From the Guardian, here's what Madonna has to say in her latest book:

'If you haven't heard of the English Roses by now," writes Madonna at the start of her new children's book, "then you are either: a) living under a rock, b) living on the moon, c) away with the fairies. If you fit the description of a, b, or c, then I am happy to clue you in to what the rest of the world already knows."

The article is all about celebrity books and how utterly lame most of them are. Madonna, of course, is example number one. Honestly, I love her 80s music - it was a staple in high school and college and I still think "Express Yourself" is awesome. And if she wants to adopt a very sad, very poor, very sick little African baby then I'm okay with it. But her books - oh lord. Why oh why are people buying these books?

Nadine Gordimer is about the classiest person on the planet as far as I'm concerned.

I just finished Tracy Kidder's Home Town and loved it. I realized last year that Kidder was one of the authors I should have read but hadn't and while I was really interested in his new Vietman memoir I thought I would start with an older title, and have had Home Town on my TBR pile for months. It took me only a couple of days to blow through it (helped along by a sick boy and little sleep).

What really impressed me is how human Kidder is as a writer. This is nonfiction but it carries all the drama of the most intense fiction. And it's not even a big story - mostly it's just small stories about small changes in the lives of a few people and I don't know how in the heck he made this so gripping but man - it is extraordinary, just as the Time magazine blurb says on the front cover. Also, this was kind of odd after my subject matter the last few days but the main character Kidder follows is a police officer, Tommy O'Conner. Tommy has a problem with an old friend in the narrative and recalls his favorite movie, Stand By Me and that great line at the end: "I never had any friends later on like the ones I had when I was twelve. Jesus, does anyone?" The fact that a Northampton cop would fall back on Stephen King to understand why what is happening now to his adult life is so difficult makes me believe that King has already made himself an author for the ages. And it had nothing to do with out taste changing over the years, and everything to do with King really knowing who we are as people, just like Kidder clearly does.

A few pages after the reference to King, Kidder quotes from a 1950 Sylvia Plath letter to her mother. She writes about walking past a Northampton mental hospital: "It was a most terrifying, holy experience, with the sun setting red and cold over the black hills, and the inhuman, echoing howls coming from the barred windows." Maybe if Plath still had a few childhood friends she would not have been so scared - maybe if she still had a hometown to keep her safe she would not have gotten so lost and alone in England.

Kidder, King and Plath. All my literary stars are in alignment it seems. Who knows what will show up in the next book I open?