The world, to say the very least, has been very challenging lately. And that won’t be changed by a fast and/or easy fix at all. So, I’ve been making it a point to find joy wherever I can because, yay, serotonin boosts. One thing that has always brought me happiness is music and I often listen to it while working, writing, or just relaxing with a game. And I have quite the eclectic collection of mixes.

When I was recently listening to my Madonna mix, it struck me that romance novels would pair up quite nicely with some of her songs. Now, I know that this may take some convincing but if you’ll allow me to expand on this, I’m confident you’ll be pleasantly surprised with my thought process. Because, with it being too hot to go out and do much of anything, I’ve had a lot of time to think about this.

With the June release of her latest album Finally Enough Love, the release of a limited series based on A League of Their Own based off the movie that featured Madonna on the screen and soundtrack alike, and August 16th being her birthday, now seemed the perfect time for a list.

So, without further delay, I present for your consideration, Madonna songs and romance novels match-ups!

If you’re someone who, like me, is an Elder born in the 1900s, you probably remember the early days of self-publishing. For those of you who don’t, it was a dark time. People were throwing their LiveJournals into .epub format and calling it a memoir, there was little-to-no editing, and anyone who wanted to write a book could do so without any oversight or input from another person. I am the first to agree that publishing gatekeeping is awful. It prioritizes voices of people who already have a platform, and it has a tendency to royally screw people whose voices would bring a new perspective to the table. And yes, that was a royalties pun, thank you for noticing.

These days, the Wild West-style wilderness of self-publishing still exists, and rightfully so. But there is also a “middle” layer, made up of authors who have decided to strike out on their own but also produce a more finished product. Kindle Unlimited is an offering of Amazon. For $10/month, you can borrow up to 20 titles on a rotating basis. It’s effectively an ebook library with no wait lists that’s funded by — and only accessible to — users. There is a wide offering of titles and genres available, so since I’ve been devouring mysteries lately, I’ve collected some of the top-rated and best Kindle Unlimited mysteries available.

I might be landlocked in the middle of Iowa but that doesn’t mean I don’t need a good bookish beach towel. Why, just a few weeks ago I went to a family get-together at a state park with a body of water in it. And as my brother-in-law said at the time, that body of water had what “could loosely be described as a beach.” Guess what we all had? Beach towels!

Unfortunately, my beach towel was a blue and white striped bore of a beach towel. Which got me to thinking: Surely there are bookish beach towels out there? So before I head on my next international vacation to lovely Iceland and its geothermal baths, I’m going to have to grab myself and my partner a couple of bookish beach towels.

Luckily, my fellow Book Riot contributors have written great articles about how to further perfect my bookish beachy day. I can follow this quiz to find out what brilliant beach read I should read this summer. I can get tips on how to achieve the ideal beach reading day. And if I want to just slap my new beach towel down on my front porch, I can even read one of these books that will transport me to the beach.

The art collection of tech mogul Paul Allen, cofounder of Microsoft who died at the age of 65 in 2018, will be sold at Christie’s in what will be one of the highest-valued single-owner sales ever to come on the open market, the Wall Street Journal first reported on Thursday.

Listed among the ARTnews Top 200 Collectors for more than two decades, Allen amassed a collection worth an estimated $1 billion. The house has not yet announced when Allen’s holdings will hit the block.

Christie’s will sell a group of 150 artworks from Allen’s estate, the collection poised to be the most expensive ever sold at auction, beating out two recent marquee single-owner holdings. It is likely to surpass the $922 million generated by the sale of the court-ordered Macklowe’s collection, sold at Sotheby’s earlier this year, as well as the 2018 sale of David Rockefeller’s collection at Christie’s in 2018, which brought in $835 million.

Allen, whose cause of death was complications from non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma, designated his sister Jody Allen as sole executor of his estate. She remains chair of his investment company, Vulcan.

Known primarily as a tech pioneer starting in the mid-’70s, Allen also gained a reputation for being a serious philanthropist and art collector, a vocation around which he was highly discreet. He first appeared on the Top 200 Collectors list in 1997, and held a place there in every edition until his death in 2018. In the 2020 edition, ARTnews predicted that Allen’s collection would soon head to auction.

From Bowie to Blonde, these are September's unmissable releases

May 28 – August 28, 2022

April 14 – September 4, 2022

After the United States Supreme Court struck down Roe v. Wade on June 24, 2022, approximately half the states triggered or scrambled to enact near-total bans on abortion. A day after this development, its devastation difficult to fathom, I visited Andrea Bowers’s retrospective at the Hammer Museum, where I was transfixed by her video Letters to an Army of Three as well as an accompanying artist book and wall installation (all 2005). These projects animate an archive of letters written to the Army of Three, an activist group in the Bay Area that distributed vital information about accessing safe abortion services to women and their loved ones in the decade before the 1973 Roe v. Wade decision.

Almost an hour long, the video features actors reading aloud from a selection of inquiring letters that vary widely in affect, etiquette, and contextual detail. Whereas some performances are deadpan, as is the enactment of a clear-sighted married mother of four from Walla Walla, Washington, others brim with emotion, like that of a teary woman, a chihuahua sitting on her lap as she vocalizes a mother writing from Hood River, Oregon, on behalf of her pregnant 21-year-old daughter. Each reader sits before a different resplendent bouquet that injects an uneasy funereal quality; after all, the video does not reveal the outcomes for any of the women whose stories are so briefly told here. The actors appear in clothing from the mid-2000s rather than period dress, as if to bring the compendium into the present to illuminate the ongoing obstacles individuals face when seeking abortions.

While the video makes this epistolary archive audible, the bound collection and wall installation—a checkered pattern of enlarged photocopied reproductions and decorative wrapping paper—make it visible. The emphatic physical presentation of these formerly furtive letters elicits a tension between public and private, while the project as a whole considers silence and speech, stillness and action. As if anticipating an era of nauseating regression, Bowers’s eternally urgent work insists that, when words fail us most, we need them more than ever.

On the evening of August 9, the staff of The Paris Review welcomed a special guest: Loudon Wainwright III, who came with guitar and banjo in hand, ready to perform on a makeshift stage in front of our bookshelves and plants. (We rearranged the furniture a bit before he arrived, and ordered pizza.) Wainwright played both classics and songs from his new album, Lifetime Achievement, accompanied on occasion by his longtime friend and collaborator Joe Henry. His rendition of “New Paint,” first released in 1972, was especially striking. You can watch it in full here, along with a performance of the Lifetime Achievement highlight “How Old Is 75?”

It’s a huge weekend in Serie A! Dotun, Andy and Nicky Bandini chew over Roma's trip to Juventus and wonder just why Romelu Lukaku and Lautaro Martínez fit so perfectly together ahead of Inter's inevitably feisty clash with Lazio.

Elsewhere, there’s an extraordinary capitulation in Dortmund thanks to last-minute goals from unlikely British sources. And are Atlético Madrid *really* keeping Antoine Griezmann on the bench to save money?!

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