-read" selection is:

The Weekend

By Bernhard Schlink

Publication Date: October 12

From Amazon:

Old friends and lovers reunite for a weekend in a secluded country home after spending decades apart. They excavate old memories and pass clandestine judgments on the wildly divergent paths they’ve taken since their youth. But this isn’t just any reunion, and their conversations about the old days aren’t your typical reminiscences: After twenty-four years, Jörg, a convicted murderer and terrorist, has been released from prison. The announcement of his pardon sends shock waves throughout the country, but before the announcement, his friends gather for his first weekend of freedom. They are invited by Jörg’s devoted sister, Christiane, whose overwhelming concern for her brother’s safety is matched only by the unrelenting pull of Marko, a unnervingly passionate young man intent on having Jörg continue to fight for the cause.

What's your "waiting on" pick this week?

Want to participate? Grab the logo, post your own WoW entry on your blog, and leave your link below!

"Waiting On" Wednesday: Bitter in the Mouth

"Waiting On" Wednesday is a weekly event, hosted here, that spotlights upcoming releases that we're eagerly anticipating.

This week's pre-publication "can't-wait-to-read" selection is:

Bitter in the Mouth

By Monique Truong

Publication Date: August 31

From Amazon:

Growing up in the small town of Boiling Springs, North Carolina, in the 70s and 80s, Linda believes that she is profoundly different from everyone else, including the members of her own family. Now in her thirties, Linda looks back at her past when she navigated her way through life with the help of her great-uncle Harper, who loves her and loves to dance, and her best friend Kelly, with whom Linda exchanges almost daily letters. For as long as she can remember, Linda has experienced a secret sense—she can “taste” words, which have the power to disrupt, dismay, or delight. Even as Linda makes her way north to Yale and New York City, she still does not know the truth about her past.Then, when a personal tragedy compels Linda to return to Boiling Springs, she gets to know a mother she never knew and uncovers a startling story of a life, a family.

What's your "waiting on" pick this week?

Want to participate? Grab the logo, post your own WoW entry on your blog, and leave your link below!

Library Loot: 6/10

Let summer reading begin! Based on my too-full library on-hold list (who knew it maxed out at 30?), it looks like women's fiction enthusiasts are in for a treat over the next few months.

Here's what came up for me this week:

Beach Week by Susan Coll

The Stormchasers by Jenna Blum

Backseat Saints by Joshilyn Jackson

My Name Is Memory by Ann Brashares

The One That I Want by Allison Winn Scotch

Visit Library Loot to see what other bloggers picked up this week.

"Waiting On" Wednesday: Freedom

"Waiting On" Wednesday is a weekly event, hosted here, that spotlights upcoming releases that we're eagerly anticipating.

This week's pre-publication "can't-wait-to-read" selection is:

Freedom

By Jonathan Franzen

Publication Date: August 31

From Amazon:

Patty and Walter Berglund were the new pioneers of old St. Paul—the gentrifiers, the hands-on parents, the avant-garde of the Whole Foods generation. Patty was the ideal sort of neighbor, who could tell you where to recycle your batteries and how to get the local cops to actually do their job. She was an enviably perfect mother and the wife of Walter’s dreams. Together with Walter—environmental lawyer, commuter cyclist, total family man—she was doing her small part to build a better world.

But now, in the new millennium, the Berglunds have become a mystery. Why has their teenage son moved in with the aggressively Republican family next door? Why has Walter taken a job working with Big Coal? What exactly is Richard Katz—outré rocker and Walter’s college best friend and rival—still doing in the picture? Most of all, what has happened to Patty? Why has the bright star of Barrier Street become “a very different kind of neighbor,” an implacable Fury coming unhinged before the street’s attentive eyes?

What's your "waiting on" pick this week?

Want to participate? Grab the logo, post your own WoW entry on your blog, and leave your link below!

"Waiting On" Wednesday: The False Friend

"Waiting On" Wednesday is a weekly event, hosted here, that spotlights upcoming releases that we're eagerly anticipating.

This week's pre-publication "can't-wait-to-read" selection is:

The False Friend

By Myla Goldberg

Publication Date: October 5

From Amazon:

Leaders of a mercurial clique of girls, Celia and Djuna reigned mercilessly over their three followers. One after­noon, they decided to walk home along a forbidden road. Djuna disappeared, and for twenty years Celia blocked out how it happened. The lie Celia told to conceal her misdeed became the accepted truth: everyone assumed Djuna had been abducted, though neither she nor her abductor was ever found. Celia’s unconscious avoidance of this has meant that while she and her longtime boyfriend, Huck, are professionally successful, they’ve been unable to move forward, their relationship falling into a rut that threatens to bury them both. Celia returns to her hometown to confess the truth, but her family and childhood friends don’t believe her. Huck wants to be supportive, but his love can’t blind him to all that contra­dicts Celia’s version of the past.

