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Next week I shoot an episode of CBS's sitcom "How I Met Your Mother", and then I leave for my book tour for the rest of September... all the while, gratefully fulfilling myriad book publicity requests - whenever humanly possible!

Juggling acting and academics in one form or another seems to be the norm for me. Ever since I was a child actress, I learned to juggle schoolwork on film sets... running back and forth between shooting an emotional crying scene, and taking a History exam. Boy, that'll train you to focus on the task in front of you!

I've found it a bit harder to juggle things these days - well, I should say that I need more technique to get through it ... without a pounding headache. Luckily, my mom is a mediation instructor and taught me to meditate at a very young age. I haven't always practiced it regularly, but I'm not too proud to admit that I need it more now than ever.

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I've been so overwhelmed with gratitude at the emails that have been showing up recently. I received one of these amazing emails today, and I wanted to share it:

Dear Danica,
Last week, my 12 year old, Kelsey, and I were waiting in the doctor's office for her sports physical. We were flipping through a copy of Newsweek and saw an article about your book-I ordered it as soon as we got home.

Math Doesn't Suck arrived yesterday. I can't express to you how impressed I am! Your writing is so perfectly geared toward middle school girls it is unbelievable. I haven't had a chance to read the whole book yet, but I spent quite some time yesterday afternoon flipping through the different sections. The blend of humor, your real life experiences, bios on successful women and encouragement is truly wonderful. I doubt I will have the opportunity to read more of the book for awhile, as I am the mother of three girls. My 10 year old, Avery is in line to read it next. (It will be a little while before Maggie, the 7 year old needs it)

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"It's a dangerous business, going out of your door. You step onto the Road, and if you don't keep your feet, there is no knowing where you might be swept off to." - Bilbo Baggins (J.R.R. Tolkien)

Condé Nast Traveler just released its list of "The 86 Greatest Travel Books of All Time". The titles were selected by a panel of forty five writers which featured luminaries such as Vikram Chandra, Peter Mayle, John McPhee, Paul Theroux, and Gore Vidal.

This epic list contained nine books published by Penguin, and included tales told by travelers who have ranged from the arid plains of Patagonia, to the shifting sands of Southern Arabia. Books such as these allow us to experience characters like the darkly ironic Mark Twain as he flees the Civil War or mulls on the Mississippi, and the profound, itinerant monk Bash-o as he travels through 17^th century Japan.

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Hello everyone!

After years of acting on television, I admit, somehow being an author now has given me a new kind of thrill that I'd never previously imagined. I knew it as soon as my box of books arrived. The big brown box arrived on my doorstep, weathered from shipping and stamped with an unceremonious white label:

Butterflies! Was that like, "McKellar," as in, "me"??

Well, this is very exciting for me, being my first book. And how wonderful to be able to write about something that has been a passion for so long: encouraging girls in math!

Let's face it; math can be very scary, especially to a middle-school kid. When I was in middle school, I would often come home and cry because I was too afraid to approach my math homework. I was terrified of even trying, because I hated feeling like a failure. Through the help of a few wonderful and patient teachers (and one in particular, Mrs. Jacobson, whom I mention in the book), I was able to overcome my fears and even discover a true love of math.

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Danica McKellar is our guest blogger during the week of August 27th. If you have any questions for Danica McKellar, add a comment to any of her posts. Here is some brief information about Math Doesn't Suck: How to Survive Middle-School Math Without Losing Your Mind or Breaking a Nail:

“McKellar is probably the only person on prime-time television who moonlights as a cyberspace math tutor.”

—The New York Times

As the math education crisis in this country continues to make headlines, research continues to prove that it is in middle school when math scores begin to drop—especially for girls—in large part due to the relentless social conditioning that tells girls they “can’t do” math, and that math is “uncool.” Young girls today need strong female role models to embrace the idea that it’s okay to be smart—in fact, it’s sexy to be smart!

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It was 6:40 p.m. and felt that I was quite early. William Gibson was slated to start reading from his new novel, Spook Country, at 7:00 p.m., so I ambled across Manhattan to Union Square, assured that I'd arrive in time to snag a seat. How naive I was! Upon approaching the fourth floor, I stopped at the sight of a large crowd, a solid wall of bodies, people craning their necks and rising to their tiptoes in order to get a peek of the cordoned off area beyond. Heart sinking, I approached and realized that the two hundred or so seats set out before the podium were already taken; standing room only, ladies and gentlemen, and the crowd was already six bodies deep!

