I’ve really been trying to make an effort in 2018 to read books I already own. Currently the amount of books I own but haven’t read, including in audio and e-book, numbers around 221. faintingviolet gave me this book in the CBR book exchange in December 2016, two weeks before Carrie Fisher died. Even though I was beyond excited to finally have it in my possession, since it had been on my TBR for years and I’d never gotten around to it, I just couldn’t make myself read […]
Vocabular Degeneration
Wishful Drinking This is a tough book to read. It’s really funny and really interesting, but you can feel as you’re reading, with it’s repetition, it’s constant reminder that she’s had electroconvulsive therapy, memory loss, years of drug abuse, and all that that she’s just not all there anymore. But, if she weren’t so honest about everything, then it would be unbearable. Instead, there’s just a lower-lying scrim over everything knowing that so much has been lost. Regardless, the book is really funny. I read […]
“Keep in mind though, I’m a PEZ dispenser and I’m in the abnormal Psychology textbook. Who says you can’t have it all?”
Like half a dozen other Cannonballers I have gone back through the Carrie Fisher catalog in the months following her untimely passing. The Princess Diarist, Shockaholic and now Wishful Drinking (yeah, I realize I went backwards but I read them chronologically the last go around). “If my life wasn’t funny it would just be true, and that is unacceptable.” I listened to the audio-book this go around, which I wasn’t ready to do with her other two memoirs, and it really punches you in the face how […]
A Book That Rubs in What We’ve Lost
Like many people, I’m sure, I set out to find some of Carrie Fisher’s writing after hearing of her passing, and crying a lot over various tumblr posts about the fierce, proud, witty, wonderful woman we’d just lost. It was surprisingly easy to get my hands on a copy of Wishful Drinking, Fisher’s short, sharp memoir that’s largely just a collection of anecdotes about her remarkable and exciting life, and I devoured it in a matter of hours. It definitely did not help with the […]
“It’s sort of like glowing in your own dark.”
In honor of the late Carrie Fisher, I picked up her audiobook of Wishful Drinking. This was written/performed about 8 years ago after Ms. Fisher went through electroconvulsive therapy, with a side effect of the therapy affecting her memories. So she wrote the show/book to help her remember. I highly recommend the audiobook version, as Carrie reads/performs her own work. We tend to skip around in time a lot, which I suppose is understandable given her condition. Before I picked this up I really had […]
Goodnight, Sweet Princess …
I happened to be at the Disney park that has franchised most of the Star Wars experience last week when I heard about Carrie Fisher’s passing. Talk about bittersweet, as we saw posters of Princess Leia, from all of her franchise appearances, around the park. I first saw Star Wars on its first release in 1977, and loved her spunky take on the princess, although I have to admit my young teen eyes and heart were mostly focused on the dreamy Luke Skywalker. But I have enjoyed Carrie Fisher […]