“Any time an opportunity scares you that much, you should seriously consider saying yes.” I read Rob Lowe’s first book Stories I Only Tell My Friends back in 2012 for Cannonball Read 4. I remember enjoying it quite a bit, so much so that when I became aware of his second memoir, Love Life I immediately added it to my to read list. Where Stories I Only Tell My Friends had a somewhat linear structure, Love Life does not. Rather, it reflects the things left […]
I am perhaps simply not fabulous enough
I wanted to like this book more than I did, and if I’m being honest with myself and you I would have DNF’ed this one about half way through if it wasn’t the book I had chosen for Read Harder Task 24: a Self-Improvement book. This is one of the tasks that actually felt like a challenge. I have read, perhaps, zero books in the past which classify as self-help. Sure, I’ve read lots of memoirs, lots of non-fiction, but really no self-help. That’s not […]
Shaking of the Sheets (and other euphemisms for sex)
Mary Roach is an author who has been on my radar for a while. I knew about her books, and her particular brand of letting-the-reader-in-on-the-joke writing about non-fiction which I learned when I dove into Packing for Mars earlier this year. So when Audible had a sale of Mary Roach’s books, I looked to see what I wanted to listen to next in her oeuvre (knowing that I already have a library request in for Stiff which is all about the life of cadavers). Bonk: […]
This Book Just Tried to be TOO Much
In 2008, before my time taking part in the Cannonball Read, I read and loved Mark Harris’s Pictures at a Revolution: Five Movies and the Birth of the New Hollywood. For those that are interested, that book covers the 1967 Best Picture Oscar race, cataloguing how that year’s nominated films – Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner, The Graduate, In the Heat of the Night, and Bonnie and Clyde each highlight the changes both in Hollywood and in the culture. I suggest it wholeheartedly. When I […]



