Catching up on BEA reports from the day, and all I have to say is: Dear Harper Perennial/ IT Books, I will be your best friend if you let me purchase one of these totes.

GIF Reaction Friday: Rob Sheffield On Karaoke Edition

I have been an unreasonable champion of Sheffield's first two memoirs, LOVE IS A MIX TAPE and TALKING TO GIRLS ABOUT DURAN DURAN. His third, TURN AROUND BRIGHT EYES, will be out in August, at which time it will Jell-O wrestle Chuck Klosterman's new book (also due out this summer) for the title of Most Likely To Be Tucked Under A Hipster's Arm On The Way From The Beach To The Bar. (That fight will be emceed by our pal Nathan Rabin's new book YOU DON'T KNOW ME BUT YOU DON'T LIKE ME, mandatory reading out June 11.)

This seems like an appropriate time to initiate the Summer 2013 tab. It's hard to be sad when something so exciting is at hand.

Rob Sheffield makes the New York Times a suitably eclectic playlist of some of his favorite songs. Anyone heading out to see him at the Bell House on Saturday? Come drink with me, I'll be the one in the skinny jeans and black framed glasses (ahhhhh, never gets old).

Rob Sheffield goes back to the tape deck

Rolling Stone writer Sheffield's first memoir LOVE IS A MIX TAPE made my list of books that make you cry. His follow-up, though, seems a little more light-hearted:



It's out July 15th. Maybe he'll be back at the Brooklyn Book Festival this year?

Books That Make You Cry (Maybe)

The holiday has left me in a bright & shiny mood, so it seems like the appropriate time to talk about sad books. (We'll save the list of books that make you cry of laughter for a more dire time, like... November.) These books moved me, even if they didn't move me to tears, so in case you've been having too much of a good time:

Sad Childhood Tie Wilson Rawls, WHERE THE RED FERN GROWS/ Katherine Paterson, BRIDGE TO TERABITHIA. I wasn't allowed to have a dog growing up, but I did have a best friend.

Sad And True That You Can't Put Down Adrian Nicole LeBlanc, RANDOM FAMILY. LeBlanc followed this Bronx family for over 10 years and you want them to improve their lives so badly, even when it seems like they're stuck in the same self-destructive cycles. This book is a nonfiction Tolstoy novel, and everyone should read it, but it's hard to take sometimes.

Sad But Beautiful Elizabeth Hay, LATE NIGHTS ON AIR. I named this my favorite book of 2008 and at its conclusion felt what the Portuguese call saudade -- an immense longing for the characters and the situation that could never come to pass again.

Sad... Or Frustrating? If my mom were making this list COLD MOUNTAIN would probably top the sad heap as the saddest. Without giving away the ending, when I finished the book, I just felt fooled. I would put MY SISTER'S KEEPER into this pile as well.

Saddest (And True) If you can read Rob Sheffield's LOVE IS A MIX TAPE and walk away unmoved, you should probably put yourself on the transplant list for a heart. Sheffield and his wife met as DJs and fell in love through music, and then one day she fell over dead, just like that. He uses the device of mix tapes he made and they exchanged, and I meant to make some of them in playlist form, really I did, but it just got really dusty in my apartment, okay?!

Has a book ever made you cry... that you can admit?