I just finished Diane Vadino's amazing debut, Smart Girls Like Me, last week. In preparation for the review I've been assigned to write, I Googled around and found her also-amazing and mouth-wateringly delicious fashion-and-shopping blog, Bunnyshop. (Bookmark. This. Now.) For a few days, I've been thinking about all the things I adore about Smart Girls while trying to figure out a way to discuss and justify the fact that it's packaged in a baby-pink cover with a picture of a rack of designer clothing.

Thanks to Brookline Booksmith for hosting the Nick Hornby reading

Just to make sure, we decided to wait until the Curse of the Hornbino had been demolished by Your 2007 Boston Red Sox before posting the rest of Nick Hornby's Q&A at the Devotion School in Brookline, where the patron saint of record-store geeks and football obsessives appeared last week to read from his so-called young-adult novel Slam, about a Tony Hawk-worshipping teenager named Sam who flees his hometown after knocking up his girlfriend.

It was a dreadful night for a number of reasons.

One would think that 800 individuals who gather in a high school auditorium in Natick to listen to, or perhaps even, celebrate, a story of three orphans whose parents perished in a suspicious fire and who had to live out their days of innocence being pursued by the most devious of men, deserve such punishment.

ROADTRIP NATION: A Guide to Discovering Your Path In Life landed in our mailbox last week. Usually we're not big fans of motivational, Chicken Soup for the Young Person's Soul fodder--and the subtitle definitely made us gag. However. RTN is something special. It is a self-help text, but it's more about the how and why and here's how you can do it, too, your own way, than it is about getting across some kind of cheesy catch-phrase.

John Updike is totes one of the smiliest old dudes I’ve ever seen. He has this really nice countenance that doesn’t even betray the fact that he’s been an amazing taste-maker for my beloved New Yorker and kickass critic and short-story phenom and literary mega-star. And I’m pissed that critics have been shitting all over him.