The 'ol walk and read

The original walk & reader?

Have you ever done the "walk and read"!? This could be a uniquely urban, perhaps even only New York City, phenomenon, but the walk and read is when you become so engrossed in the book or magazine you're reading during your commute, that when you get off the subway you simply cannot stop reading. You must walk, but you must read. I once traveled 20 minutes on foot through Bay Ridge Brooklyn, glued to my second (and more contemplative) reading of Pride and Prejudice. (Is my inner dork showing?) Anyway, this morning I nearly dropped my iced coffee and eggs (a little Friday fancy breakfast treat) while walk and reading Z - A Novel of Zelda Fitzgerald by Therese Anne Fowler. 

Though certainly not a literary masterpiece, Z is a completely captivating, fiction-based-on-fact, novel about the famous wife of F. Scott Fitzgerald. The couple, who traveled the world in a flurry of excess and barely affordable glamour with a who's who of 1920s icons like Ernest Hemingway, Pablo Picasso and Cole Porter, have a maddening love for one another which ultimately may have been their undoing. Released no doubt in time to benefit from some of Baz and Leo's Gatsby fever, I've been completely enamored with Zelda's struggle to define herself next to a man obsessed with establishing his own greatness. For a "lovely, sad and compulsively readable book" (Kirkus Reviews) check out Z this summer!