Dear Reader

Dear Reader Column 9-30-05

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Dear Reader,

I'm on vacation this week and some of my friends have graciously offered to fill in for me while I'm gone. Today's column is written by Lois Geller, author and President of Mason & Geller Direct.

Thanks for reading with me. It's so good to read with friends.

Suzanne Beecher
Suzanne@DearReader.com 
www.DearReader.com

Today's guest columnist, author and President of Mason & Geller Direct, Lois Geller...

Do you remember how you got on the Dear Reader email list? If you're like me, the answer is lost in the mists of antiquity. Last year some time?

All I remember is that some dear soul forwarded a Dear Reader review and I liked the featured book (and bought it) but I liked the review just as much. Suzanne is fun to read and I felt as if a friend was talking to me. So I emailed her and told her so.

She emailed me back and we chatted almost daily through cyberspace and then one day she emailed that she was coming to New York City and would I mind if she dropped by the office to say hi?

Would I mind? Of course not!

My office is a pretty busy direct marketing advertising agency (Mason & Geller: I'm the Geller) and at the time we were in a great building at the corner of Madison Avenue and 39th Street. Suzanne walked in tentatively and I loved her right away: long blonde hair, big smile and homemade chocolate chip cookies! The aroma floated down the halls and into offices and soon our whole staff was in our boardroom munching away and listening. Suzanne and I chatted away as if we'd known each other since grade school.

I get to do a lot of public speaking about marketing and when Suzanne told me she planned to do a lot of speaking, especially at libraries, we talked about that. She was (and is) very easy and pleasant to talk to. When I got her Dear Reader letter the next morning, it felt as if she was writing just to me.

A lot has happened since then: Suzanne's Mom passed away, my 94-year old Mom got weaker so I moved our office to Hollywood, Florida just to be near her (everyone came along and we're happy as clams down here in hurricane country.) Then I got breast cancer and went through the operation and radiation - doing fine now - and through it all, Suzanne and I continued yakking online. (She's as easy to write to as she is to talk to.)

Soon, I hope, I'll be able to ask her to come over from her home on the other side of Florida for a nice visit. In the meantime, busy as I am, there's so much to be thankful for: my Mom, my wonderful staff, terrific new apartment and the new office I can't wait to show Suzanne. It's in a quiet marina with zillion dollar yachts out front, ubiquitous palm trees dropping real coconuts and birds flying about. Sometimes an ever so solicitous ibis ushers me from parking lot to office. Hope Suzanne brings cookies.

Lois K. Geller loisgeller@masongeller.com
Author of, "Response: The Complete Guide to Profitable Direct Marketing"

Dear Reader Column 9-29-05

Join my email book club. Over 300,000 people read 5-minutes a day. To see what books I'm featuring this week, go to: http://www.dearreader.com/

Dear Reader,

I'm on vacation this week. My husband and I are wandering around the Blue Ridge Mountains. Instead of running previous columns, I've asked some friends of mine to fill in for me. Today's guest column is written by author and storyteller Joel ben Izzy.

Thanks for reading with me. It's so good to read with friends.

Suzanne Beecher
Suzanne@DearReader.com
www.DearReader.com

From Guest Columnist Joel ben Izzy....

It is, as Suzanne says, so good to read with friends. Though I've long known this, I never realized how good it was until I wrote a book.

As a traveling storyteller, I was accustomed to seeing every face in my audience. For twenty years I wandered the globe, gathering and telling tales always, it seemed, among friends--such is the life of a storyteller. I would never have written a book, but for a strange twist my own story took, on the day I went for a surgical procedure and awoke to discover I could no longer speak. At first doctors said the loss was temporary, but later they decided it was permanent.

So it was I found myself living inside a story as strange as any I had ever told. At first, my life crumbled--not just as a storyteller, but as a husband and father to two young children. Over time, though, my stories came back to me like old friends, helping me find meaning in my loss. New ones came, too, from a great teacher, who guided me from darkness into light. Eventually, my journey seemed worth sharing with others, so I set fingers to keyboard.

