Lounging at the Waldorf/Slumming on Park Avenue

Can you believe it's Friday? This week went by in the blink of an eye. But since DivaCardista will be enjoying a sprightly salad of Belgian endive featuring calendula whilst encouraging educational uplift (but not separation) at the Waldorf in just about an hour, all is well. What a nice way to end a week. I recommend it!

For the longest I have been wanting to share and thus recommend some great summer reading! So on this sunny morning I get my chance. I just love reading books that remind me what it is to tell a great story and that lovely feeling you get when a great story is being told to you. Nothing like it. For instance:

1. new boy by the wonderful Julian Houston! It's a warm, often funny, poignant and beautifully complex story of a bright young man from the South going to school in the North with the best and the brightest [and, too often, cruelest] of America's wealthiest families during of the infancy of the 1950's struggle for civil rights. It's not so much a coming of age story as it is a coming into manhood and wisdom story of 15 year old Rob Garett finding his way as the first African American at the story's fictional prep school Draper. Believe me, these 282 pages will fly and then you will want to take the journey again.
2. A Day Late and a Dollar Short by none other than Ms. Terry McMillan. Now her marital woes have been in the paper (and on Oprah's yellow couch) so much that we can forget her gift to the world: creating characters that are truly multidimensional and, whether in moments of functionality or disfunctionality, warm blooded and fascinatingly human. In this classic, she gives breath and life to each member of a family struggling to become better people and better as members of the matrilineal tribe called Price. Now I know you're saying "Um, DivaCardista? Ma'am? This book is at least five years old. Everybody knows this is a good book. And who doesn't know that Terry can write? Looks like you're...um...a day late and a dollar short." Well, so what. Within the next few weeks folks will be running all across this country and halfway round the globe talkin to skulls and throwing kisses to Shakespeare, and look how old he is? DivaCardista just wants to remind folk of the delightful wonder that is our Terry McMillan.
3. i hear a symphony by Ms. Paula L. Woods. What an absolutely beautiful and loving testimony to the historic love African Americans have had for our families, our friends and each other. I mean! And the artwork is not only great but well placed/interpersed within the poems, rare letters, essays and stories of love. Nothing is overlong, but it is all overdue considering DivaCardista could have sworn she just heard somebody's child proclaiming his "love" for a stripper. Not that strippers don't deserve love but Lord have mercy. Somebody send him this book before he goes into the studio again. Might just change his life.

Well it's about time for DivaCardista to fabulatize before she goes to slumming at the W-A.

Be sweet and have a grand day! I know I will. :)

Blessings,
DivaCardista