Ephron's book is organized into dozens of moods, and she offers several books to fit each of those moods. For every book, Ephron offers a capsule description and rates the book on its literary merit, level of reading difficulty, and other criteria. "Think of it as mood therapy in a book," writes Ephron, "and your personal guide to the outstanding, funny, sad, thrilling, inspiring, mind-bending . . . books of our times."
If, for example, you're in the mood for a good laugh, Ephron offers 10 books from Evelyn Waugh's "Scoop" (a satirical skewering of British tabloid journalism) to Erma Bombeck's "If Life Is a Bowl of Cherries, What Am I Doing in the Pits?" (Ephron describes Bombeck as "the doyenne of the wisecrack in gentler times"). In recommending David Sedaris's "Naked," Ephron summarizes it as "[a]utobiographical essays by a hapless narrator . . . Sedaris's tales of growing up in a dysfunctional (to put it mildly) family, hitchhiking trips, and deadly jobs are wickedly funny."
Taking the opposite tack, if you're in the mood for a good cry, Ephron offers 17 books from the obvious, such as Toni Morrison's "Beloved" ("It's one of those books that burrows its way in and takes up residence in a dark place in your soul," explains Ephron), to the surprising, such as Dee Brown's "Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee" ("Each chapter," writes Ephron, "tells the tragedy of another tribe, from the Long Walk of the Navahos, to the Cheyenne Exodus, to the massacre of the Lakota Sioux at Wounded Knee").
