Contemporary women's fiction

Since I started this blog, I've been writing periodic posts focusing on some of my favorite books/authors in some of my favorite genres.  A lot of what I read doesn't necessarily fall into a genre, however - or if it does, it's a pretty broad genre which I would refer to as contemporary women's fiction.  Basically, books written by women, generally aimed at women though they can certainly be read by men as well, and set in the present day without other genre elements like thriller, fantasy, etc.

I've already written about my favorite authors in chick lit, which definitely is a subset of contemporary women's fiction.  It's kind of hard to say what the different is between the two, but I'd say chick lit (which for me is certainly not a pejorative) tends to be just a little lighter, fluffier, more focused on romance, and often about younger protagonists.  Some of my favorite writers, who I mentioned in the chick lit post I just linked to, definitely have written more serious books as they have gotten older themselves.  So definitely check out that post as well if you're interested in contemporary women's fiction.  But in addition to the authors mentioned there, here are some of my other favorites:

School Reading

It's been a little while since I posted - it has been a busy few weeks between adjusting to the back to school routine and the Jewish holidays.  And on top of that, I'm the coordinator for the school library volunteers for my son's elementary school, so a flurry of e-mails, organizing, scheduling, and training has been occupying a lot of my free time.  Still related to books, but a little less time for reading and even less for writing about reading!

Speaking of school, I'm interested to hear other people's opinions about reading for school.  One thing that seems to have changed since my own school days is a shift to letting students pick their own books rather than having assigned reading.  In my day, in elementary school we had a textbook for reading, and then in middle school and high school we read many books/plays as a class, as well as (I believe) still having a text book.  

GCBC - Summer Reading Roundup

As I've mentioned a few times previously on this blog, my friend Sarah and I have a book club that consists of just the two of us.  We call it GCBC, short for Grand Central Book Club, since ideally we meet in person to discuss the books, which we usually do over lunch at Grand Central Terminal.  We used to just pick a book to read together only when we planned to meet, but earlier this year we were discussing books we both wanted to read, and since we're both slightly crazy obsessive types, we compiled a list of books we both wanted to read and started aligning our reading so that we were reading more and more books at roughly the same time, as long as both of us either owned the book or could get it from the library!

So, from mid-June to the beginning of the September, we read a whopping 10 books together!  And unfortunately, various factors conspired against us so we were unable to get together for lunch to discuss.  So, we decided to do just a quick summary of our thoughts on each book, both to share with each other and for the edification of readers of this blog as well!

Anticipated Books of Fall 2018

Hard to believe when it's still so hot, but summer is drawing to a close.  Well, technically summer does not end until September 22nd, but to me, summer ends and fall begins when school starts.  For some of you around the country, that already happened weeks ago.  But here in New York, school starts after Labor Day, so my kids have just gone back to school.

With how hot and humid it has been in New York, I'm really looking forward to some nice fall weather.  But of course I'm also looking forward to fall reading!  There are lots of books being published this fall that I'm looking forward to, including some by a few of my favorite authors.  Here are some of them, listed in order of publication with the dates in parentheses representing the publication dates: