New York - May 15, 2001

Summer Reading 101: What Fun!

Summer Reading 101: What Fun!

16 meetings. (1 missed!) 831 e-mails. 1 presentation. 174 voice-mail messages (Deeeelete!).

And—rats!—you missed this week’s New Yorker, again. And no, the two-foot pile on your coffee table is not an installation piece (thank you very much).

Forgive yourself, sweeties! Because “The Fun of It: Stories from Talk of the Town” is just out, and the book is profoundly rocking our world.

Not only did it have us rolling with laughter, it’s chock full of fun facts: did you know that the average reader spends four years’ worth of eight-hour days reading The New York Times over the course of a lifetime? (“How many of us will ever devote that kind of time gazing into the eyes of the loved one?”). There’s urban lore (did you get your summer-camp name tapes sewn in at Menikoff’s on York Avenue?); fashion scoop (things you’d rather not know about handbag princess Judith Leiber’s working the floor at Saks); sociological observation (the early a.m. rituals of Upper East Side private school kids—yay, Jackson Hole!—as well as the foibles of Eugene T. Maleska (did you know he almost screwed up a marriage proposal?). There are pieces by Jackie O., E.B. White, George Plimpton, John Updike, and Johnny Carson.

Now, this is what we call fun.