I’ve been seeing previews like crazy for Julia Roberts’ new movie, “Eat Pray Love” and it looks pretty cute. And since I have a standing rule that I must read the book before I watch the movie, I was forced into this week’s read. However, I’m so glad that I did!

“Eat Pray Love” is a non-fiction book written by Elizabeth Gilbert. Gilbert has found herself with the perfect American life: a gorgeous house, a good husband and a successful career. But, she is consistently unhappy and one day realizes that she just doesn’t want to be married anymore. This “perfect life” is just not for her. So she leaves her husband and after being inspired by three different countries and their cultures, she decides to spend a year traveling to Italy, India and Indonesia. She chooses Italy because she has always wanted to learn Italian, India because she has recently gotten into the yoga lifestyle and Indonesia because she traveled there once and was told by a medicine man that she would return. She uses the advance from this promised book to fund her whirlwind adventure and sets off.

This book was somewhat of a sensation. For a year, it felt like someone I knew was always reading this. So, of course, I resisted, as any good book snob does. I’m really happy that I picked it up though! Gilbert is a charming and hilarious narrator. She’s so open with her experiences and feelings, it seems like I’m reading a letter from an old friend. I constantly found myself smiling while reading this one, that is, when I wasn’t laughing at her quick wit. But, besides being entertaining, I also found this one quite inspiring. Read More »

In the summer, there is nothing I love more than laying on the beach with a cold drink and a good book. One of my favorite genres for summer reading is biography and for some odd reason, I tend to gravitate to memoirs of alcohol and drug abuse. Don’t ask me why, but I love to read memoirs of addicts. Maybe it’s the grittiness of the story or that they usually are somewhat recovered by the time they write the book, but I can’t get enough of them! So when I came across “Nice Recovery” by Susan Juby, I didn’t even think twice about digging in.

You may recognize Susan Juby’s name; that’s because she is a best-selling teen fiction author. She is also a recovered alcoholic. Juby’s memoir begins with her first, very insignificant drink at a wedding, but her alcoholism actually starts when she is 13. Always considered a bright, capable student and gifted writer, she decides to start hanging out with the wrong crowd (or the people her mother refers to as “bad news”) and gets heavy into partying. After being sent to live with various relatives all over British Columbia and somehow managing to graduate high school, Juby moves on to fashion design school in Toronto. Once there, she continues to drink herself silly and, eventually, out of school. During her time as a student, she out-drinks everyone she meets and begins to see a bigger and bigger divide forming between her and her peers when it comes to drinking. Then, she gets a couple wake-up calls and decides to sober up at the ripe old age of 20, just when most people begin their drinking career.

I found that I was really able to relate to Susan’s story. I myself was a pretty big partier in high school and have since considerably settled down. I’m not sober, but I haven’t been drunk in over a year, and I kind of like it that way. People can never believe how little I drink and that I have no desire to get hammered. I’m constantly being pressured by friends, but honestly, drinking effects me way too much and the night out is never worth the hangover (at least in my case!). Anyways, my feelings aside, the book is so refreshing and definitely stands out amongst the alcoholic-memoirs I’ve read. It’s poignant, funny and above all, totally real. Read More »

Got something awesome everyone needs to know about? A really rad singer? A wicked new book? A fro yo pie that will delight your belly without making it bigger?? Email your “The Know” ideas to Jill@collegecandy.com or tweet me and I’ll pass them along to everyone right here, every week. Make your kindergarten teacher proud and share!

With summer here (or officially four days away) we’ve got lots and lots of free time on our hands. And by that I mean we’re cooped up in our parents house and – god help us – we love our parents, we really, REALLY do, but after about 48 hours back from school we are already counting down until Welcome Week.

There are only so many times one can surf through Perez or watch this week’s episode of the Bachelorette commenting on Ali’s awful spray tan, so what can you do to pass the time? READ. And by read, I mean the books you’ve always wanted to, not the ones required for class that you beg your suitemate for her notes on so you don’t actually have to read them.

The fun books, the good books, the books you can’t put down – so much so you take them with you to pee. The books that are thoughtless and funny and on and on.

So here’s a list of ten of my favorite books, some new, some old, some serious some fun. Go sit on your lawn, make yourself an Arnold Palmer and enjoy. Read More »

I’m a sucker for a great non-fiction book and biographies are no exception! I find biographies so powerful; fiction can be wild and created, but imagined. Part of the appeal of biographies is that all the wildness is REAL and TRUE.

