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(image via flickr)

It’s funny how most of my favorite camping memories are about food. Like the time, two days into a camping trip in Big Sur, friends pulled profiteroles from deep inside their cooler like a magician pulling a rabbit from a hat. They warmed rich, creamy chocolate sauce on the fire and drizzled it over the ice-cream-filled pastry puffs. We devoured the unexpected treat around the campfire, licking every last bit of gooey, rich chocolate goodness from our fingers. Decadent, delicious, unforgettable.

Some of the best books are the ones chock-full of characters we wish we could know in real life. Here’s a few of our favorites we’d be happy to call classmates. HAGS and KIT, guys!

(Image via flickr)

With the end of the school year comes the summer reading list: the list of books that students will be tested on in the fall. The specific books obviously vary from school to school, but during my stint as a high school teacher, the summer reading list always faced the same challenges. Our department would argue about the purpose of summer reading, and we would end up standing divided, each with certain books in our corner.

While some of my colleagues struggled to find selections that were both 1) not adapted into movies and 2) not on Sparknotes, that generally limited the choices, and seemed wrong to me. It usually resulted in summer reading becoming a pointless assignment, with no real connection to the coursework in the coming year. It also did little to foster a love of reading for the students. It was a punishment assignment: a reminder that they weren’t free from the grasp of school.

Because for many students, the cycle of summer reading was the same: cramming it all in before a test, downloading study guides, or writing a vague essay that could be about any book.

Taking photos of food is easy! Especially compared to photographing people. Food doesn’t talk back or move around. It just sits there looking delicious, waiting for you to find its best angle. Food never complains that you are making it look fat or ugly, and it never insists that you play death metal during the photo shoot.

Don’t let all those gorgeous shots in cookbooks and on the internet intimidate you! Here are some tips to making successful food photos, whether you’re cozy at home or out at a restaurant, street fair, luau, or anywhere with good food.

Photos by Marian Hammond

William Shakespeare’s Star Wars came out July 2^nd, one week before my birthday, and what a week it was—lots of fun press, a great book release at Powell’s and a great party afterward (featuring the world’s best cake courtesy of the world’s best spouse), watching the online buzz grow, and so on.

I thought I’d hit the high Monday the 8^th, when Google Trends Manager Kevin Allocca appeared on the Today show and named my little book as the reason why Google had seen an upturn in searches for “Star Wars” over the weekend.  But then, later that day, my editor Jason Rekulak from Quirk Books called me and told me there was a decent chance I would end up on the New York Times bestseller list.

Wait, what?

Summer makes bad songs sound good. There’s no better time of the year to blare Top 40 music as loud as possible and sing about how awesome life is. There are some songs that re-surface every year throughout the summer months and, for some reason, they are universally loved.