Day after day, I stared at the screen, trying to tell my story, I pictured the reader I hoped would someday appear: kind and caring, open and curious, with a sense of humor--a friend I had not yet met. After five years of writing my story became a book--"The Beggar King and the Secret of Happiness".

Mailing off the final version felt like putting a message in a bottle. I waited anxiously for months, until it finally appeared on the shelves, then waited more. One day an e-mail came--someone in Boulder, Colorado, had read it, and shared his own story of a curse turned to a blessing. A woman in Maine wrote that she had read the book with her father as he lay dying, and how they spent his last days sharing the stories they'd never told.

Each day brought new responses. One of the nicest came when I read in "Dear Reader" how my story had touched Suzanne. She shared some of her story as well, and forwarded the e-mails from readers, stories that filled me with gratitude. Suzanne and I began trading stories and--though we've yet to meet in person--have become book friends.

Since then, my little book has taken on a life of its own. It's been optioned for film and being developed as a play. My publisher sends me foreign editions--Chinese, Russian, Japanese and German, so far. What a strange feeling to hold a book you've written, but cannot read. And it's so fun to see the covers--you can find them at:

http://www.emailbookclub.com/photo/izzy.html

The paperback has just come out, and there's no telling where it will go. But I hope it finds those readers who need it.

Because it's so good to read with friends.

Joel ben Izzy
www.storypage.com

Dear Reader Column 9-28-05

Join my email book club. Over 300,000 people read 5-minutes a day. To see what books I'm featuring this week, go to: http://www.dearreader.com/

Dear Reader,

I'm on vacation this week. My husband and I are wandering around the Blue Ridge Mountains. Instead of running previous columns, I've asked some friends of mine to fill in for me. Today's guest column is written by Carol Fitzgerald.

Thanks for reading with me. It's so good to read with friends.

Suzanne Beecher
Suzanne@DearReader.com
www.DearReader.com

From Guest Columnist Carol Fitzgerald....

Each weekday morning I log into my email and read Suzanne's column. Like many of you, it's the way I start my day. Suzanne and I met a couple of years ago in Los Angeles when we were on a panel together at a book conference. I was intrigued by what she was doing with DearReader.com as I love projects and programs that connect readers with books and authors. You see, I founded a website called Bookreporter.com in 1996 while Suzanne started DearReader.com in 1999. As Internet entrepreneurs there is a certain kinship between us.

Many of the books she excerpts we have reviewed on Bookreporter.com or one of our other websites, or we have provided a reading group discussion for the book on ReadingGroupGuides.com. As a result, I enjoy seeing what she is sharing with her readers.

But there is more than just the books happening here, which is something I know you feel too. As I read Suzanne's columns I have come to know her better than I know some friends who I have known for years. Through her stories, pictures and ramblings--and I mean the latter in the fondest sense--I came to know her.

I also read between the lines.

Last year when her mom was ill I knew from reading columns how her mom was doing. I could tell by what she wrote--and didn't. When I heard of her mom's death offline, I waited to see how she would share it with her readers. What I read, when she told you this news, carried the same emotion I heard in her voice on the phone. When she writes with glee about a bubble machine she wants to give away, or a special book giveaway, I can see her smiling as she writes. That's something special.

We had dinner in Chicago back in June. I arrived at the restaurant and found her hunched over her notebook writing away just as she described in her column. I realized then that the reason her column works is because it comes from the heart instead of some made up place.

Right now I am picturing Suzanne on vacation in the Blue Ridge Mountains. I can see her with camera in hand documenting places to share with her readers. I can see her finding items in small shops to share with you. And I can see her reading and pondering what books she wants to share.

I know this because I live my life the same way. I read a book and think about how to bring it with our readers. I do something and think how to make it live on our pages, newsletter or in a blog.

I almost ended this column with a trivia game about Suzanne to see how well you know her. But then I realized that this is not a place to get tested or graded. It's a place to explore and relax. I love the way she tells readers to skip books when they are not interested. To me, that's why you love it here. You see, she like me sets the table and invites you in. What you take from the visit is all up to you.

Happy reading.

