CRP's Blog

Get some great book suggestions for the long Fourth of July weekend by checking out what CRP’s staff has been reading over the past week.  (And tweet us beach read suggestions for Caitlin!) #CRPreads

I just read Missoula by Jon Krakauer and Between the World and Me by Ta-Nehisi Coates back-to-back. Such powerful and important nonfiction. Both books made me angry, and deeply sad. Each one should be required reading for every human being, though I wouldn’t necessarily recommend reading them consecutively. I’m at the beach next week and will be reading something wholly different (though I still haven’t decided what…beach read recommendations welcome). —Caitlin Eck, publicity manager

I’m reading Philip K. Dick’s Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, the novel that inspired the film Blade Runner. Though some lines from the film were taken verbatim from the book, the two are very different so far. But both the book and the film raise fascinating questions about what happens when the line separating humans and machines begins to blur. What does it mean to be human when humanoid androids can be programmed to look and behave almost exactly like “real” humans?  —Ellen Hornor, project editor

LitHub Daily’s tagline is “The Best of the Literary Internet,” and it has, hands-down, some of the best article teasers in the business. There isn’t a day where I don’t end up clicking to read an article because of the one-sentence summary. My favorite article teaser this week was “Stephen King has surprisingly legible handwriting: an old note on the origin of Scott Landon’s driving music.”  The article was fun as well. But the piece that was of most interest, and that generated the most thought and sparked conversation between me and coworkers, was Suki Kim’s “The Reluctant Memoirist,”  about how Kim’s book Without You, There Is No Us was published and marketed as a memoir rather than as investigative journalism. —Mary Kravenas, marketing manager

I just finished Firoozeh Dumas’ middle-grade novel It Ain’t so Awful, Falafel, which is heavily based on the author’s own experiences as an “all American” Iranian kid living in California during the late 1970s—the time of protests, revolution and the hostage crisis in her home country. It’s tough not to be didactic in explaining a lot of Iranian history and culture for this reading level (we meet Cindy, the main character, in 6th grade), but Dumas’ characters have exploratory conversations about politics and lifestyle while also forging real relationships with each other. I will probably add Dumas’ (adult) memoirs to my TBR list. —Meaghan Miller, senior publicist