And by far one of the craziest biographies I’ve ever read has to be Jeannette Walls’ “The Glass Castle.” From the outside, adult Jeannette appears relatively normal. She is a successful, beautiful journalist living the life. But for years Jeannette harbored the secrets of her absolutely unconventional, tough upbringing and finally shares them with the world in “The Glass Castle.” Now, some of you may think that you had strange upbringings. Maybe your family moved a lot or your parents were a little bit different, but trust me, you have nothing on the Walls family.

Jeannette appropriately begins her memoir with her first memory. She is three years old and cooking hot dogs on the stove. Yes, you read that right, three years old, practically a baby, and cooking! Jeannette, being an innocent child, doesn’t realize all the safety precautions involved in cooking on a stove and her dress manages to catch fire. She screams for her mother, who comes and puts out the flames with an army surplus blanket and them gets a ride with their neighbor to the hospital. There, Jeannette is treated for massive burns and even has to undergo a skin graft.

WTF, right? What person in their right mind lets a three year old cook!? But, of course, it gets worse. After spending several weeks in the hospital, and still with much time left in her recovery, Jeannette’s father arrives and announces that he is busting her out. He disconnects her IV, picks her up in his arms, runs out of the hospital with little Jeannette and hops into the family’s getaway car. Read More »

Summer has just begun for me and besides working 35 hours a week (doing the best student job on the planet, might I add), I’ve been devouring book after book. Science, YA, dystopian – I’ve got it all. However, despite my plethora of reading material, I often find myself trolling Amazon.com, looking for new releases that I can’t wait to get my hands on. And because I think many of you are in the same boat as me, in need of some serious reading for your summer break, I’ve compiled a list of 5 books from a variety of genres to keep your eyes on over the summer, listed in order of release date (hint hint to any publishers/editors/authors reading this!).

Did I miss any exciting new releases for the summer?! Read More »

If you read my Saturday posts, you know that I love me some non-fiction, specifically from the science section. Yes, it sounds super nerdy, but let me tell you, the science section houses some of the most interesting and relevant books in all the bookstore. Another one to add to that list is “The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks” by Rebecca Skloot.

If you’ve never heard of Henrietta Lacks, you’re not alone. However, some of you may have heard of HeLa cells. HeLa cells are used in scientific research and have been part of almost every medical breakthrough since the ’50s. And they’re immortal. I’m getting ahead of myself, though.

So what is the connection between Henrietta – a poor, black woman from Baltimore – and the trillions of HeLa cells in the world? You won’t believe it, but every single one of those trillions of cells are HERS. Even the name HeLa comes from her name: HEnrietta LAcks. And even more miraculous is the fact that you’re probably more familiar with Henrietta than you think. Odds are, one of the vaccines you’ve received in your life was created from her cells or maybe even contained her cells. Mind-blowing.

In 1951, Henrietta visited John Hopkins complaining of a “knot” in her stomach. She was eventually diagnosed with cervical cancer and treated in the fashion of the day: tubes of radium were sewn onto and in her. However, before beginning the treatment, a doctor took a sample of her tumor and shipped it off to George Gey. Gey had been trying to create immortal cells for years. Up until this point, cells died within a few days in a culture and scientific progress was at somewhat of a standstill. But when Gey cultured Henrietta’s cells, he noticed that the cells weren’t dying – in fact, they were multiplying. The culture grew so quickly that he had to move it to another jar! Gey was fascinated by this immortal cell line. He sent samples to any scientist who asked and eventually HeLa cells were turned into a BILLION-dollar industry. Read More »

This week, I have to start with a disclaimer: I’m teasing you with an advanced reader. This book doesn’t actually come out until May 4th, but it’s definitely worth the wait, especially since this time of the year is perfect for a book about uncertain futures.

For most college students, exam time is looming just around the corner. We’ve slacked off all year, attending too many “Thirsty Thursdays” and fallen prey to our friends begging us to come out  just one more night. And now, as we stare at the stack of textbooks piled on the desk in front of us, we’re forced to actually think about our futures instead of just enjoying the student life.

What comes next?