Carol Fitzgerald
Carol@bookreporter.com 
www.bookreporter.com

Dear Reader Column 9-27-05

Join my email book club. Over 300,000 people read 5-minutes a day. To see what books I'm featuring this week, go to: http://www.dearreader.com/

Dear Reader,

I'm on vacation this week. Some of my friends have graciously offered to fill in for me while I'm gone. Today's column is written by author M.J. Rose.

Thanks for reading with me. It's so good to read with friends.

Suzanne Beecher
Suzanne@DearReader.com
www.DearReader.com

Today's guest columnist author M.J. Rose....

Once upon a time (about four years ago) I interviewed a woman for my weekly column on publishing news for Wired.com. Her company was so innovative and so interesting I wanted to bring it to the attention of readers everywhere.

Usually, I interviewed about a dozen people a week for the column, and while many of them had news, very few of them stood out the way she did. She was open and charming and smart and what was even more curious (and rare) was she was as interested in me as I was in her, asking me to tell her all about my novels, which she said she was going to read.

When I called back to fact check a few items for the column, she'd already read one of my books and after telling me how much she liked it, mentioned that she was coming to New York. How could I not have invited her to lunch?

A month later I arrived at the Tabla restaurant in the east 20's on Madison Avenue without any idea of whether or not she'd be anything like what I'd imagined. She was already at our table, wearing the perfect black suit, her blonde hair shining, looking about twenty years younger than her age. (I'd asked over the phone for the article.)

You know how it can be awkward when you meet someone you've never met before?

It wasn't.

You know how so many people just talk about themselves and never remember to ask about you?

She didn't.

You know how you can talk for a half hour or so and then run out of things to say?

We didn't.

Lunch is supposed to take an hour or an hour and a half.

Two and a half hours later we left the restaurant--yup, you guessed it, me and Suzanne Beecher, having bonded over iced tea and Indian food and the fact that both of us who really never made friends easily, had made friends so easily.

She's the best!

Thanks for reading with me, too!

M.J. Rose--author of "The Halo Effect".

(www.mjrose.com)

Dear Reader Column 9-26-05

Join my email book club. Over 300,000 people read 5-minutes a day. To see what books I'm featuring this week, go to: http://www.dearreader.com/

Dear Reader,

I'm on vacation this week. My husband and I are wandering around the Blue Ridge Mountains. If you see us, be sure to say hello. Some of my friends have graciously offered to fill in for me while I'm gone. Today's column is written by my good friend Bill Duncan. Feel free to drop Bill a note.

Thanks for reading with me. It's so good to read with friends.

Suzanne Beecher
Suzanne@DearReader.com 
www.DearReader.com

Today's Guest Columnist Bill Duncan....

Let's have an understanding right away. I suffer from Biblioholism, a literary addiction that I wager every reader of this column also suffers from, or is in a state of denial. I am a newspaper editor, columnist and book reviewer, all a natural adjunct to my Biblioholism.

I have a columnist friend, Suzanne Beecher, who writes a daily column from her base in Sarasota, Fla. I admire that because facing a blank screen once a week, as I do for my own column, is a frightening task. To do it daily is heroic.

She writes my kind of column. Nothing serious, but always entertaining because each column is a slice of life. I first met Suzanne when I interviewed her online for a newspaper story about the book clubs. We became instant friends, exchanging personal e-mails almost on a daily basis.

In the spring this year, my wife, also a writer and I made a pilgrimage to Sarasota to visit Suzanne and her husband, Bob. It was the first time we had met face to face. For all you Suzanne fans, she is real, folks. Everything you read about her in her columns is absolute Suzanne. She is not from a cookie cutter mold. In my opinion, the master chef threw away the mold as soon as Suzanne was out of the oven.

Suzanne was thinking about taking us out to some fancy restaurant in Sarasota, but decided it would be more fun to fix lunch at her home. Being from the South, I was imagining something more along the line of hog jowls and black-eyed peas.

To my surprise, she fixed an elegant lunch of Chinese cuisine, down to her homemade hot-and-sour soup. I don't know how she knew Chinese was one of my favorite foods, perhaps I had written a column about it and since we exchange columns--and column ideas--she may have picked up on it from that source. I was not only impressed with the full Chinese dinner, but even more so with her hot-and-sour soup. It was authentic down to the dried black fungus.

