So this is the first post of my very first blog.  I was at work today processing magazines and I came across this list in a Real Simple magazine.  The title was: 50 books that will change your life.  It made me pause and read the list to see how many of these books I had actually read seeing as I work in a library.  Really, sad to say, not many!  In fact, I hadn't even heard of all of the authors.  I started to think about how a book can change your life.  I love to read.  I read all the time, anytime I get a chance really.  I am a busy mom with two jobs, two cats and a dog.  I don't have a lot of free time but I really would like to change my life with a book!  So, I starting thinking that maybe I should read all of these books.  Even the few I have read should maybe be reread and rethought.  So where do I start?  The list is in alphabetical and that appeals to my sense of order so I'll start with the As and work my way down.  The first book on the list.  Number one is About Alice by Calvin Trillin.  I haven't heard of this book or this author.  We didn't have a copy at my branch so I had to put the book on hold and have it sent out to me.  I hope to get it by next week.   This is a summary from Good Reads:

In Calvin Trillin’s antic tales of family life, she was portrayed as the wife who had “a weird predilection for limiting our family to three meals a day” and the mother who thought that if you didn’t go to every performance of your child’s school play, “the county would come and take the child.” Now, five years after her death, her husband offers this loving portrait of Alice Trillin off the page–his loving portrait of Alice Trillin off the page–an educator who was equally at home teaching at a university or a drug treatment center, a gifted writer, a stunningly beautiful and thoroughly engaged woman who, in the words of a friend, “managed to navigate the tricky waters between living a life you could be proud of and still delighting in the many things there are to take pleasure in.”

Though it deals with devastating loss, About Alice is also a love story, chronicling a romance that began at a Manhattan party when Calvin Trillin desperately tried to impress a young woman who “seemed to glow.”
“You have never again been as funny as you were that night,” Alice would say, twenty or thirty years later.
“You mean I peaked in December of 1963?”
“I’m afraid so.”

But he never quit trying to impress her. In his writing, she was sometimes his subject and always his muse. The dedication of the first book he published after her death read, “I wrote this for Alice. Actually, I wrote everything for Alice.”

In that spirit, Calvin Trillin has, with About Alice, created a gift to the wife he adored and to his readers.

Hardcover, 96 pages

Published December 26th 2006

So this book is non-fiction.  Not usually a non-fiction reader but it sounds kind of interesting?? So, officially #1 About Alice by Calvin Trillin....as soon as my hold comes in!