I really enjoyed my trip to Book Expo America and have so much to say, but, honestly, I just need to talk about falafel for a minute. Because, hot damn, I had a lot of awesome falafel in New York. Guys, I just really love falafel a whole lot. 

My source was Taim, which was conveniently located in the nifty West Village neighborhood I stayed in. (Seriously, guys, if you go to NYC, skip the hell that is Midtown and stay in the Village, it's so pleasant.) Here are some of my falafels. 

Recently, The Mary Sue--a website I have deeply conflicted feelings about--posted a super-ignorant, click-bait-y piece about romance novels and romance readers.

Rather than rebut the silliness (because what's the point), I thought I'd offer some recommendations for clever ladies looking to try out the genre, want to try a new subgenre of Romance or who want to revisit it after an absence. I'm not an expert, but I've read reasonable widely in the genre and appreciate that it is, in many ways, a deeply feminist field of offerings, particularly in recent years. 

The following are 11 smart big-R romances (read: happy ending of a central love story, as defined by the Romance Writers Association) I recommend for Clever Ladies who are interested in the genre. Keep in mind that there's just about something for everyone in this genre, so if there's not something that's up your alley on this list, there's probably something out there--leave a note in the comments and I'll see what I can do. 

It's no secret that Molly O'Keefe's novels are my favorites in the very crowded contemporary romance genre.  Her books, which on their surface follow the norms of romance novels (since that's what they are), are brilliantly subversive. All of the novels I've read by this author riff on romance archetypes and conventions in a deliciously satisfying manner. Molly's latest, Wild Child, is no different.

Wild Child focuses on Monica Appleby, famous reality television teen wild child, who wrote a bestselling tell-all memoir of her raucous and destructive formative years. She's alone, her closest friend having recently died and not having a relationship with her mother, and has returned to the town of Bishop, Arkansas to write her follow-up book, this time chronicling the events of her parents' tumultuous relationship and her father's subsequent death. Monica is all hard edges and walls, unwilling to make even casual connections with anyone.

Monica ignored Jackson as he slid into the booth across from her. First the Cracker dude and now Jackson. Good Lord, weren’t the headphones a giveaway? Did she need to make a Do Not Disturb sign? This was why she so rarely went to coffee shops to work, preferring her own company and her own music.

The mayor of Bishop is Jackson Davies, who dropped out of law school and returned to his hard-luck hometown to raise his younger sister, Gwen, after their parents were killed in a car accident. Jackson never wanted to make Bishop his home; the town is dying, with an empty factory gathering dust and many of the town's residents struggling in the blighted economy. His father was mayor of Bishop as well, and his goal at the town's leader is the turn the economy around, make sure his sister is safely away at college and then get out of town.

Today, Laura tweeted a post from Salon's entertainment section, to which I reacted quite viscerally.

This (somewhat link-bait-y) piece is called "The Julie Taylor Test," referencing the daughter fo Eric and Tami Taylor on Friday Night Lights, and it's absolutely dripping with sexism. The author, Willa Paskin, asserts that bad acting can be identified by comparing the performer suspected of bad acting to Julie Taylor on Friday Night Lights, portrayed by Aimee Teegarden.

She argues, 

Enter the Julie Taylor Test, an easy way to identify bad TV acting: Ask yourself, is it  to imagine the inner life of this character? If no, is it possible to imagine the inner life of the characters surrounding him or her? It was all too possible to imagine the inner lives of every character on “Friday Night Lights” but Julie.

The thing is, using Paskin's own example, Julie Taylor has an immense inner life (watch The Giving Tree, S3E10, if you don't believe me).

However, her "inner life" is that of a teenage girl, so there are two strikes against Julie the character and Aimee the actress.

I'm always on the verge of canceling my Hulu subscription. It provides little to no value 92.3% of the time. And yet, they keep reeling me back in with some exclusive programming: Moone Boy, The Mindy Project, and now, The Wine Show. 

You guys, I love wine. I'm not a lush or anything, but I just love wine. I am a member at two local wineries, walk down to my neighborhood wine shop's Friday wine tastings, recently took a class with Josh about winemaking and somehow managed to order a hundred pounds of wine grapes to try our hand at making our own. 

