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Maybe just nudge the puppy with your foot a little?

Wherever You Go, There They Are by Annabelle Gurwitch

January 22, 2019 by octothorp Leave a Comment

I picked this up because I absolutely loved Gurwitch’s book Fired; for a couple bucks at the library, that and a general regard for the former Dinner and a Movie hostess was enough to part me with my cash. There was a lot of good will going into the purchase.

And this wasn’t bad, per se – I got my money’s worth at least, and Gurwitch has an amiable tone with some interesting stories – I’m just not sure there was enough to sustain a book here. I didn’t dislike it, but I’m not a fan, and it feels a bit like kicking a puppy – there’s nothing to dislike, so it feels wrong to give a bad review.

The ostensible theme is family, but the essays are disjointed and some only tangentially address familial ties – reading about the author’s time at an adult sleepaway camp was amusing, but hardly fits in with tales of finding a nursing home for her parents or the same parents’ questionable choices in the author’s childhood.

There are worse companions to take a meandering journey with than Gurwitch, but I do wish she had stuck to family stories OR “isn’t society crazy – my friend retouches instagram photos of her dog” modern anthropology stuff instead of trying to stitch the two together with a loose theme.

So yeah, even if this is going straight into the resell pile, I don’t want to kick the puppy – this was charming and pleasant enough. But I am nudging that puppy back to the humane society.

No, you get off MY lawn

Television Is the New Television by Michael Wolff

January 19, 2019 by octothorp Leave a Comment

Man did I dislike this book. Based on the jacket and the title I was expecting a treatise on the nature of content as driven by the state of each method of delivery – TV in the era of even faster communication. I wanted an actual exploration of the one and only thing most of us know about Marshall McLuhan – the medium is the message now that media has changed so much – but instead I got a bunch of inside baseball from someone who couldn’t stop congratulating himself for things like knowing that McLuhan quote is a paraphrase.

I don’t care about the business model. I don’t care about ad revenue. I want to know how speed changes the type of entertainment produced. I don’t want blind item gossip about Whoopi Goldberg disguised as a point about a la carte content. And the worst part? All the trashy gossip is couched in holier than thou superiority over internet content.

Nope. Hard pass. This isn’t Future Shock, you’re not that smart.

Under Construction

I Know What I’m Doing by Jen Kirkman

January 6, 2019 by octothorp Leave a Comment

This is my year to chip away at the stack of unread books and get down to zero before buying new ones, despite my having had this exact same goal the last two CBRs and privately even before that. So what do I do? Read an entire book at the library to get around that whole “buying new ones” restriction. I feel like I put myself on a liquid diet to lose weight then started chugging condensed milk.

Anyway, I picked this up because apparently my local library doesn’t have Anna Kendrick’s autobiography, and the octospawn likes the library well enough that I could sneak a couple chapters in between managing his chaos.

It starts strong, and I’ve enjoyed Kirkman on Drunk History, so I was primed to enjoy it. She discusses her divorce in witty, relatable ways, and it’s refreshing to read about a divorce that seemed to be the best thing for all concerned. The majority of the strong feelings about her divorce seem to be in others’ reactions to it, including a projecting dentist, her own OBGYN, and innumerable friends. But the book needed that divorce as a unifying concept, and instead it just kind of… meanders. An essay about an ill fated stand up performance in Dublin is just kind of … there.

Which is unfortunate, because kirkman has a lot to say about relationships in general that’s worth reading. She discusses her new found singlehood, dating for better and worse as a divorcee, and her friend with benefits irreverently but intelligently, making her current path seem like the correct one for her without eliding over its difficulties or pretending it’s what everyone should do. It’s amusing, if not hysterical, but ultimately the lack of focus keeps it from being a five star book for me.

Well, I WAS With You

I’m With Fatty by Edward Ugel

January 6, 2019 by octothorp Leave a Comment

I made it rain at the friends of the library book sale just prior to my annual promise not to buy more books until I read everything in my unread stack (almost always 50 books no matter what I do), and like any good binge it was all impulse.

I love personal challenge essays (see above – although I will never ever succeed in diminishing that unread stack, my novels apparently breed in captivity) and for two bucks, how bad could this be? (How many of my reviews have some variant of this sentence? Do I never learn anything?)

Not that bad, but not that great either. It was refreshing to read an account of disordered eating from a man because these books always seem to be written by women, and it’s telling that the impetus for the author’s weight loss was primarily health based and instigated by his wife – though he concedes his looks are diminished by his weight gain, he isn’t confronted by a world that doesn’t accommodate his size the way women constantly are.

