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Last night, I attended one of Random House’s “Big Ideas Nights,” where an author is interviewed and there is plenty of time for interacting with the featured speaker. The evening’s guest was Tara Westover, whose book EDUCATED was an instant New York Times bestseller and a Bookreporter.com Bets On pick. I had the pleasure of reading an advance copy of this book last summer and had met Tara in the fall at a media lunch. It was so lovely to see her interviewed by Amy Chua, author of BATTLE HYMN OF THE TIGER MOTHER and the recently published POLITICAL TRIBES: Group Instinct and the Fate of Nations. The room was packed, and clearly many had read EDUCATED and had insightful questions for Tara. The Random House team taped the event for Facebook Live, and you can watch it here. Tara was a thoughtful speaker. I was impressed to hear the amount of self-evaluation she put into her writing, as well as how carefully she wanted to vet it to ensure that her perspective was clear on various portions of it.

It’s been a crazy time as the second nor’easter in the tri-state area swept through here and left us without power for part of five days; the third storm today only hit the city mildly. I am sure there were many book club meetings that had to be rescheduled! This has been one very wild winter.

This is one reason I am happy to focus here on some events and programs that are guaranteed to make our readers smile.