I don't know how this all happened, but it did. 

So, we were cruising around hulu this summer and happened upon The Wine Show, which was, obviously relevant to our interests in the Moon Casa. 

Andy Daly seems the nicest man around, whether in print or on a podcast, he just exudes decency and good humor. Andy Daly has created one of the darkest, funniest shows on television. His character, Forest Macneil, has non threatening looks and sincere love of reviewing, with the misguided belief that his reviews of life itself, he will improve, life itself.

Last month, my husband and I headed down to Austin, Texas for a vacation and ATX Fest. In case you haven't heard of the festival, it focuses on television, with panels, reunions and other events about television past and present. This was the final year they were incorporating Friday Night Lights into the festival, and so I thought this was the year to go.

I wanted to share a bit about the fest, the good and bad, and the whole experience, even though I'm a bit late in doing so. 

ATX Fest: Day #1

"The Inessential Guide" is part of a new occasional series on CEFS, in which I'll be providing you with the guides to, well, whatever, that you don't really need.

You know we've been doing our annual "List of Awesome" every year and it's always been books, but since I'm tinkering with the focus of CEFS moving forward (more on that later), I thought I'd highlight some of the things I really enjoyed this year that aren't books in these lists.

Also, I really like lists. If you've missed previous years' installments, they're all archived here. 

For the first 2015 List of Awesome, I wanted to spotlight some of the fabulous television that I've enjoyed this year. It goes without saying that we're spoiled for television these days--so much so, it sometimes seems overwhelming.

You know we've been doing our annual "List of Awesome" every year and it's always been books, but since I'm tinkering with the focus of CEFS moving forward (more on that later), I thought I'd highlight some of the things I really enjoyed this year that aren't books in these lists.

Also, I really like lists. If you've missed previous years' installments, they're all archived here. 

For the next 2015 List of Awesome, I wanted to spotlight some of the the best comics and graphic novels of the year.

Hi folks! I'm happy to share our summer recommended reads with you. It's funny, I keep saying that I haven't gotten super excited about many books this year, but here we have 20+ books that we feel good about recommending--I guess are some good ones out there after all!

Reading has been tough this summer--I took on some huge projects that have competing deadlines and that means my eyeballs aren't too happy with me by the end of the day, so I haven't been reading as much. Plus I've been (intentionally) checked out from a lot of the book chatter online, so I haven't been as on it with regard to what's new and buzzed. (Not necessarily a bad thing.)

Onward to the recommendations!

You may recall that I've slid far, far down the comics rabbit hole. I even have new releases on my calendar so I remember to get say, the new Saga, on the Wednesday it releases. 

Here's what I've recently read.

Hawkeye, Volumes 1-3.

These combined volumes feature the archer Avenger and his mentee Kate, who's also known as Hawkeye and is super rad. I knew nothing about The Avengers going into this and found it incredibly accessible and liked the healthy does of angst. Fraction writes Sex Criminals, which I love, so I shouldn't be surprised by this one, but I was. My favorite was the third volume, LA Woman, which is just a Kate story.

Hi folks! I'm happy to share our summer recommended reads with you. It's funny, I keep saying that I haven't gotten super excited about many books this year, but here we have 20+ books that we feel good about recommending--I guess are some good ones out there after all!

Reading has been tough this summer--I took on some huge projects that have competing deadlines and that means my eyeballs aren't too happy with me by the end of the day, so I haven't been reading as much. Plus I've been (intentionally) checked out from a lot of the book chatter online, so I haven't been as on it with regard to what's new and buzzed. (Not necessarily a bad thing.)

Onward to the recommendations!

Well, I got a bit behind on, like, life, so I thought I'd bundle a few months of our recommended reads for you, rather than trying to catch up month-by-month. 

I did a bit of re-reading over the last few months, which has been pretty fun. I think I will continue to revisit my favorites as a matter of course, because there's something enjoyable in revisiting a beloved story. We all read The Carnival at Bray for book club right before it was a Printz honoree and we all loved it so much, so if you haven't snagged that brilliant little book, do so!

