Aha I have too many things going on to update a blog so we (me and the publishers) are gracefully conceding DEFEAT :) But everything that crosses my mind goes on a) twitter if it’s little and b) my facebook page if it’s potentially more interesting, so that’s where to find me- @jennycolgan or www.facebook.com/jennycolganbooks. See you there! Jenxxx

HEY! And if you are thinking, huff, she never updates this blog, well, yes, okay, right but I DO update www.facebook.com/jennycolganbooks. Hmm, maybe we need a way to combine the two. We do, don’t we? That’s where all the nice recipes and everything go. Anyway,

Exciting news 1) Little, Brown, my publishers have asked for a follow up to Meet Me at the Cupcake Cafe! Hurrah. It will be called Christmas at the Cupcake Cafe (hmm, can you guess what it’s about?) and it will be out late next year for Christmas 2012, and I absolutely cannot wait to get started on it.

Exciting news 2) is that next year’s book, Rosie Hopkins’ Sweetshop of Dreams is all finished and ready and the cover is gorgeous and early feedback is very flattering so that is exciting too. It’s out at the end of March. Hurrah! It’s about Rosie, a busy, harassed nurse in London who has to go to the country to take care of her elderly aunt after an operation. She thinks it is going to be the most boring thing she has ever done. It is NOT :). We’ve got some yummy sweet recipes in there too and lots of nice things.

Reading wise, my friend the brilliant Lucy Mangan recommended The Best of Everything which I utterly adored. It’s about New York girls in the 50s, a bit Mad Men, but so honest and fascinating and brilliant, it felt like it was written yesterday. Zone One, which is good, but I’m not sure we need another zombie apocalypse whilst the Walking Dead is just being so brilliant and Justin Cronin must surely be due to deliver the follow up to the Passage soon ; The Children of Men, which is COMPLETELY awesome- I loved the film, but the book is amazing in a completely different way; a very hyped new book with a beautiful cover which I found to be a fairly thin Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell rip- off (which IS brilliant); and Boomerang by Michael Lewis, who if you have the faintest interest in our current economic situation you should be reading almost constantly.

Hope you’re well! Jenxxx

I hate it when books rush past. Sometimes now it feels like the publishing cycle is so fast that things can come and go in the blink of an eye, then they’re impossible to find again. Which means I do a lot of impulse buying. I know, I know, hypothetically with the internet you can find everything forever, but I almost never remember what caught my eye first time around.

Anyway, here is one you might have missed whooshing past, but I can’t recommend it highly enough. It’s by Ben Hatch, and it’s called Are We Nearly There Yet? 8000 miles in a Vauxhall Astra . At first glance you might think it’s one of those Bill Bryson light comic monologues (no disrespect to Bill Bryson by the way, I think he’s a genius who has taught more people more interesting stuff in a fun way than just about anyone since Richard Attenborough), but it’s not like that at all. It’s about a family who take off to write a guidebook for Fromer’s with their two toddlers. Whilst they do, Ben’s father gets ill (it’s non-fiction), and, due to eight hours in a car together every day for months on end, the whole family learn a lot about each other.

I think why I liked it so very much is that so many books look at bad marriages or relationships; or they focus on finding a person, then ignoring after the happy ever after, whereas this is about a living, loving, occasionally quarrelsome but clearly very happy marriage and it felt curiously life-affirming to read about it. It’s very warts and all, extremely funny, very human and very sad. If you liked One Day (ha, I have yet to meet anyone who did NOT like One Day, or who was just saying they didn’t to show off and be different), or just like good books in general, don’t let this one pass you by. OOH and for disclosure, yes, he is a friend of mine, but he has written loads of books and I have never felt moved to blog about them before :)

Other things on my pile:

A Storm of Swords (Still, Jen? Jings, yes, and I have about three more to go as well. But WHAT a storyteller.)

The Time Traveller’s Guide to Medieval England -such a cool idea.

Little House on the Prairie I was reading this on holiday- it was one of those old things people leave behind in slightly shabby holiday cottages like the one we were in- and the baby threw it in the swimming pool. As it rained every single day on holiday I rather grumpily didn’t replace it. But it is even better than I remember and I am going to get a copy and start reading it to the boys asap.