The best birthday gift I ever received was my Dad taking me to Barnes and Noble and letting me get as many books as I wanted. I bought 246 books that day and had read at least 17 of them by the predawn hours. The books I read these days go a bit slower than The Babysitter’s Club, but I still read a lot!
I don’t really like book reviews. I don’t read them, I don’t write them, I don’t really see the point. Sum it up for me in a tweet or keep it moving! Below please find the first installment of what I read this month, followed by either an irreverent summary, an emotional moment, or simply, what the book made me think about. Mostly in a tweet, but all under the limit of an Instagram voice memo.
…
Unspoken Social Rules & Etiquette, (Un)Common Sense, & How To Act, by Patrick King – My joy at knowing more than I thought was tempered by the resultant low ROI. You can let a girl know ALL the rules, but you can’t make her respect the ones that don’t make sense. However, I finally kind of get the point of small talk.
3 Stars
Help Wanted, by Adelle Waldman – A book about people who work in the warehouse of a big box store that had me crying with gratitude that I don’t have a boss, the wolves that raised me went to Yale, and I never went through with any of my pregnancies.
5 Stars
Uneducated: A Memoir of Flunking Out, Falling Apart, and Finding My Worth, by Christopher Zara – Zara believes all his troubles in life are because he didn’t go to college, despite presenting like Hans Asperger’s morning wood. Zara enjoys a great career in journalism while always being quite sure that every (obviously autistic) symptom he experiences is because he doesn’t have a B.A. Eventually, Zara marries another obviously autistic person who is convinced all her autism symptoms are because she is trans. Together, they live happily ever after as Gen X’ers, the last “we don’t need a diagnosis in this house” generation.
2 Stars
Where The Grass Is Green And The Girls Are Pretty, by Lauren Weisberger– Weisberger’s books are like early 2000’s TV – even the characters that aren’t wealthy are actually kind of wealthy. Two sisters, one successful by one standard, the other successful by another, are drawn together when one gets herself wrapped up in a college admissions scandal. I love to see the girly novelists tread very lightly on the theme of getting canceled, but only when it’s a totally forgivable case of naiveté, responding to social pressure, and simply wanting what’s best for your child. I enjoyed it, but I don’t even remember if anyone got divorced
3 Stars
The Breakaway, by Jennifer Weiner – This is Weiner at her best; the protagonist that is basically her, the mom that is a version of her mom, Philadelphia as a character — all her classics. Reading this highly enjoyable novel got me thinking about how much truth there is in fiction and how freeing it could be to begin writing in the third person, especially about certain facts of my experience. A love story with lots of biking and a happy ending!
4 Stars
I’ll be posting one of these every month, with all the books I read the previous month. June includes the memoir Wild Game & Anderson Cooper’s Astor.
Your One Wild & Prec
