Did you know that our Cover Stories blogger, Melissa, is also a talented author of six Young Adult novels, including the recently-released Unbreak My Heart?

We Can All Do Better, by former U.S. senator, Rhodes Scholar, NBA champion basketball player, and best-selling author Bill Bradley, can't help but induce a flinch. It's hard to imagine anyone doing better than Bill Bradley. But the rest of us. . . guess we need to step it up! That somewhat guilty feeling that we all could work a little harder, be a little smarter . . . it's as American as apple pie and snake-oil salesmen. We're all okay, but we all could use a little work. And it's why a lot of us get a little irritated by corrections to our grammar. Let's look at how we can work with a little less judgment by arming ourselves with a little more knowledge. 

"I began to picture this clock in the bedrooms of the book’s characters. It fit so well: a grieving mother, lovers, musicians, a murderer, an elderly cancer patient whose granddaughter is stealing his pain medication..."

A Feast of Ice and Fire is a lovingly produced and visually stunning cookbook, one that will more than impress anyone who calls themselves a fan of GRRM’s A Song of Ice and Fire. I was so impressed with this book that I showed it to my wife a few days ago – and guess what we just had for dinner tonight? Honey Chicken, Black Bread, and Medieval Applecakes!

Bring Up the Bodies is the latest novel from Hilary Mantel, the prodigiously talented author of Wolf Hall, a 2009 award-winner in both Great Britain and the U.S. Returning to Thomas Cromwell and the court of Henry VIII, Mantel here turns to the tale of Anne Boleyn. Musing on Britishness and "Bring Up the Bodies" reminded me of Monty Python and "bring out yer dead," and how does bringing up a body differ from bringing up a baby? Up, out, up--and away! To the land of verb particles.

"There’s always a moment when a new cover shows up on email, and I close my eyes and hold my breath as it downloads (I live in the country, so until a couple years ago, you could suffocate, doing this on dial-up). When I opened my eyes and saw the cover of Blue Moon Bay..."

I’ve had a love-hate-love relationship with graphic novels my entire life. When I was a kid I assumed that graphic novels were just "dumbed down" novels and during my stint as a bookstore manager, where all graphic novels were relegated to the comic book spinner, I ignored them because of my previous prejudices. But after I became a professional book reviewer, and I was forced to dip my feet into the graphic novel pool, I realized that I had wasted 20 years of potentially stellar reading experiences on an unjust assumption...

Jenny Lawson's first book, Let's Pretend This Never Happened, collects many favorite posts from theBloggess.com, her wildly popular blog about life in Texas and her taxidermic childhood. But let's not pretend her title doesn't bring up a wildly popular grammar topic, too: Namely, do we need a "that" with "this never happened"? Drat those thats--when do we need 'em? When don't we?