She served the soup in fine china bowls with matching delicate china spoons. However, what really startled me was when I opened my fortune cookie and found this message inside: "You achieve great peace of mind when you talk with an old friend."

I don't know how the anonymous fortune teller knew about our strange friendship, but here I was with Suzanne and I had great peace of mind with a friend--not an old friend, mind you. Suzanne is a young friend, younger than my oldest daughter. We are a generation apart, yet we both feel comfortable in our shared cyberspace, telephone calls and letter exchanges. The common denominator is books.

In 1991, Tom Raabe wrote a book about my addiction in which he said Biblioholism is "the habitual longing to purchase, read, store, admire and consume books in excess."

Well, that sums me up. I think it sums up Suzanne, too.

Thanks for reading with Suzanne. She will be back soon.

Bill Duncan
semperfi@douglasfast.net
P.O. Box 812
Roseburg, OR 97470

Dear Reader Column 9-23-05

Join my email book club. Over 300,000 people read 5-minutes a day. To see what books I'm featuring this week, go to: http://www.dearreader.com/

Dear Reader,

I'm on vacation. Today's column is written by Sandra Backlund, one of the winners of the "Write a Dear Reader Contest." Sandra is a retired teacher and she lives in Lafayette, Colorado. "My mother used to sit down and journal every day," Sandra said, "and now I've gotten a journal just like the one that she used, and I'm writing every day, too."

Congratulations Sandra. Hundreds of people entered the contest and my staff picked the two winning entries. I'm grateful to everyone who submitted a column.

My husband and I will be wandering around the Blue Ridge Mountains for the next 10 days. If you see me, be sure to say hello.

Thanks for reading with me. It's so good to read with friends.

Warm regards,

Suzanne Beecher
Suzanne@DearReader.com 
www.DearReader.com

Today's guest column is written by Sandra Backlund.

Sometimes actions are louder than words!

Embarking on a day of solo skiing in the high country, I eased my matronly blue van (years ago dubbed the "Mother Ship") into the ski area's wooded outer parking lot, my car radio's classical station supplying the perfect rapturous accompaniment to this gloriously sunny, white-skirted day. I parked and turned off the car and radio, surprised by a less pleasing sound assaulting my ears. In the next parking spot stood a Subaru with its doors thrown open, a booming rap beat blasting from its stereo system. Beside it, four snowboarders pulled on loose jackets and knitted hats, oblivious to the overreaching effects of their music.

"How rude," I thought, opening the hatch of my van, "to assume that everyone in the lot wants to listen to their particular, offensive music." I felt invaded--the peace of the day ebbing away.

Getting into my van to put on sunscreen gave me a shelter from the noise, when a more positive move occurred to me. I turned my radio once again to the classical station, cranked the volume all the way up and lowered all four windows at once, my speakers pouring classical crescendos from every orifice of the vehicle.

Thus accompanied, I got out to don my boots and unload my skis, trying to pretend it was normal to function amidst this much noise.
The musics dueled.

The boarders, one by one, glanced up from fastening boots amidst the cacophony and grinned. Grins broadened to smiles, nearly to laughter. They were definitely getting it. Minutes later, all ready to go, we simultaneously turned off both sound systems and locked the cars; the show-down over.

"Great day, isn't it!!!" chirped one of the boarders to me in the now silent lot, barely containing his glee.

"SO GREAT!!!" I agreed, having given up nothing, and gained quite a lot.

-- Sandra Backlund / Dear Reader Column Winner

Dear Reader Column 9-22-05

Join my email book club. Over 300,000 people read 5-minutes a day. To see what books I'm featuring this week, go to: http://www.dearreader.com/

Dear Reader,

I'm on vacation. Today's column is written by Jennifer Grant.

Jennifer was one of the winners of the "Write a Dear Reader Contest." She is a library technician at The William T. Coppell Public Library, in Coppell, Texas. Jennifer said, her mother, who's a librarian, used to tell this story over and over again when she was a kid.

Congratulations, Jennifer. Hundreds of people entered and my staff picked the two winning entries. I'm grateful to everyone who submitted a column.