I observed mildly panicked looks. Apparently I should have arrived about two hours earlier, but it was too late for regrets and besides, us Penguin employees are cool under the collar. I ducked off to the right, burrowed my way through the people thronging the Architecture aisle, and then hung a counter intuitive left past Interior Decorating. Rounding the corner, I realized my gamble had paid off—the very far right of the cordoned off area was but sparsely populated, four yards of near empty aisle cut off from the main crowd by a table of discounted hardbacks. Grinning, I turned to survey my view of the podium.

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The Penguin Press' Listening is an Act of Love Chosen for Starbucks Book Program

The Penguin Press' Listening Is an Act of Love — A Celebration of American Lives from the StoryCorps Project, edited by five-time Peabody Award winner Dave Isay has been selected as the next title in the Starbucks Book Program, it was announced last week. Beginning November 8th, Starbucks will offer its customers this touching, heartfelt book and accompanying audio CD in a box set available exclusively at Starbucks Company-operated locations in the U.S.

Drawn from more than 10,000 recordings from StoryCorps, the largest and most ambitious oral history project in American history, the 50 stories found in Listening Is an Act of Love are arranged thematically to form a beautiful mosaic of American life.

50th Anniversary of Jack Kerouac's On the Road Garners Major Media Attention

September 5, 2007 marks the 50th Anniversary of Viking's publication of Jack Kerouac's novel On the Road. On August 20th, Viking releases in hardcover three new Kerouac-related books: On the Road: The Original Scroll; Why Kerouac Matters: The Lessons of On the Road (They're Not What You Think), a book by New York Times reporter John Leland; and On the Road: the 50th Anniversary Edition. In last week's edition of Newsweek, David Gates called Leland's book "a headsnapper and a groundbreaker." Feature pieces on the anniversary have already run in The New York Times (a major article by Motoko Rich and Melena Ryzik in yesterday's Arts section), USA Today, Outside Magazine, Men's Journal, The Nation, The Boston Globe and The Chicago Tribune, with many more reviews and features to come.

Look for this coming Sunday's issue of The New York Times Book Review, which features a front cover review by Luc Sante of the scroll edition, as well as a review of Leland's book. Sante's review closes with high praise: "The novel that On the Road became was inarguably the book that young people needed in 1957, but the sparse and unassuming scroll is the living version for our time."

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Unless you've been hermetically sealed away in a bomb shelter or have been orbiting the planet in a space station, you're probably painfully aware of the earth's environmental predicament.

Al Gore's An Inconvenient Truth shocked the world last year with its facts and images, and today, almost exactly a year later, The 11th Hour takes the stage to scrutinize the global crisis and galvanize us into action.

Called "an unnerving, surprisingly affecting documentary" and "essential viewing" by The New York Times, The 11th Hour is narrated by a "sincere and passionate" Leonardo DiCaprio and stars luminaries as varied as physicist Stephen Hawking, to former Soviet Union Prime Minister Mikhail Gorbachev. Dozens of conservationists, policy wonks, gurus and scientists are interviewed, and all of them agree: though the situation has become dire, it's not too late, and in fact there may even be cause for hope.

A key guest in the documentary is Paul Hawken, author of Blessed Unrest, a proponent of grassroots environmental activism. After spending more than a decade researching groups as diverse as billion-dollar nonprofits to single-person causes, he concludes that there is a vital, thriving movement in the works, a global desire to re-imagine mankind's relationship with the environment.

“Life is the most fundamental human right,” Hawken writes, “and all of the movements within the movement are dedicated to creating the conditions for life, conditions that include livelihood, food, security, peace, a stable environment and freedom from external tyranny.”

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For years, it’s been impossible to say why I insist, nightly, on setting out five plates and five forks and something hot in a pan that I’d be embarrassed by if any adult I wasn’t married to caught sight of. Though all research trumpets the importance of family dinners, I sometimes wonder if these researchers actually do it themselves. These days, our dinners usually feel like a nightly opportunity for everyone to think of new and imaginative ways to complain about the food. Generally, we begin with the four-year-old’s pronouncement, said ritually like grace, that he is allergic to all food except noodles. Following this, the eight-year-old begins the elaborate process of separating any food that has touched another, and eventually we segue into the moment when the eleven-year-old lays his cheek on the table and says he’s too tired for all this all over again. Truly, I've wondered sometimes if maybe not eating together would bring us closer, or at least spare us the nightly speech from their father: “Mom has cooked us a lovely dinner. I’d like everyone to thank Mom for the food.”