Learn more about me

Welcome to my website

Welcome! This website documents my passions of reading, discussing books, talking to authors, roller and ice skating, and whatever else may fall within these pages.

I didn’t grow up in a family of readers, but I fell in love with Scholastic book fairs and my local library in middle school – both of which provided the foundation for a lifetime love of books. I remember checking out with awe titles from A Wrinkle in Time by Madeline L’Engle, to The Borrowers by Mary Norton, to Danny Dunn and the Smallifying Machine. A little later, it was Little House on the Prairie, Little Women, and Seventeenth Summer.

In college, I earned a bachelor’s in journalism and worked at as a copy editor at a daily newspaper before moving to PR, but I continued to freelance for years, writing mostly travel features and ice skating articles. My love of books rekindled a few years after college, and special favorites were non-fiction and fiction titles that read like non-fiction. (Think Lisa Genova and Left Neglected). My vote for funniest book ever, hands down, is A Walk in the Woods by Bill Bryson.

During COVID, a friend shared the newly launched Friends and Fiction page on Facebook, where five best-selling authors — Mary Kay Andrews, Kristin Harmel, Kristy Woodson Harvey, Patti Callahan Henry and Mary Alice Monroe (now emeritus) — streamed live from their living rooms discussing their new book releases, indie bookstores, and what they were reading.

Soon after the Friends and Fiction page started, I posted an innocent idea: “It would be great if we had a book club.” Soon Kristin Harmel was messaging me about the idea, we fleshed out the structure, she created the separate page, and The Friends and Fiction Official Book Club was born.

Since 2020, I have co-hosted the F&F Book club with Lisa Harrison. We select a book each month as our book club pick and then interview the authors steaming live on Facebook. We always read the new releases of the Fab Four — Andrews, Harmel, Harvey, and Henry. In October 2022, Lisa and I were honored in New York City with the Zibby Award for Best Virtual Book Club for 2022. It’s an honor, and a trip, I’ll never forget. Check out our book club here and join us for thoughtful, spoilers-allowed discussions of great fiction titles. Thank you for visiting my website.
Brenda By The Book