Is your closet jam-packed and yet you have absolutely nothing to wear? Can you describe your personal style in one sentence? If someone grabbed a random piece from your closet right now, how likely is it that it would be something you love and wear regularly?
With so many style and shopping options, it can be difficult to create a streamlined closet of pieces that can be worn easily and confidently. In The Curated Closet, style writer Anuschka Rees presents a fascinatingly strategic approach to identifying, refining, and expressing personal style and building the ideal wardrobe to match it, with style and shopping strategies that women can use every day. Using The Curated Closet method, you’ll learn to:
- Shop smarter and more selectively
- Make the most of your budget
- Master outfit formulas and color palettes
- Tweak your wardrobe for work
- Assess garment fit and quality like a pro
- Curate a closet of fewer, better pieces
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"The Hands-On Home: A Seasonal Guide to Cooking, Preserving & Natural Homekeeping" by Erica Strauss
Create the DIY home you've always wanted with over 100 recipes, tips, and inspirational ideas from blogger Erica Strauss (Northwest Edible Life). Covering everything from cooking, canning and preserving to making your own nontoxic home and personal care products, this fresh take on modern homemaking wil help you make the most of your time, effort, and energy in the kitchen and beyond.
Over half of the book focuses on the kitchen with a wealth of information about how to organize and stock your kitchen to more effortlessly prepare delicious meals. A former professional chef who knows how to build flavor into simple and delicious home-cooked meals, Strauss provides delectable recipes for breakfast, lunch, dinner, and dessert like Choose-Your-Own-Adventure Granola, Forager Spring Greens Soup, Simple Crispy Chicken with Roasted Lemon Pan Sauce, and Olive-Oil Rosemary Cake with Lemony Glaze.
Strauss includes details on Basic Food Preservation techniques such as water-bath canning, pressure canning, and lacto-fermentation along with a handy year-long food preservation calendar of what to put up when. Preserving recipes are organized seasonally and include Rhubarb Syrup, Pressure-Canned Chicken Broth, Korean-Spiced Turnips, and Cranberry-Pear-Walnut Conserve.
The book also features recipes for DIY home care and personal care products like Nontoxic Laundry softener, Fizzy Bath Bombs, and Refreshing Peppermint Foot Scrub. Hands-on Home is packed with fabulous recipes, practical, no-nonsense advice, and time- and money-saving techniques. With a focus on less consumerism, Strauss provides instruction on everything you need to live more delicious and sustainable DIY lifestyle.
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"Talking as Fast as I Can: From Gilmore Girls to Gilmore Girls (and Everything in Between)" by Lauren Graham
In this collection of personal essays, the beloved star of Gilmore Girls and Parenthood reveals stories about life, love, and working as a woman in Hollywood—along with behind-the-scenes dispatches from the set of the new Gilmore Girls, where she plays the fast-talking Lorelai Gilmore once again.
In Talking as Fast as I Can, Lauren Graham hits pause for a moment and looks back on her life, sharing laugh-out-loud stories about growing up, starting out as an actress, and, years later, sitting in her trailer on the Parenthood set and asking herself, “Did you, um, make it?” She opens up about the challenges of being single in Hollywood (“Strangers were worried about me; that’s how long I was single!”), the time she was asked to audition her butt for a role, and her experience being a judge on Project Runway (“It’s like I had a fashion-induced blackout”).
In “What It Was Like, Part One,” Graham sits down for an epic Gilmore Girls marathon and reflects on being cast as the fast-talking Lorelai Gilmore. The essay “What It Was Like, Part Two” reveals how it felt to pick up the role again nine years later, and what doing so has meant to her.
Some more things you will learn about Lauren: She once tried to go vegan just to bond with Ellen DeGeneres, she’s aware that meeting guys at awards shows has its pitfalls (“If you’re meeting someone for the first time after three hours of hair, makeup, and styling, you’ve already set the bar too high”), and she’s a card-carrying REI shopper (“My bungee cords now earn points!”).
Including photos and excerpts from the diary Graham kept during the filming of the recent Gilmore Girls: A Year in the Life, this book is like a cozy night in, catching up with your best friend, laughing and swapping stories, and—of course—talking as fast as you can.
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"Millennials of New York" by Connor Toole & Alec Macdonald
For fans of both the irreverent Stuff White People Like and the lauded Humans of New York comes the perfect send-up: Millennials of New York, a hilarious satire of the millennial generation, from the creators of the viral Facebook sensation and senior writers at Elite Daily.
