Category: Books

I really liked this book. It is small, so you can take it with you when you shop. The author explains what she, as a stylist does. Aside from dressing movie starts and personal clients, she also is hired by advertising agencies to dress any model you may see in the ad. This is a niche market I never even thought about.

There were some good tips in the book. My favorite was to take your waist measurement and your rise measurement. When looking for pants, bring along a tape measure and use it to decide if you want to try on a pair of pants. The front of the pants should be half your waist measurement. If the rise matches, you have a potential winner. If not, move up or down a size. Genius! She also solved the mystery of taking measurements. I’ve often wondered how tight to pull the tape. I learned for comfortable ease, always add the width of two fingers into your measurements.

Rita Williams’ mother died when she was four and after that she was raised by her Aunt Daisy. The book explores their contentious relationship, growing up Black in the middle of lily-white Colorado, their self-sufficiency and their extreme poverty. It was a very sad, yet fascinating story. I would love to find out what happened to Rita Williams after she left her Aunt’s care.

Claire & Mia Fontaine
One day, Mia Fontaine, the seemingly normal 14 year old daughter of Claire Fontaine, just up and ran away. When Claire found her, she was using drugs. This book, written by both mother and daughter, follows their story as Claire works to get Mia into a treatment program she can’t run away from. It was very gripping for the majority of the book, though the time Mia spent in treatment did drag on a bit. It was interesting to see how Mia’s drug use changed her mother and herself, for good.

Most novels I read are stories. That is, they have characters and a plot and plot devices and everything gets wrapped up in the end. They are sort of like real life, but not really. Real life never really wraps up as neatly as novels. You meet the guy, you find each other and pledge love and at the place where the novel of your life would end there comes a whole life of dishes that need to be done and bills to be paid and work to go to. Even on gray rainy days.

I loved this book because it was a slice of life. In real life people may never know what happened to this or that dropped plot line in their life. They may know each other. They may have said goodbye forever only to discover each other, by chance decades later. They may have a chance meeting with a stranger that connects dots for them. Or maybe everything is murky.

I loved this book because Leo Gursky, the character we meet first, is such a force of nature. An old man, retired locksmith in New York City, never married, who carries a note in his wallet explaining he has no family and where to bury him. Seeing the world through his eyes is a reason to read fiction.

Other characters were also wonderful. I can’t say enough about this book. I don’t even resent that someone the same age as me could create such a perfect thing. Read it.

I liked the relationship between the two characters, which was the rarely depicted between-sexes-friendship. I liked how badly written Glove Pond was. I liked that the story captured the numbness of working at a major chain store. I was confused about the ending. Overall, I enjoyed the book.

I didn’t read the whole thing, but I did pick up some good tips from this tome.

I started this, but The Mitfords were distracting me and I never got through the first quiz.

Bandbox.

Checked out and didn’t even read.
I at least started everything I read this month.

Engrossing story of a man over the age of 30 who learns to grow up. He loves playing in a wedding band, and has been dating the same girl for 15 years, “off and on” as he likes to say, but when he accidentally proposes to her, and the wedding is suddenly on, he has to come to terms with real life. How he does it isn’t necessarily the textbook way, and I don’t think his marriage will last long, but the story was very real and understandable. I enjoyed this book.

April Harris heard my plea for book recommendations and told me about this one. I read it in one day.

I think that fiction books can go one of two ways. One is to put people in weird situations and see how they react to them. The other is to put people in very normal situations and see how they react to them. I think the former is the plot device of the majority of books written today, and the latter is much less used but equally welcome, as long as the author can write well.

This is one of those people-in-weird-situation books. Gina is a 33 year old widow, too stunned by grief and living on her husband’s boat. Late one night she hears someone board the boat and in a panic, fires her gun. The “intruders” turn out to be Reese, her husband’s ex-wife and Angel, an Reese’s 8 year old daughter. Angel takes a bullet in the shoulder and suddenly the widow’s and the ex-wife’s lives become entwined.

This was a very gripping book, and I didn’t see coming the even weirder situation that develops at the end of the story. It was well written and had sympathetic characters all around.

Based on the author’s own reporting in this book, I would guess that, of all the authors I read A.J. Jacobs would be most likely to Google himself and find this review. If he is reading this, let him rest assured that I enjoyed this book, the story of—as the subtitle informs us—“One Man’s Humble Quest to Follow the Bible as Literally as Possible.”

Parts of this books are laugh-out-loud funny, as when Jacobs describes boning up for an interview with Rosario Dawson by watching two of her movies rented from CleanFlicks or describing how his refusal to tell a lie by calling an English muffin a bagel results in the temper tantrum of his three-year-old son.

The book was also thought provoking, I especially enjoyed the part about not using the Bible as a self-help book, which is the opposite message I’ve heard over and over again. Other parts are sweet, such as his dealings with his neighbor and newborn twins. Jacobs is obsessive about his subject, devouring not just several versions of the bible, but many, many books about the Bible. Overall, an entertaining read.

One note. It used to be books had footnotes. You would read until you got to the little superscripted number sign and then shift your eyes down to the bottom of the page to read the little footnote. Somewhere along the line, we lost the footnotes. There seems to still be end notes in academia, resulting in a grumbled flip to the back of the book only to see “Ibid.” The nonfiction world seems to have embraced an even more annoying version. They let the author write the notes, and put them at the end of the book, and make no mention of them throughout the book. More than once after I’ve finished a book I’ve come upon several pages of end notes that I had no idea were there. Then I read some disjointed notes that would have been much more interesting if I had been able to read them while I was reading the chapter in question. How is the reader even supposed to know to go to the back of the book at that point? “Bring back the footnote!” Don’t let David Foster Wallace be the only one to indulge. Let our eyes jump around the page again. It would be like a video game. Or a web page. I beg you nonfiction book manufactures, bring back the footnote. Or at the very least the endnote. Footnote! Footnote! Footnote!