If not for the humor in the exposition of her epistolary novel, I’d have never read, much less bought Maria Semple’s bestseller, Where’d You Go, Bernadette (2012). A satire of the Seattle-based super rich and privileged, I found myself not liking many of the characters because they typified so many of my stereotypes of the super rich: delusional, entitled, competitive, paranoid, and money/power/status obsessed. Despite my less than positive review, the novel is well-written and stylistically inventive. For these reasons, it gets three rather than two stars. Read […]
When in Rome…
Rabid fandom is one reason I’ve yet to watch Titanic and never got into Friends, Lost, among many other highly successful films and TV shows. Instead, I tend to dedicate my viewing time to the underdogs, which is to say that a lot of the shows that I do like tend to get cancelled, i.e. Arrested Development, Life, Chicago Code, Human Target, Men of a Certain Age. To date, The Good Wife is the only one of my faves to have escaped that fate. With that said, you can imagine how resistant […]
By Lying, Cheating, and Cheating, Yes, “This Is How You Lose Her”
Junot Diaz’s This Is How You Lose Her (2012) is an eight story collection of machismo, misogynistic narratives centered around Yunior, a seemingly compulsive cheater who is forced to face the consequences of his actions. Never having read Diaz before, I had no idea what to expect, and after reading epigraph by Sandra Cisneros, I used my knowledge her structure and style from The House on Mango Street (1984) to guide me. What ensued was a rather confusing read. Unlike some who found Diaz’s use of Spanglish to be the […]
“Not Only Can I Act, I Can Also Write!”…But Not As Well
I’m a bit of a perfectionist, so to date, I have written two complete short stories which I first wrote many years ago. Since then, they’ve been in a constant state of revision because they lack a certain je ne sais quoi for publishing. I wish other writers were as self-aware: Amazon is currently filled with published novels that are truly the works of amateur writers. One such amateur work is Molly Ringwald’s When It Happens to You: A Novel in Stories (2012). At $1.99 at the time of […]