Blog Entries

Jolenta and Kristen are the hosts of the funny and insightful podcast, By the Book.  In each episode, they read a chosen self-help book, spend two weeks living by the book’s guidelines, and then offer their opinions of the book’s premise.  When they had read and lived by 50 different books, they decided to write one of their own.  How to be Fine highlights what they learned from their experiment.  

On the week before Christmas, in the sleepy little tourist town of Pine Cove, Santa is murdered. At least that’s what seven-year-old Josh sees happen. In reality, a guy in a Santa suit was having it out with his ex-wife and he fell onto a shovel and died. Not knowing that, Josh makes a desperate Christmas wish, for Santa to be alive again. And then a Christmas miracle happens. At least, that was the plan. Except that heaven's stupidest angel decides to grant his wish by raising Santa and everyone else buried in town from the grave... as brain-hungry zombies.

On a snowy December night in London, Laurie James looks out the window of her bus and sees him-- the man she's convinced, in that split second, is the one. Their eyes meet, he makes a move in her direction... and then the bus drives away. Laurie becomes obsessed, spending months scanning every face at every bus stop and every cafe in the hopes that it's him. But it never is.

That is, until her best friend and roommate, Sarah, introduces him to Laurie at a Christmas party a year later as Jack, the man of Sarah's dreams.

This book of short stories by Hugo Award winning author Connie Willis is sure to get you in the spirit of the season. She puts a fantastical spin on many cherished holiday traditions, from android Rockettes to high-tech decorations. Willis also pays homage to the classics, pondering what the ghosts from Dickens's A Christmas Carol do in a modern December, and presenting a Christmas mystery that takes cues from both Arthur Conan Doyle and Edgar Allan Poe.

Author, blogger, YouTube personality, and (most importantly) mortician Caitlin Doughty has compiled a list of the best questions about death that she’s received from kids and answers them in this hilarious book. As a mortician with a degree in medieval history, she answers these questions with science and history in an easy-to-understand matter while touching on her "death positive" movement, in which she believes that we should stop the cultural censorship of death for the betterment of society.