I don't have a litmus test for bad books. There are, however, definite signs of good books. If I find myself thinking that I should get up and find Post-It flags before I hit the twenty-five page mark it's probably going to be a good book. If after less than ten pages I find myself half tearing apart my office looking for my metal page points I know it is going to be a very good book. That is precisely the position I found myself in shortly after starting Mary Ann Shaffer and Annie Barrows' The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Society.

I've frequently noticed that books travel in circles. I'll read a review at one blog, then it will be on another, and then another, and another and another. They frequently are not the books that will reach the top of the New York Times best books list. But they might make a blogger's list for fun books at the end of the year. One of the books that I've been noticing, and which has just come out in paperback giving it a good shot at beach reads lists, is Garden Spells by Sarah Addison Allen.

A great winter read for women who love memoirs and road trips is Eight Women, Two Model Ts, and the American West, where writer Joanne Wilke pieces together the journey her grandmother, great-aunt, and six of their female friends made in a couple of Model Ts. In 1924, the women headed out from Iowa on a sightseeing tour that took them to the Garden of the Gods in Colorado, the Great Salt Lake in Utah, Mount Rainier, the Pacific Ocean, and Yellowstone, to name just a few of the tourist attractions of the American West that the women reached during the nine-week trip.

While I am not at BlogHer Con this weekend I know that for the women that are there it's a special time. For two days they will be with women like themselves - women who put themselves out there, who share a passion for writing, women who take chances and are trailblazers. Times like that are magical and we always remember the magical moments in our past. Sometimes, if we are lucky, we get more than a magical moment. Sometimes we get a magical summer. I think we all have a summer that we look back on, the one that no matter what happens in the future that summer will always be special.