I read Augusten Burroughs’s memoir about his extremely messed up childhood, Running With Scissors, sometime when it first came out in 2002. Since then, I’ve read many, many memoirs about messed up childhoods, but for some reason, his really stuck with me. I’ve read most of what he’s written since — Dry, Magical Thinking, Side Effects, and now, Lust & Wonder. None of them have really measured up to Running With Scissors for me, but Lust & Wonder comes the closest. “I know now: what is is all that matters. Not the thing you […]
Kept me awake!
No Sleep Till Wonderland, Paul Tremblay’s follow up to The Little Sleep, definitely improved upon the first. Once again, we follow our narcoleptic narrator — P.I. Mark Genevich — as he stumbles around Boston, trying to solve a crime. “I swoon into a standing eight count. Goddamn, I actually feel my consciousness want to detach and hide like a turtle retreating into a hopelessly soft shell that won’t save anyone.” In this novel, Mark has already pretty much blown through any goodwill that the public extended him […]
Dense but interesting
This is not a book to read in an evening or two. For one thing, it’ll depress the hell out of you. It’s also very dense, very technical and chock full of information. But don’t let that dissuade you, if you’re interested in this sort of thing — taking it a chunk at a time made it digestible, and very, very interesting to read. “Down to their innate molecular core, cancer cells are hyperactive, survival-endowed, scrappy, fecund, inventive copies of ourselves.” Siddhartha Mukherjee tells two […]
“What made something precious? Losing it and finding it.”
This was a thoughtful, well-written and gripping book. It was also incredibly sad — just so, so sad. “You don’t feel like smiling? Then what? Force yourself to smile. Act as if you were already happy, and that will tend to make you happy.” Sixteen year old Lydia dies at the beginning of the book — she drowns in a lake. The rest of the book focuses on her family — her mother, father, sister and brother — as well as events that led up to Lydia’s […]