What's your "waiting on" pick this week?

Want to participate? Grab the logo, post your own WoW entry on your blog, and leave your link below!

"Waiting On" Wednesday: Rich Boy

"Waiting On" Wednesday is a weekly event, hosted here, that spotlights upcoming releases that we're eagerly anticipating.

This week's pre-publication "can't-wait-to-read" selection is:

Rich Boy

By Sharon Pomerantz

Publication Date: August 2

From Amazon:

Robert Vishniak is the favored son of Oxford Circle, a working-class Jewish neighborhood in 1970s Philadelphia. Handsome and clever, Robert glides into the cloistered universities of New England, where scions of unimaginable wealth and influence stand shoulder to shoulder with scholarship paupers like himself who wash dishes for book money. The doors that open there lead Robert to the highest circles of Manhattan society during the heart of the Reagan boom where everything Robert has learned about women, through seduction and heartbreak, pays off. For a brief moment, he has it all...but the world in which he finds himself is not the world from which he comes, and a chance encounter with a beautiful girl from the old neighborhood, and the forgotten life she reawakens, threatens to unravel his carefully constructed new identity.

What's your "waiting on" pick this week?

Want to participate? Grab the logo, post your own WoW entry on your blog, and leave a link in the comments section!

"Waiting On" Wednesday: Strangers at the Feast

"Waiting On" Wednesday is a weekly event, hosted here, that spotlights upcoming releases that we're eagerly anticipating.

This week's pre-publication "can't-wait-to-read" selection is:

Strangers at the Feast

By Jennifer Vanderbes

Publication Date: August 3

From Simon & Schuster:

On Thanksgiving Day 2007, as the country teeters on the brink of a recession, three generations of the Olson family gather. Eleanor and Gavin worry about their daughter, a single academic, and her newly adopted Indian child, and about their son, who has been caught in the imploding real-estate bubble. While the Olsons navigate the tensions and secrets that mark their relationships, seventeen-year-old Kijo Jackson and his best friend Spider set out from the nearby housing projects on a mysterious job. A series of tragic events bring these two worlds ever closer, exposing the dangerously thin line between suburban privilege and urban poverty, and culminating in a crime that will change everyone’s life.

What's your "waiting on" pick this week?

Want to participate? Grab the logo, post your own WoW entry on your blog, and leave a link in the comments section!

Weekend Cooking: Two New Food Memoirs

Weekend Cooking is hosted by Beth Fish Reads.

If I read non-fiction, it's usually a memoir, and I'm particularly fond of food memoirs. (Check out my all-time favorites here.)

Two new releases recently caught my eye and are definitely on my "must-read" list:

Spoon Fed: How Eight Cooks Saved My Life
By Kim Severson

From the prominent New York Times food writer, a memoir recounting the tough life lessons she learned from a generation of female cooks, including Marion Cunningham, Alice Waters, Ruth Reichl, Rachael Ray, and Marcella Hazan. (Amazon)

Cakewalk

By Kate Moses

From the author of Wintering: A Novel of Sylvia Plath comes a funny, touching memoir of a crummy—and crumby—childhood. Filled with the abundance and joy that were so lacking in Kate’s youth, Cakewalk is a wise, loving tribute to life in all its sweetness as well as its bitterness and, ultimately, a recipe for forgiveness. (Amazon)

Also, I love the annual installments of Best Food Writing...and I just came across a similar series, Cornbread Nation (fifth edition just released), which spotlights the best of Southern food writing each year. Anyone familiar with these? Worth checking out?

Library Loot 5/13

Library Loot is a weekly event hosted by The Adventures of an Intrepid Reader.

I just finished Brunonia Barry's The Map of True Places, and I enjoyed it so much that I went back and picked up The Lace Reader (I know, I'm the very last person to read this). I had it in my head that it would be too "mystical" for my taste, but after reading her latest, I had to read it...because, well, I love her now.

In the meantime, several books came up on my library list that I've been tap-tap-tapping my fingers waiting for:

Girl in Translation by Jean Kwok

Heart of the Matter by Emily Giffin

Husband and Wife by Leah Stewart

By Accident by Susan Kelly

Twelve Rooms with a View by Theresa Rebeck