Oh, Dave Barry. You may not be the height of sophisticated humor, but you crack me up every time. My city has an annual book sale to raise money for the library — it’s basically my Christmas (mass market paperbacks for a quarter!) and I always managed to find at least one Dave Barry collection every year. The basic “theme” of this one is Dave Barry reacting and responding to various weird ass stuff that readers have sent to him over the years. For example, news articles […]
“I make art for the sake of art . . . and for my own selfish gratification, because I’m an artistic monster.”
I have a tendency to read memoirs written by celebrities, or “celebrities”, when they pop up on Overdrive — regardless of whether or not I’ve heard of the person. They usually short, fun reads and contain at least a few good stories. I probably don’t enjoy them as much when I have no outside information about the writer, but they’re usually worth the few hours it takes to read them. A strong endorsement, huh? Actually Lindsey Stirling’s memoirs, The Only Pirate at the Party, were pretty enjoyable overall. […]
Triple Cannonball!
I’ve been vaguely familiar with Tig Notaro for the last few years, but mostly as a writer on Inside Amy Schumer, and as the comic who announced her breast cancer at a stand up show. I had no idea that in the four months prior to her breast cancer diagnosis in 2012, that Notaro also almost died from Clostridium difficile (C. diff), lost her mother in a freak accident, and went through a break up. I’m Just a Person tells the story of that year, and how Notaro coped (or […]
“What did it feel like to die? Was it a peaceful sleep?”
I’ve read of few of Laurie Halse Anderson’s YA novels. This one is skewed for a slightly younger audience than say, Speak or The Impossible Knife of Memory, but manages an interesting glimpse into the past, led by a strong female character. Late in the summer of 1793, yellow fever killed an estimated 5,000 people (in a city of 50,000) in less than three months. 20,000 residents fled the city, while the rest waited out the disease as their family and neighbors dropped like flies. Fever 1793 lets us watch the epidemic through the […]
“It was her style, that indefinable asset. It was said that the others had style but Babe was style.”
I realized about 4 hours into this book (I listened to the audio version — big mistake, since you can’t skim to reach the ending faster) that nothing was actually going to happen. I slogged on, since I’d already invested so much time, but I was right — this one goes nowhere. I also kept telling myself that I like Melanie Benjamin novels, but I turned out to be wrong there. Like The Aviator’s Wife and The Autobiography of Mrs. Tom Thumb, The Swans of Fifth Avenue was just dull. […]
“I am empty space, and I am the light that illuminates that space.”
This book had a really cool concept that just did not work here — I thought I would be reading some good horror, and ended up with a slightly bloodier Twilight. “It was possible, I saw now, to be a grotesque, to be huge and free, to wander the streets in utter freedom despite your atrocity, as long as you did it when everybody else was sealed inside their little lit boxes. Now it made sense – why monsters came out at night.” About 100 pages into […]
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