I am at best unsure of how I feel about Mindy Kaling. I detested her character on The Office – Kelly Kapoor drove me nuts. I did love some of the episodes she scripted for The Office, and The Mindy Project is some of my favorite television right now, but not always because of Kaling herself. Sometimes her brand of humor, or the humor she surrounds herself with, just don’t work for me. I can really appreciate a show without always finding it funny. And […]
“‘And then Adam was like, “Who’s Jesus?” and God said, “No one yet. It’s just an idea I’m throwing around.”‘
I admire Jenny Lawson so much, even more now that I’ve read this book. She’s frequently very open on her blog about her mental illness, but she’s never been this open before. It must have taken a great deal of courage to talk so freely about such personal things. Then again, maybe it didn’t. Jenny herself admits in the book there’s a kind of freedom that you can only achieve once you stop caring what other people think and truly accept yourself, flaws and all. […]
Dear Mindy Kaling: Please write a romantic comedy. Okay, thanks, bye.
This isn’t going to be my best review ever. Since last night I’ve been fighting exhaustion, and I think I might have a sinus infection, but I wanted to get this review done within 24 hours of finishing because I know that I will forget what I want to say about it if I wait any longer than that. First, I liked this book more than her first one, although I do admit my memory of that one is a bit squidgy. From what I […]
“Winner: Everyone who isn’t my editor.”
A review is really unnecessary here. Just go buy/check out/borrow/steal Furiously Happy and get to reading. It is incredibly funny, incredibly moving, and really, really, REALLY funny. Did I mention it was funny? Because it’s really funny. This isn’t enough to make word quota is it? Do we have a word quota on the CBR blog? I should probably check in to that. No, I’m not just typing to fill out word space. How dare you, good sir or madam. If I had a white […]
Lincoln was late to his own assassination.
There’s something about the way Sarah Vowell writes about history that brings it to life for me. Probably because there’s something about the way that Sarah Vowell writes about people, and history is made of people. It often doesn’t feel that way. (Ironically, there’s a section in here where she tells a story about a time where she ended up yelling at some guy in a supermarket about how the only time it would be interesting to live through history would be if you were […]
But seriously, why not me?
Expectations for books are funny things. When you’ve read something by a author before, especially a memoir or essay collection, you think it’ll be in a similar vein. After all, you enjoyed the first one so much, you’re buying a second, right? You want to read things like the ones before–not exactly the same, of course, but maybe with the same tone or voice. In her second collection of personal essays, Why Not Me?, Kaling delivers that consistency, but adds something pretty important–feeling and heart.