Friday Five- March 15, 2019 Edition

A few years ago I started a weekly post called the Friday Five, about five things that I found interesting that week. I'm going to revive this and try to be really diligent about posting, so here goes Friday Five 2.0

1)  I first discovered Paula Pell at the Saturday Night Live exhibit in NYC. They did a video interview with former head writers and she was in it. I found her so interesting, and didn't really hear too much about her until I watched the NBC sitcom A.P. Bio. She plays the school secretary and she is hilarious, especially in her scenes with Patton Oswalt, who plays the principal. Then I saw her on IFC's Documentary Now! in the episode that spoofs the famous documentary about the Broadway show Company. Pell takes on the Elaine Stritch role and she is nothing short of phenomenal. Watch part of it here:


2)  Speaking of TV comedies, I'm addicted to Brooklyn Nine-Nine on NBC. It's made by Dan Goor and Michael Schur, who did one of my all-time favorites Parks & Rec. I have no idea why it took me so long to find this, but I have four seasons to catch up on.


3)  I've seen some terrific Facebook Lives, all having to do with books. Author Adriana Trigiani has been doing them weekly, and it's like chatting with a good friend. She has some exciting movie news on this week's episode. If you like her books, check her Facebook page for these fun visits.  You can see it here.

I also watched two other recent Facebook Lives- Harper Book Studio 16 talk on Historical Fiction with author Lauren Willig and editor Rachel Kahan was the first one. They mentioned so many of my favorite books- The Thorn Birds  and Gone With The Wind. You can see it here.

The last one I watched was a Library Love Fest interview with actress Kate Mulgrew, who many know from Ryan's Hope, Star Trek Voyager and Orange is the New Black. She wrote a book called How to Forget about her parents. If it's half as good as her memoir Born with Teeth, it will be fantastic. I saw her speak about that book a few years ago at Barnes & Noble in Union Square, my post about that is here. The Facebook Live video is here.

4) As I've mentioned before, I volunteer at the Book Cellar, a used book store located in the Webster Library branch of the New York Public Library. All of the staff are volunteers, all of our books are donated, and our profits benefit the local branch libraries of the NYPL. People are very generous to us, we get some wonderful books, including rare and new books. This week we got an exciting book- an inscribed copy of Hamilton- the Revolution about the smash Broadway musical. The book is signed by Lin-Manuel Miranda, and I was so happy when I saw that signature. This is a big find for us.

5) Author Laura Lippman is trying to encourage people to read 100 pages daily for her #AlwaysForPleasure Twitter reading challenge during this Lenten season (although there is no correlation). I decided to follow her example and I finished two books- Jacqueline Winspear's 15th Maisie Dobbs book, The American Agent (which is one of her best!) and Jennifer Robson's historical novel about the women who made Queen Elizabeth's wedding dress, The Gown, which I also liked. I'm in the middle of two other books, Jennifer Weiner's Mrs. Everything and Kate Quinn's follow-up to her hit The Alice Network, titled The Huntress. I saw Jennifer Robson and Kate Quinn at HarperCollins' Book Club Girls' Night Out last year, where they talked about their books. That post is here.

Whew, this is a long post. Most of the Friday Fives won't be this long, I promise. Let me know what you've found interesting this week in the Comments section. Have a great weekend!