Well, this was sweet and cute and ultimately, I probably won’t remember a word of it in six months. But it was a fun book to read in the bathtub. Sloane Crosley’s collection of essays, I Was Told There’d Be Cake, touches on all sorts of important topics: the mall, weird parents, bad bosses, shitty boyfriends, etc. She has a good, self-deprecating sense of humor (important for a collection of memoirs) and an interesting take on a variety of subjects in life. Her brutal story about […]
This is Where I Leave You by Jonathan Tropper
I feel like I should have liked This is Where I Leave You more than I did. I like books (and movies) with big ensemble casts. If there’s ever a movie where someone says “we’re getting the band back together!”, I’m there. And I love stories in the vein of dysfunctional families. And I don’t even mind an unlikable protagonist, which is certainly the case here! But the combination of those elements in this story left me wanting. After the patriarch dies, the rather fucked up […]
McSweeney’s #10 (McSweeney’s Quarterly Concern #10)
I saw the cover of this book at a book sale and I fell for it, hard. It’s a compilation of “genre” short stories: westerns, sci-fi, horror, crime, etc. The reason for my instant need to own? Contributing authors include: Michael Chabon (who also edited), Elmore Leonard, Neil Gaiman, Nick Hornby, Stephen King, Michael Crichton (who sadly contributed a rather lame tale), Dave Eggers, Harlan Ellison, and more. Love at first sight, I’ll tell you. It mostly lived up to my expectations as well. The majority […]
Wild by Cheryl Strayed
I’m a little late to the party that is Cheryl Strayed’s Wild, but I’m here now! Like most people who read this book, I came away with a sense of awe that Cheryl not only accomplished her goal of hiking the Pacific Crest Trail, but also that she didn’t freaking die in the process since she was so wildly (ha!) unprepared for the task. “I knew that if I allowed fear to overtake me, my journey was doomed. Fear, to a great extent, is born of a story we […]