{"id":36823,"date":"2025-09-22T17:58:07","date_gmt":"2025-09-22T17:58:07","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/36823\/"},"modified":"2025-09-22T17:58:07","modified_gmt":"2025-09-22T17:58:07","slug":"what-to-read-now","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/36823\/","title":{"rendered":"What to Read Now!"},"content":{"rendered":"

Fall is a great time to curl up with a good book! Anna David, publisher and New York Times bestselling author, joined us to share her current favorites. For more information about Anna, click here<\/a>.<\/p>\n

It Girl: The Life and Legacy of Jane Birkin by Marissa Metzler<\/p>\n

A few years ago I talked about Metzler\u2019s previous book Glossy about the founder of the beauty brand Glossier. I liked it but found it a bit uneven, mostly because the research and reporting was woven together with some bizarre interactions with Weiss herself. Well, Metzler does 1000 times better with a subject she never met\u2014particularly one who was as unique and outspoken as Jane Birkin. Most people know of Birkin because of the famous, and ridiculously expensive bag that Hermes created for her but she was so much more: a beautiful acting prot\u00e9g\u00e9 from a creative family who moved to Paris and became known for her songs and relationship with French icon Serge Gainsbourg. This thorough and gripping biography delves into the most fascinating aspects of Birkin\u2019s professional and personal life, touching on issues with codependence, parenting and yes coming to terms with the fact that she became most famous for a bag that had nothing to do with her. In all, It Girl is a fabulous read about someone whose name you may know but whose life has been more shrouded in mystery.<\/p>\n

Gwyneth by Amy Odell<\/p>\n

I didn\u2019t want to love this. I didn\u2019t even want to read it because I thought it would be like reading a several hundred-page issue of Us Weekly focused on an actress I\u2019ve never thought much about. While that actually sounds delightful in some ways, let\u2019s just say I didn\u2019t think it would be brain enhancing. Brain enhancing or not, I couldn\u2019t put it down. I\u2019m not sure what I learned from the book that will serve me, except that you can go very far if you have the sort of confidence that comes from having a wonderful dad who adores you. But it did manage to make Gwyneth into a full person\u2014a lucky and privileged person, yes, but not the caricature she somehow always gets presented as in the media when she puts her foot in her mouth while revealing how out of touch she is with the lives and struggles of everyday people. But the book, which was written without her approval, is as well-reported and well-written as could be and thus does a solid job of showing how Gwyneth probably couldn\u2019t do anything but make faux pas like she does, given her life experience. It also shows that the fact that she took her a bit irrelevant for the common person recommendations and turned it into the multi-million-dollar brand Goop isn\u2019t an accident: she\u2019s savvy indeed. Written by Amy Odell, who also wrote the New York Times bestseller about Vogue editor Anna Wintour, Gwyneth is a book that\u2019s hard to put down.<\/p>\n

Good Ideas and Power Moves: Ten Lessons for Success from Taylor Swift by Sin\u00e9ad O’Sullivan<\/p>\n

Before I say anything, just know that I\u2019m a Swiftie to a vaguely terrifying degree and I\u2019m as much a fan of her good ideas and power moves as I am of her music. So the idea that a former Strategist at Harvard Business School\u2019s Institute for Strategy was not only a serious Swiftie but had also broken down Swift\u2019s strategies for success was thrilling to me. And even as someone who spends at least a few hours a day thinking about Swift, I have to say there are definitely some things O\u2019Sullivan explained in ways I\u2019d never thought of\u2014for instance that one of the reason for Swift\u2019s dominance is that she\u2019s created a community that doesn\u2019t need her involvement to grow\u2014for instance in the years she took off after her battle with Kim and Kanye (if you know you know; if you don\u2019t, it\u2019s too much to break down), she only grew in popularity. O\u2019Sullivan compares that to major brands that need to constantly be in our faces to grow. So if you want to be able to apply Swiftian strategy to business, and every businessperson should, you need to read this.<\/p>\n

All the Way to the River by Elizabeth Gilbert<\/p>\n

Well, this book has, to say the least, caused quite a big stir in the few weeks it\u2019s been out. That\u2019s what will happen when Elizabeth Gilbert, who wrote the mega bestseller Eat Pray Love, which was then made into the mega movie starring Julia Roberts, releases a memoir about how she realized she was in love with her best friend when that best friend was diagnosed with a terminal disease, divorced her husband and then descended into addiction with her lover. Now clean and sober, Gilbert reflects on the insanity of her life with her girlfriend with rather astonishing sanity\u2014somehow making her behavior sound logical. As the former poster child for straight, straight-edged women having very neat and clean spiritual awakenings, All the Way to the River makes Glennon Doyle\u2019s transformation from happily married Christian mom to lesbian activist seem tame. Of course, Gilbert is a brilliant writer so if you come for the salacious story, you may end up staying for the precise prose.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Fall is a great time to curl up with a good book! Anna David, publisher and New York…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":36824,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[30],"tags":[28441,740,288,28444,93,28443,61,60,28442,1364,962,6543],"class_list":{"0":"post-36823","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-books","8":"tag-biography","9":"tag-book","10":"tag-books","11":"tag-elizabeth-gilbert","12":"tag-entertainment","13":"tag-gwyneth","14":"tag-ie","15":"tag-ireland","16":"tag-jane-birkin","17":"tag-memoir","18":"tag-success","19":"tag-taylor-swift"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/36823","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=36823"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/36823\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/36824"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=36823"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=36823"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=36823"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}