As always, click on the cover for more information. If we have a review available, it will be noted.

I can't recall who specifically recommended Katherine Center's Happiness for Beginners, but I'm most glad that whomever that was mentioned it--because it's most definitely a Sarah book, despite that it involves **shudder** camping. (UGH!)

Recommendation Tuesday started as a joke and is now an official thing. Basically, this is my way of making Tuesday a little more awesome. If you've got a book to recommend on this or any Tuesday, tweet me at @SarahSMoon or tag me on Instagram @sarahbethmoon and I'll help spread the word.

View all of the past recommendations over here.

I always feel weird recommending a "big" book that's gotten a lot of attention, because it feels like those books don't need me, but the heart likes what the heart likes, you know? In this case, I just finished reading and enjoyed the hell out of Alexandra Bracken's new epic time travel novel, Passenger. 

Recommendation Tuesday started as a joke and is now an official thing. Basically, this is my way of making Tuesday a little more awesome. If you've got a book to recommend on this or any Tuesday, tweet me at @SarahSMoon or tag me on Instagram @sarahbethmoon and I'll help spread the word.

View all of the past recommendations over here. 

Stephanie Tromly’s first novel, Trouble is a Friend of Mine, packs clever dialog, great characters and a complex mystery into a quick paced and excellent read.

Cordelia Jensen's debut novel first got on my radar thanks to Stasia Ward Kehoe's guest post for our Verse Week celebration this year.  While I don't read all the blogs, it seems like it's not received much attention and I'm here to remedy that, because folks, Skyscraping is a special book. 

I coined the term "nostalgia lit" on a podcast episode a couple years ago, and I'm generally a fairly reluctant about books set in near history, but Skyscraping is a wonderful example of this particular almost-contemporary setting.

You know all the ways you can kill a girl? 
God, there are so many. 

Courtney Summers' new novel, All The Rage, is out today and it's a difficult, important book that you need to pay attention to. 

Al The Rageis an indictment of a culture that shames and silences girls when they need support the most, that tells them that they are not valued; this is the culture that creates the Steubenvilles. (Let's be honest, Steubenville is not one place, it is everywhere.)

"The Inessential Guide" is part of a new occasional series on CEFS, in which I'll be providing you with the guides to, well, whatever, that you don't really need.

You know we've been doing our annual "List of Awesome" every year and it's always been books, but since I'm tinkering with the focus of CEFS moving forward (more on that later), I thought I'd highlight some of the things I really enjoyed this year that aren't books in these lists.

Also, I really like lists. If you've missed previous years' installments, they're all archived here. 

For the next 2015 List of Awesome, I wanted to spotlight some of the the best comics and graphic novels of the year.

You know we've been doing our annual "List of Awesome" every year and it's always been books, but since I'm tinkering with the focus of CEFS moving forward (more on that later), I thought I'd highlight some of the things I really enjoyed this year that aren't books in these lists.

Also, I really like lists. If you've missed previous years' installments, they're all archived here. 

For the first 2015 List of Awesome, I wanted to spotlight some of the fabulous television that I've enjoyed this year. It goes without saying that we're spoiled for television these days--so much so, it sometimes seems overwhelming.

Recently, The Mary Sue--a website I have deeply conflicted feelings about--posted a super-ignorant, click-bait-y piece about romance novels and romance readers.

Rather than rebut the silliness (because what's the point), I thought I'd offer some recommendations for clever ladies looking to try out the genre, want to try a new subgenre of Romance or who want to revisit it after an absence. I'm not an expert, but I've read reasonable widely in the genre and appreciate that it is, in many ways, a deeply feminist field of offerings, particularly in recent years. 

The following are 11 smart big-R romances (read: happy ending of a central love story, as defined by the Romance Writers Association) I recommend for Clever Ladies who are interested in the genre. Keep in mind that there's just about something for everyone in this genre, so if there's not something that's up your alley on this list, there's probably something out there--leave a note in the comments and I'll see what I can do.