By Marcia Schneider A recent screening of the 1962 classic black and white French film Jules and Jim, directed by François Truffaut, while revealing some weaknesses when measured against today’s filmmaking standards, represents a film far ahead of the thinking of its day.  The richness of content and avant-garde nature of the film more than [...]

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By Michelle Jeffers Want to feel old, fast? Check out a funny site out there called Obsolete Skills. I didn’t realize so many life skills had already become obsolete, from making a collect call from a payphone to driving a stick shift to setting the correct time on a VCR (did anyone ever really know [...]

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By Mary Ellen Hannibal Into every writer’s life a bit of glamour does sometimes fall; this past Saturday night I was one of many (many) authors taking part in Authors Night:  “the premier literary event of the Hamptons.”  Yes, the irony came in as many different colors as there were styles of strappy sandals sinking [...]

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We’re proud to announce that Readers Cafe is now open!  Come check it out, grab a cup of Blue Bottle coffee, and hang out with a good book.

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By Marcia Schneider A couple of months ago fellow blogger Mary Ellen Hannibal and I were exchanging reading notes and discovered that we were reading the same book, a novel which has appeared on both the local and national best seller lists for some time. We agreed that writing about the obvious was not a [...]

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By Michelle Jeffers Since the best job ever title is already taken, I will say I have the second best job in the world. And I recognize how profoundly fortunate I am to have it. California’s jobless rate remains over 12 percent! It was nice to see the word get out about the work libraries [...]

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By Mary Ellen Hannibal Life can turn weird when you change paradigms, especially when a child enters the picture.  Melanie Gideon’s very funny memoir, The Slippery Year, chronicles one woman’s adjustment to marriage, motherhood, and the strange discontinuities of our contemporary life.  Set in the Bay Area, her book is about strange territory in a [...]

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By Marcia Schneider Lead in lipstick? Some time ago, thanks to a program offered for teens by the San Francisco Public Library’s Stegner Environmental Center, I became aware that not all personal care products are as safe as one might hope to believe.  Ranging from drug store and supermarket products to high-end cosmetics sold in [...]

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By Mary Ellen Hannibal This month Showtime premieres a new half-hour comedy based on that hilarious subject, cancer. Luckily, Laura Linney plays the protagonist, a 40-something schoolteacher and mom who has heretofore done everything a good girl should; upon receiving a stage-4 melanoma diagnosis and an estimate that she has one year to live, her [...]

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