My husband and I will be wandering around the Blue Ridge Mountains for the next 10 days. If you see me, be sure to say hello.

Thanks for reading with me. It's so good to read with friends.

Warm regards,

Suzanne Beecher
Suzanne@DearReader.com 
www.DearReader.com

Today's guest column is written by Jennifer Grant.

Like many people who read this column, I love books and started reading voraciously when I was in elementary school. However, my fascination with books started even earlier.

Even before I could read, I had a healthy appetite for books. That's not a metaphor. When I was a baby I used to eat books.

At bedtime my mom liked to read a Winnie-the-Pooh picture book to me. Well, she read it to me until the day she caught me with a mouthful of pulp. Her favorite 32-page book had only six pages left.

After my first taste of book, I tried to eat others, but my mom figured out my dining schedule. She would stick her finger in my mouth and swipe the paper out before I could get it juicy. She would also catch me gumming the covers of books and take them away before I could warp the cardboard with my plenteous baby saliva.

When she tired of my game, my mom put me on a no-book, no-paper diet. She gave me lots of "teething books" that she could wash after my snack time. One of these chew-proof books also had a noise device inside, so every jaw contraction produced a little squeak. The noise alerted my mom that I was craving books again.

Luckily, once my teeth grew in, I stopped my book feasts. My mom allowed me to look at paper books again, and I have never stopped.

Thanks for eating-err, reading-with me, too.

--Jennifer Grant / "Write a Dear Reader Winner"

Dear Reader Column 9-21-05

Join my email book club. Over 300,000 people read 5-minutes a day. To see what books I'm featuring this week, go to: http://www.dearreader.com/

Dear Reader,

Tomorrow my husband and I leave on our vacation. We're headed for the Blue Ridge Mountains. We're leaving a day early, because when we visited the travel agent the other day, we got so jazzed thinking about our vacation, we decided to get out of town early.

Before we sat down with the travel agent, the only preparation we'd accomplished was to buy a book about the Blue Ridge Mountains--but neither of us had read any of it yet. The other day when I suggested to my husband that we should probably start planning our vacation--because we didn't even know what roads we were going to take--he assured me not to worry. "It's simple," he said, "we live in Florida, the Blue Ridge Mountains are North, we're just going to get in the car and start driving North."

Nevertheless, I decided we should visit a travel agent. It's amazing what a skilled professional woman can do. Why, in 30 minutes the travel agent had us mentally on the road, with yellow highlighted lines on a map--and yes I conceded to my husband that those lines headed North--but she told us which roads to avoid because they were under construction. Three clicks of the travel agent's mouse, and we were instantly booked in a great hotel--top floor with a jacuzzi--for the first three nights of our trip, and then on to a rustic cabin in the mountains.

I cycle through a series of emotions before I go on a vacation. At first, I'm excited about going and I'm counting the days. Then, I get down to business about who's going to take care of what while I'm gone, planning the trip, making reservations. But then two days before I'm supposed to leave, I always get nervous. I start thinking that maybe going on vacation isn't such a good idea after all. I worry about what might happen while I'm gone--not that anything bad has ever happened. Then, I have to talk myself down from pre-vacation anxiety and remind myself that I spent one entire vacation worrying about things. And when my vacation was over, I was so disgusted with myself, because truth be told, nobody really missed me and everything went along just like normal. So now that I've reaffirmed myself that it will all be okay, I'll say good-bye because tomorrow I'm on vacation.

Be assured, I'm leaving my column in good hands. Thursday and Friday you'll be reading the winning "Write a Dear Reader Column" entries. And then, every day next week, I'm featuring a Guest Columnist. I asked five, busy talented friends of mine--all writers and authors--to fill in for me, and they all graciously accepted.

I'll talk to you soon. This girl's hitting the road!

Thanks for reading with me. It's so good to read with friends.

Gone on vacation,

Suzanne Beecher
Suzanne@DearReader.com 
www.DearReader.com

P.S. My husband and I had a "Bread Bake-Off Contest" over the Labor Day Weekend. For recipes and photos that will make you hungry--my cinnamon rolls looked mighty fine--go to:

http://www.emailbookclub.com/photo/bread2.html

Dear Reader Column 9-20-05

Join my email book club. Over 300,000 people read 5-minutes a day. To see what books I'm featuring this week, go to: http://www.dearreader.com/

Dear Reader,

The boxes came today. The ones that my husband and I packed up when we were at my mother's house a few weeks ago. It was my final trip back home.