Maybe that’s why the cheap jokes at the end are so off putting to me – I don’t think the author meant poorly by them, but jokes about women with pronounced Adam’s apples just don’t have any place in the 20-teens, especially from an author whose book discusses the otherness of being overweight and of being Jewish. It’s a cheap joke, it adds nothing, and it made me lose sympathy for an otherwise likable author.

Aside from that, this was a pleasant if insubstantial book. I’m curious about his first book about working with lottery winners, even if it’s not a great sign that the most interesting part of this book was the description of his last one.

Get more Nell Scovells!

Just the Funny Parts by Nell scovell

December 30, 2018 by octothorp 1 Comment

For a book that explores the difficulties of making it as a writer while female in the 1990s, with all the boys club exclusion and outright sexual harassment that implies, this was a surprisingly fun read.

The cover of the book says it all; if you watched broadcast tv in the late 1990s to early aughts, odds are you’ve watched something Scovell wrote. Sabrina the Teenage Witch, Letterman, NCIS, and one of the better Simpsons episodes in the series’ golden years. And I had no idea who she was before I bought the book.

Granted, some of this is because her heyday was just before the cult of the showrunner – prior to 2010 or so, I think I could name maybe five behind the scenes personalities on any TV series since the inception of the medium, and usually because they were prolific (Aaron Spelling, Norman Lear) or changed television drastically in some way (Chris carter, Joss Whedon). But it’s still impressive that I had no idea that someone responsible for so much entertainment I’ve personally enjoyed was completely unknown to me.

There’s one pretty obvious reason. “As a female writer, the odds of writing an episode for The X-Files was slightly worse than surviving The Hunger Games,” Scovell writes. “This is not an exaggeration. During the show’s initial run, only seven of two hundred (3.5%) episodes were written by women. Meanwhile, one out of 24 survived the hunger games (4.2%). Katniss had it easy.”

Scovell writes about not just her successes despite a deck stacked against her, but also about lucky breaks, and ways she erred herself. In discussing her time as showrunner on Sabrina, she laments that she didn’t hire enough minority writers, and that she could easily have found black, Hispanic, and Asian writers suited to the show had she looked harder.

The book is more entertaining than perhaps I’m making it sound – most of Scovell’s credits are for comedy, after all, so it’s a breezy read – but it was refreshing to read about the industry sexism in the context of a woman’s success despite it.

One wish

December 28, 2018 by octothorp Leave a Comment

Damn, Liane, why you gotta do my girl Catriona like that?

I love that Moriarty doesn’t spare any of her heroes or demonize her villains utterly, but this was as brutal to Catriona as any of Moriarty’s writing is capable. I won’t lie and say that it didn’t have a lot to do with seeing a lot of myself in Cat, the triplet (with flighty spacey Gemma and no-nonsense Lyn rounding out the trio) whose mundane happiness is made more interesting with a cynical streak, but could ANYTHING – like any one life event – go in that woman’s favor?

The always sparky writing from Moriarty is diminished for me by her torturing her character so thoroughly. When her husband’s infidelity is compounded by the realization her sister once had a relationship with him prior to their marriage, Cat’s reaction was both irrational and understandable, and it seemed as though the double rifts in her closest relationships might be her trial. But then shit. Just. Keeps. Happening.

I don’t want to spoil all the plot, even if I predicted what happened in the in-medias-res opening fight between the sisters pretty much immediately. But Moriarty doesn’t tend to rub salt in her characters wounds like she does repeatedly with Cat, and a tacked on hint at a happy ending doesn’t quite mitigate the gauntlet of suffering the woman was put through.

The book is still overall pretty great, and I quite liked Gemma (I do wonder what the book would have been like had Lyn and Gemma been one character and the dynamic had been between twins rather than triplets; Lyn felt tacked on even if she had good moments). As always, Moriarty excels at seeing her characters from multiple perspectives, and the interstitial observations of the triplets from random people was clever, but man, couldn’t cat win the lottery at the end of this thing? Or maybe have her husband die in a fiery plane crash? I don’t need perfect endings for all the characters I love, but their suffering should at least be related to a personal failing (as it initially was with Cat’s overblown reaction to her sister, and arguably her husband initially) instead of bad things repeatedly being visited upon them. It’s still a good read, but I’m deducting a star and I demand a sequel where Cat gets a unicorn.

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