Discover the voice of a generation—self- and selfie-absorbed as it may be—in Millennials of New York. With over two hundred pictures, lists, graphs, and charts, authors Connor Toole and Alec Macdonald brilliantly parody this generation with their smart and witty captures of young people from all over New York. Covering everything from how hard it is to wait for a brunch table to the intricacies of Netflix-and-chill, from what constitutes the perfect selfie to how to ask your parents for rent money, Millennials of New York is the ideal gift for millennials and the people who love them—even if they don’t quite understand them.
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"Grilled Cheese Kitchen: Bread + Cheese + Everything in Between" by Heidi Gibson & Nate Pollak
Melted cheese between slices of toasted bread—the ultimate in comfort food. This mouthwatering cookbook features 39 grilled cheese recipes created by Heidi Gibson, winner of seven grilled cheese championships and the co-owner (with husband Nate) of the American Grilled Cheese Kitchen in San Francisco. The classic Mousetrap is dripping with three kinds of cheese. The Piglet wows with its thinly sliced ham and sharp cheddar. And grilled cheese makes a great breakfast—just add an egg! With 40 additional recipes for great accompaniments and side dishes—including hearty soups, many varieties of mac & cheese, spicy pickles, and tangy spreads—plus tips on choosing the best bread and cheese and techniques for grilling each sandwich at just the right temperature, anyone can create the perfect grilled cheese sandwich.
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"Everything I Want to Eat: Sqirl and the New California Cooking Hardcover" by Jessica Koslow & Maria Zizka
Jessica Koslow and her restaurant, Sqirl, are at the forefront of the California cooking renaissance, which is all about food that surprises us and engages all of our senses—it looks good, tastes vibrant, and feels fortifying yet refreshing. In Everything I Want to Eat, Koslow shares 100 of her favorite recipes for health-conscious but delicious dishes, all of which always use real foods—no fake meat or fake sugar here—that also happen to be suitable for vegetarians, vegans, or whomever you’re sharing your meal with.
The book is organized into seven chapters, each featuring a collection of recipes centered on a key ingredient or theme. Expect to find recipes for dishes Sqirl has become known for, as well as brand-new seasonal flavor combinations, including:
- Raspberry and cardamom jam
- Sorrel-pesto rice bowl
- Burnt brioche toast with house ricotta and seasonal jam
- Lamb merguez, cranberry beans, roasted tomato, and yogurt cheese
- Valrhona chocolate fleur de sel cookies
- Almond hazelnut milk
Throughout this book, Koslow provides notes and thought bubbles that show how just about any dish can be modified for specific tastes and dietary needs, whether it needs to be gluten-free or vegan.
Everything I Want to Eat captures the excitement of the food at Sqirl—think of a classic grilled cheese turned playful with the addition of tomato coriander jam—while also offering accessible recipes, like blood orange upside-down cake, that can be easily made in the home kitchen. Moreover, it’s an entirely new kind of cookbook and approach to how we are all starting to think about food, allowing readers to play with the recipes, combining and shaping them to be nothing short of everything you want to eat.
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So the last time I did one of these I was trying to get my hands on the audio book version of "Washington: A Life" by Ron Chernow, which I still haven't gotten. And because I couldn't get it then, I started reading "The Girl With The Lower Back Tattoo" by Amy Schumer because Nicole recommended it to me.
Before I started "The Girl With The Lower Back Tattoo" I didn't know how I'd feel about it because at that point I had never actually watched any of Amy Schumer's comedy, so I kinda went into the book blind. But that being said, I totally enjoyed the book. There were a lot of references to areas of Long Island I know very well, which is probably one of the reasons I enjoyed it so much.
But I enjoyed it, it was a quick and fun read.
Are you reading anything good? Lemme know!
and thoroughly enjoyed learning about places I never knew existed and more abut places I have visited myself throughout my little adventures. Because of this book Phil and I have a handful of adventures planned for this summer.
before it needed to be sent back to it's library but I will check it out again at some point because I really wanted to read it. 
and I really enjoyed both of them. I got some excellent ideas for making my own banh mis at home and my friend's really liked them when I made them.
was nothing special. It was a hodgepodge of random recipes with a few old photos of the Kardashian-Jenner family (Less pictures than I honestly expected from Kris Jenner). The only recipe that I was slightly interested in was CiCi's Cheese Borags, but not enough to take a picture of the page. So yeah, the book was just meh.
because I'm not up to that part of my course yet, but do you guys really care how I feel about a book for my class? I mean, if you do leave me a comment and I'll let you know how I feel about it once I've read it. I know the only person who was interested in how I felt was Erin because she is interested in all of the management stuff I'm about to learn about.
(1949)
was another one that was just okay. Nothing really in it that I felt like trying to make. 
