So last night was a big night for Girls. The show and its writer and star, Lena Dunham, picked up a couple Golden Globes and the second season premiered on HBO. But even if you’re one of those people who “doesn’t watch tv” …

The Millions on “Ten Books to Read Now That HBO’s Girls Is Back”:

But while Dunham’s lady-centered wry comedy may be singular in today’s television line-up, the world of literature is home to a multitude of books with the same appeal as Girls, books that feature a certain kind of female protagonist (usually one coming of age) or a certain kind of female narrator (pointed, self-deprecating, and ultimately wise). These are books that — like Girls – explore what it is like to be young and hungry — hungry for love and hungry for sex, but most of all, hungry for recognition and hungry for adulthood. Ultimately, the girls in these books, like the girls of Girls, are hungry to become the women they will one day be.

And in case you missed it, Friday’s show was a Girls bonanza with Terry’s interview with Lena Dunham and David Bianculli’s review of the second season.

Holiday Reading?

Internet, what are you reading this holiday..Wednesday?

I’m reading The Family Fang, a novel by Kevin Wilson.

litglutton:

Summer Books 2012: The Complete List

Use the list below to browse NPR’s 2012 Summer Books recommendations. Each critic’s list is presented separately. Click on the article names to read our critics’ comments about the books.

Read More

Reading anything good?

I just finished Buddha in the Attic (for book club) and Open City (for reading on benches) and Are You My Mother? (the Alison Bechdel version, not the PD Eastman one..)

What are you reading?

What are you reading this Memorial Day weekend?

Anyone need some fresh suggestions? Let’s make a list.

nprbackseatbookclub:

February Book Picks: ‘Shooting Kabul’ And ‘The Hundred Dresses’

This month, NPR’s Backseat Book Club will read two books that explore what it’s like to try to create a new home while still missing the one you’ve left behind. Join us as we read Shooting Kabul by N.H. Senzai and The Hundred Dresses by Eleanor Estes.

Join in with NPR’s book club (and the newest NPR Tumblr page!)

What’s the best thing you read in 2011?

Web, print, magazines, newspapers. What’s the best thing you read this year? Let’s make a list for our friends traveling this weekend to enjoy. 

A good novel doesn’t just transcend the boundaries of its target market — it knows nothing about target markets. … Many of these crossover “teen” novels are satisfying to adult readers because they tap into ageless themes, namely the sense that each of us longs to know who we really are in a strange, confusing and sometimes otherworldly world. As it turns out, the search for self is a lifelong one.

Here are five titles for summer reading that will appeal to readers across age groups.

Gary Shteyngart on attention spans: “Sometimes technology outpaces humanity’s ability to process it. I think that’s where we are right now. My mind has been sliced and diced in so many ways. There’s so many packets of information coming at me, especially in a city like New York, which is so dense with information no matter where you go. … It’s just shocking: how is literature supposed to survive when our brain has been pummeled with information all day long at work — if we’re white collar workers. When we go home, are we really going to open a thick text with 350 pages and try to waddle through it?”

Saul Bellow once said, ‘A writer is a reader who has moved to emulation’ — which I think is true. I just started writing and made that jump from reader to writer and learned how hard it was, but also how much fun it was — losing myself in these imaginary worlds.

— Stewart O’Nan on why he switched from a career in aerospace engineering to writing.

This will be hard for this crowd: To fully give yourself over to Mary Gordon’s luscious, wistful new novel, you first have to make yourself forget that the Internet exists. 

Book critic Maureen Corrigan’s review of Stewart O’Nan’s ‘Emily Alone’: It takes a deft hand to do justice to the ordinary. Most novelists don’t even bother to try, which is why most novels are about a rip in the fabric of the routine. It’s tough to find fiction ambitious enough to tackle the story of a run-of-the-mill job, a hum-drum family; but, if the mundane matters to you, then Stewart O’Nan is your man.

What Are You Reading?

Anything good? We’ll make a list!

Happy World Book Day!

Writer Wilfrid Sheed, on why he stopped writing reviews later in life: “As a novelist, you really don’t need any more enemies than the course of life is going to send you,” he told Terry Gross in a 1988 Fresh Air interview. “On humane grounds, I think that you lose the killer instinct as you go along. I think criticism can be a blood sport, really to be indulged by the young. As you get old, you imagine that perhaps the person is ill or you imagine all the situations that have happened to yourself at one time or another and you really can’t go on giving [criticism] because you know how much it hurts.”