Donna's Book Club.

( like Oprah's Book Club, only spelled differently.)

 

book collector or architect cartoon? you decide.
"Mike's never been much of a reader."

 



 

My new book is out!! Love Me or Go to Hell - True Love Cartoons, is finally here, all about love, of course, and just in time for graduation or unfortunate summer breakups. Cartoons galore, because men think about sex every nine seconds, but women want love, sweet love. Includes cartoons by some of my favorite hot cartoonist girls, just to stir up the pot. (My publisher calls it "racy".... hmmm.) It's in every conceivable store. More info here.

What Do Women Really Want? Chocolate! Yes, yes, yes! It's my first book of cartoons (and a few quotations) about our other true love, chocolate. Gosh, someone paid me to publish this? It really was almost as much fun as tasting a table of desserts. Ladies, rejoice, you'll get some chuckles and a collector's dream - the first book of All Chocolate Cartoons anywhere. Rose Levy Beranbaum, author of 8 books and star of her new PBS series, wrote the foreword! Wow! More info and reviews here. And get it autographed!

I've often thought I should write to Stephen King to thank him for the many happy hours I've spent reading his books. He has been the greatest escape for me. I think he's one of America's best writers.
I thought about listing Misery first - so much finer than the movie, which was very good - but I've chosen Gerald's Game this time.
It starts out in a vacation cottage on the lake at the end of fall, with no one else around. This happily married couple starts fooling around, playing a little game of tieing up the wife, and what do you know, the husband has a heart attack and dies! What happens next makes this book unputdownable...

The Cake Bible was the first cookbook I just had to have! My friend Candy told me about it - how the author discovered a brand new way of mixing butter with flour first, instead of with sugar, so the ingredients actually became moister and richer, like a croissant. I also liked the story of how the author found the man she decided she could marry. He was a doctor, and she a chef, but they both mixed ingredients in the same way - in a blender, to aerate them! Yes, this is Rose Levy Beranbaum, the author that wrote the foreword for my book - but cross my heart, I had included her in Donna's Book Club before I did my chocolate book! You'll find some new favorite recipes here.

From now on I'll have to say, "Robin Williams is a genius....the designer, not the actor!" She's written several books about design, and I just happened to find this one first, and am I glad I did. It made design - how to combine type and picture - into an art and a game at the same time. And she also makes it seem possible, which is no little feat when you didn't get such a good grade for art in school. (oops)

Stephen Fife is the first playwright I ever met! (I was a drama major in college, love to read plays, and go to the better ones, so this was a thrill for me.) He is also a wonderful writer, and this is his first book, Best Revenge. (I read it in galley form - ooh la la.) Steve tells the true story of a play he wrote and helped produce, and every page is entertaining.
Nice bullet holes on the cover. I was supposed to do the cover. Wouldn't that have been fun? But oddly enough, the publisher wanted to do his OWN cover. But you would have liked my cover better... Of course, you can't judge this book by...oh, just read the damn thing.

Diablo - at least this Diablo - isn't a book, it's a game. It's the first computer game - more of a story than a game - that I ever played, and it changed my life. I am positive that it actually made me smarter. It taught me to think in a different way, maybe in other dimensions. Part of it is that I had no directions, and couldn't even find hints on the web, so every part of the puzzle was this new experience. Live it.

Hopping bird picture


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