That’s the question Sean Aiken asked. After graduating from college, he was lost. He didn’t know what he wanted to do for the rest of his life, but knew that he didn’t want to be stuck in a job he hated. Plenty of people suggested respectable careers for Sean, but the advice that seemed to have made the difference was from his father: do something you’re passionate about. Since Sean wasn’t really sure what he was passionate about, he decided that he would have to try out different jobs and see if he could manage working them for the better part of his adult life. In fact, he decided that he would try on 52 different jobs in one year. If you’ve done the math, you know that there is 52 weeks in a year, meaning that Sean was embarking on what he called “The One-Week Job Project”. His plan was to create a website, offering his services to employers for one week and in exchange they could donate his earnings to ONE, a campaign that fights poverty. He figured that this way more people would benefit from his experience. Read More »

I’ll admit it: this week I fell prey to the “Recommended” table at my local book store. Being a bookseller, I find myself to be a bit of a book snob and will rarely listen to advice about my reading material. However, I am also a sucker for a nice cover (yeah, I judge a book by its cover) and “Sarah’s Key” indeed has a nice cover. So I picked it up, read a few pages and before I could resist, I was hooked.

“Sarah’s Key” is a historical fiction novel that flip flops between two story lines: Sarah’s and Julia’s. Julia Jarmond is living in modern-day Paris. She is married to a man that she describes as a typical Parisian: good-looking, successful, but also very reserved and often, cold. They live with their daughter, Zoe, and also many secrets.

Then there is Sarah, a 10-year-old French Jew who is taken from her home and sent to a concentration camp during the 1942 Velodrome D’Hiver roundup in Paris. For those of you who have no idea what the Vel D’Hiv roundup is (don’t be embarassed – I didn’t either!), here is a crash course: Basically 13, 000 Jewish men, women and children were arrested and taken to the Veldrome D’Hiver (a stadium), right in the middle of Paris, where they were left for several days before going to the Drancy and Beaune-la-Rolande internment camps and finally Auschwitz. Now, even if none of the other words in that sentence meant anything to you, I know you recognized Auschwitz. And so you know the fate of these poor, innocent people. Sarah is taken, along with her mother and father. Read More »

So you’re home for break. And it’s wonderful. But what are you going to do with all that downtime for the next three weeks?

How about do a little reading for pleasure? You know what I’m talking about, right? The kind of reading you can do without a highlighter. Without making annotations. Without a 12lb textbook that hurts your arms as you attempt to read it in bed.

Yeah, that’s right. The good kind. For a reader like me, winter break means catching up on all those books I’ve been missing out on thanks to the hundreds of pages of History reading my professors assign nightly. If you’re looking for some good books to pass that time at home (or on a warm beach somewhere) with the parentals, allow me to recommend a few of my favorites. If you do anything over this break (besides watch TV and eat leftovers) you must pick up at least one of these: Read More »

Even though I live in chilly Northwestern Ontario, the snow has still not fallen! And, yes, I am a little peeved.

Usually the late November snow signals me to bust out the Christmas decorations and movies (can anybody say Elf?!) and indulge in the holiday spirit. But this year I’ve had to create all the spirit myself.

Besides watching Christmas special after special, I’ve turned to cozy holiday books to get myself in the mood, and The Gift, by Cecelia Ahern, is just perfect for the job. Many of you may remember this blockbuster hit from last Christmas season. Well, it was originally a book and I managed to snag myself a bargain copy of the hardcover a couple months ago. I decided to wait for a more appropriate time to bust it out and – seeing the Christmas lights being hung all over time – that time finally arrived!

“The Gift” switches between two seemingly parallel stories. One is of Lou Suffern, an overworked business man who is constantly faced with the conundrum of being in two places at once with his busy life. The other features Raphie, an older policeman (or Garda as they call them in Ireland!) and Turkey Boy, a young boy who threw a turkey through a window and is now at the Garda station. Lou’s story is actually being narrated by Raphie, who is telling Lou’s tale as a warning to Turkey Boy.

Lou’s story essentially begins when he meets Gabe, a homeless man who sits outside Lou’s multi-million dollar office building in Dublin everyday. One day Lou decides to purchase a coffee for Gabe and they end up chatting. Gabe seems very wise and intrigues Lou. Gabe also tips Lou off on a suspicious lunch meeting that Lou’s co-worker and boss had, so Lou decides to get Gabe a job in the mail room of his building. He figures that Gabe will be able to keep his eagle-eyes on Alfred, Lou’s suspicious co-worker and also, that it’s a good deed. Read More »