I'd started sorting through some of my mother's things after her funeral, but I still faced a huge pile in her basement when I returned. Deciding what to keep and what to toss or give away, it was a slow, difficult process. What looks like junk to most people are precious memories to me.

Sorting through someone else's possessions, even when they were your mother's; makes me feel uneasy. What's left behind exposes a person after they're gone, and they're not even there to explain why they kept something all those years.

So I could only guess why my mother hung on to a tall, decorative, gold bottle with a pointed top on it. The bottles were popular when I was growing up. Ours used to sit in the corner of the living room. It didn't do anything except sit there and collect dust. I dusted it every Saturday.

Looking at it now, I can't for the life of me understand why my mother found it attractive. It's one of the ugliest bottles that I've ever seen. Nevertheless, it went into my "save" pile of things. How could I say "no" to a bottle that used to sit in the corner of our living room?

And that's how my so-called "sorting things" went for most of the day. After four hours, my "save" pile was overflowing and the "toss" pile had six items in it. I finally had to have my husband help me make decisions. We started over again, from the beginning. He was patient. I'd pick up an item, tell him a story about it, and then he'd help me make a less emotional decision about whether or not to keep it. By the end of the weekend, we'd filled 12 huge boxes with things that I was shipping to my home in Florida.

I opened a couple of those boxes today when they arrived, but I think I'm going to have to leave most of them taped up for a while. It took a lot out of me to pack up the memories, and I don't think I'm ready to start unpacking them quite yet.

Thanks for reading with me. It's so good to read with friends.

Suzanne Beecher
Suzanne@DearReader.com 
www.DearReader.com

P.S. My husband and I had a "Bread Bake-Off Contest" over the Labor Day Weekend. For recipes and photos that will make you hungry--my cinnamon rolls looked mighty fine--go to:
http://www.emailbookclub.com/photo/bread2.html

Dear Reader Column 9-19-05

Join my email book club. Over 300,000 people read 5-minutes a day. To see what books I'm featuring this week, go to: http://www.dearreader.com/

Dear Reader,

My husband, Bob, and I had a "Bread Bake-Off Contest" over the Labor Day Weekend. The only rule we adhered to was that the bread recipe had to include yeast. My husband chose a Hearty Wheat Bread, the recipe on the back of a gourmet wheat flour package. I was ambitious and decided to bake Northern Maine Oatmeal Bread, and I made a braided twist and cinnamon rolls from a sweet bread recipe that I used when I was in home economics class in 1968.

The sweet dough is a cool rise recipe--the dough rises while it's sitting in the refrigerator, and you can leave it in the fridge for 2 to 48 hours. There wasn't time to wait for bread dough to rise and then bake it off all in one class period, so it was the perfect recipe for students. And I have to say that it's still a perfect, no-fail recipe for me today, too.

Everyone interprets a recipe a little differently. The instructions in the recipe that my husband was using instructed him to warm up his bowl. The next thing I knew, he had the hair dryer on full blast and was aiming it at his baking bowl. (Yes, there is a photo link at the end of this column.)

After my husband tasted my oatmeal bread and cinnamon rolls, he awarded me the Bread Bake-Off Blue Ribbon and he suggested that I shouldn't even taste-test his bread. The poor guy, his bread looked hearty all right, so hearty that in his words, "If we ever decide to build that addition on to our house, we can make the bricks out of this bread dough recipe."

We had a lot of fun making bread. In fact, I've made the bread a couple of times since then. Next Labor Day I think I'll invite my son and daughter-in-law to join in the "Beecher Bread Bake-Off Contest", too.

For recipes and photos that will make you hungry--my cinnamon rolls tasted mighty fine--go to:
http://www.emailbookclub.com/photo/bread2.html

Thanks for reading with me. It's so good to read with friends.

Suzanne Beecher
Suzanne@DearReader.com
www.DearReader.com