For full,list, visit the Fictfact.com Book Release Calendar and click the date.  (If unfamiliar with FictFact, it's for tracking/viewing book series.)

A literary map of London, with its writers and characters charted by neighborhood. Which, this us just about the coolest. The Twin Cities of Minneapolis and St Paul have nowhere near the literary relevance of London (not even close), but I would kill for a literary map of my hometown(s). Here's a start:

--Dr and Mrs Kennicot from Sinclair Lewis's Main Street honeymoon near Lake Calhoun; she's from St Paul
--Much of the action of War for the Oaks takes place in and around First Ave
--Zombie novel Fiend bops around St Paul and the St Paul suburbs, ending in the St Paul County Courthouse
--Meridel LeSeuer's The Girl takes place in the dodgy part of St Paul circa 1920s; not sure where exactly
--Franzen's Freedom takes place in Ramsey Hill in St Paul
-- Diablo Cody worked as a stripper in Sex World, Sheikh's, and other Minneapolis strip clubs, as detailed in Candy Girl
--Though much of Tim O'Brien's In the Lake of the Woods takes place in the Lake of the Woods (doi), it starts in St Paul when the protagonist's bid for governor fails
--Similarly, the (I think only pseudonymous narrator) of Pirsig's Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance starts in the Wedge neighborhood. Specific streets are named, something like 25th and Colfax
--For sure there's stuff by William Kent Kreuger, Garrison Keillor, Robert Bly, and Louise Erdrich I can't think of right now.

This book is yet another reminder of how good I have it.

I had never considered what life was like for a woman before the Pill. While I had read books about women from before it's invention, such as The Second Sex  and The Feminine Mystique (okay, before most middle class women could easily get it prescribed), these books didn't quite illuminate the problem like this. The first takes a comprehensive look at women that goes well beyond motherhood and not wanting it and the second looks at bored mothers. Neither is written with the hope that there could be another option, besides dangerous and illegal abortions, because there simply was not one. It's kind of like noticing the lack of cell phones in old movies, no one looks for one, so neither does the viewer.

Because this book focuses on the Pill itself, it also goes into the motivation for creating one for each of these four crusaders. They are Margaret Sanger, Katherine McCormick, Dr. Gregory Pincus and Dr. John Rock. Four amazing people who realized that there could be another way. Their journey is full of troubles and small victories. I loved the way they fielded the landmines of the 1950's rhetoric on sex and birth control. This book even covers the conversation (or motivation) around the terms that arose from this struggle such as birth control, family planning, and inhibiting ovulation. This was a PR nightmare that they were mostly careful of avoiding with terms like those. I wish they could see us now. Access isn't perfect, but most people seem to get the value in their amazing product.

One of my goals this year is to read 12 Orthodox books. I…argued a lot with this one in my head, which I think is partly because I wanted it to be something different (not fair of me, I know) and partly because it was pretty surface-level.