This brief audiobook gave me a bit of an existential crisis. It’s billed as a funny memoir-type-thing written by a comedian. It says so right on the cover. Which is why I spent the first half of the book asking myself, “Is this humor? What is humor? Is anything humor? What is life? Why am I here?” It wasn’t that it was a bad book, exactly, although it wasn’t great. It just wasn’t funny at all. Delaney covers his early life and youthful misadventures and…maybe […]
So now I feel like an underachiever
Lab Girl is one of those books that makes you sit back and wonder what you’ve been doing with your life. It’s not enough that Hope Jahren is an accomplished geobiologist and geochemist, or that she has a Ph.D. from U.C. Berkeley. It’s not enough that she’s won three Fulbright Awards, or that Popular Science magazine named her one of its “Brilliant 10” scientists in 2006. It’s not enough that in 2016 Time named her one of the world’s “100 Most Influential People.” With all those accomplishments, you’d think she’d have […]
The Power of Words
Jacqueline Woodson’s 2014 poetic memoir Brown Girl Dreaming won a slew of awards: a National Book Award for Young People’s Literature, the Coretta Scott King Award, a Newbery Honor, an NAACP Image Award, just to name a few. It is the beautifully told story of Woodson’s childhood, of the people and environments that formed both her and her dream of becoming a writer. It also offers glimpses into the civil rights movement and the experience of racism through the eyes of a child who witnessed […]
Bitter is Bitter
I ended up re-reading this book yesterday because I needed something to make me laugh. I have always gotten a kick out of Jen Lancaster’s older memoirs and even though I know them by heart, I still laugh each time. I think my main take away at reading this again after several years of reading her latest memoirs is that her older memoirs were more honest and up front about her life and family. Nowadays it feels like she always keeps things back. And she […]