Summer Reading: Julie and Julia

OK, so I've been meaning to pick up this book all summer. Really. But then the great Tamora Pierce quest happened. Anyway, I finally got around to it.

I love reading memoirs. Especially fun, pithy funny ones who's plots wouldn't be dissimilar to a chick flick. Hell, this one is so like that it has now been made into a chick flick, written and directed by the Queen of Chick Flicks Norah Ephron, but I digress.

Julie and Julia is a truly adorable book. Julie Powell is tantalizingly neurotic, and straddles the line between annoying and endearing perfectly. There are plenty of times when you roll your eyes at her, but you get the feeling that she's rolling her own eyes too.

For those of you who live under rocks, Julie and Julia chronicles Julie Powell's quest to cook every recipe in Julia Child's Mastering The Art of French Cooking. It's also about sex. A lot about sex actually. But anyway...

I did feel myself getting fatter just reading about some of meals Julie made out of the book. I've never been much of a cook, I'm a baker, I make a mean yellow buttermilk cupcake, but cooking also seemed way to precarious for me. My brother and my mom are great cooks, they can whip up anything and it comes out delicious. I got the feeling that Julie was this kind of cook before her "project," so it was less of a stretch for her.

I liked the book. Didn't love it. But with the endless abyss of school only reading coming to me in just a week (EEK!) I'm not being picky. I definitely still want to see the movie. Definitely.

Summer Reading: A Little Bit Wicked, Life, Love and Faith in Stages

Have I espoused before how much I adore Kristin Chenoweth? I'm pretty sure I have. I've at least talked about how much I love Wicked, and I feel the two probably go hand in hand.

A Little Bit Wicked is Kristin's attempt to get all Jen Lancaster on her cute, blonde, Christian butt. (I say butt, because Kristin would never use the a-word) Everything about this book made me want to give Cheno a big hug and tell her how much her work has meant to me over my life. Alan Cumming, her and Kathy Bates's version of "Easy Street" is easily the only thing that makes the ABC made for TV remake of Annie passible. I watched her hug hit sitcom Kristin. (Me and her parents, pretty much), I set my VCR for her role in The Music Man. And then there's Galinda...you want my opinion on that, check out this post from a few months ago for that explanation. Annabeth was the saving grace of the last few seasons of The West Wing, and Pushing Daisies was taken from us far too early.

The book deals with her feelings about her meteoric rise on Broadway, her on again off again relationship with Aaron Sorkin, her ever present and unapologetic faith in Jesus Christ, and has a wit and humor that people associate with this little spitfire. I highly reccomend the book. I started it at 4 o'clock PM yesterday and finished it at 10:30 this morning, so it's not a hard read, but it's good!

Summer Reading: Queen of Babble Gets Hitched

I've written at length about how much I love Meg Cabot, so when I finally read the finale to the Queen of Babble triology last night and this morning, I was expecting great things. I was a little disappointed.

Queen of Babble revolves around the lovably neurotic and big mouthed Lizzie Nichols. By the time Gets Hitched begins Lizzie is living in New York City, working in a West Side bridal shop, and recently engaged to her dreamy French Aristocrat boyfriend Luke, after having spent New Years Eve with his best friend and her recently out of the closeted best friend's ex Chaz. (to clarify, Lizzie's friend Shari is the gay one, not Chaz) SCANDALOUS, I know. As the year rolls on Lizzie and Luke put off planning their wedding and Chaz and Lizzie continue to deny they have feelings for each other.

This is Cabot so I'm sure you can guess the ending. Anyway, I laughed a few times, not as much as I usually do. It was a nice capstone to the triology, although unlike The Princess Diaries series it didn't build, each installment wasn't better than the last but in fact worst. The first Queen of Babble remains one of my favorite books, but it's sequels are definitely sub standard.

Summer Reading: The Tales of Beedle The Bard

JK Rowling's companion to Harry Potter and The Deathly Hallows the short and sweet The Tales of Beedle The Bard came out almost a year ago, I bought it six months ago and I've just gotten around to reading it today.

Beedle is a necessary read for even the most casual of Harry Potter fans. Rowling enfuses these Brother's Grimm style fairy tales with her wit and somewhat twisted sense of humor. Each tale is followed by a "commentary" by the ever wise, somewhat omneiscient Albus Dumbledore. One extremely pro Muggle story is commented on partially with an excerpt from a letter to Dumbledore by Luscious Malfoy that is apparently the basis of the rampant antagonism between the two wizards in the original series. The final sentence of this commentary is, "This exchange marked the beginning of Mr. Malfoy's long campaign to have me removed from my post as headmaster of Hogwarts, and of mine to have him removed from his position as Lord Voldemort's Favorite Death Eater." I giggled for a while

The real piece de resitance is the final tale, "The Tale of Three Brothers." All of the stories contribute a great deal to understand the world of Harry Potter but obviously "The Tale of Three Brothers" contributes to the plot. Obviously, Voldemort's quest for the unbeatable wand and the origins of Harry's invisibility cloak are both rooted in this tale. I really enjoyed the little collection. A must read for any Potter Fan.

Summer Reading: The End of The Jews

When Adam Mansbach came and spoke at Scranton this past March, I got the sense that the dude was angry. Or at least kind of peeved and played on that to enhance his image as "young priveleged white male in tune with the black struggle." But it wasn't until I made it through his second novel (The Allendale Public Library doesn't stock his first one Angry Black White Boy, a satire about white privilege, hm, I wonder why?) The End of The Jews that I realized how angry he is.

Or if Mansbach isn't angry at least his book is. The End of The Jews chronicles the multi-generational Brodsky family, Jewish family from the Bronx, grappling with artistic and intellectual pursuits. It's an intersting read, for sure, and as Mansbach and I said when we talked, "The Bronx is the Bronx," so there were certainly elements that I related to on that level, being the granddaughter of Bronx Irishmen, rather than the grandson of Bronx Jews.

Mansbach's characters are flawed, loveable and all too human. The centerpiece, brilliant novelist Tristan Brodsky is the kind of tortured genius who you can't help but want to see fall off his high horse. His grandson Tris is slightly more sympathetic and their respective love interests, Tristan's wife Amalia and Tris's girlfriend Nina are a but clicheed as women stifled by their love for their brilliant men.

It's a good read, and honestly, I'm waiting for Mansbach's third effort, which he read to us from, which seems a little bit more up my alley. Either way, I stretched my horizons, I don't usually read contemporary male authors. Good for me!

Summer Reading: The Host

All praise to Stephenie Meyer, for once again gathering me into her web of riduclous plots that make you feel like an idiot when you say them out loud but characters that you can't help but fall in love with.

Unlike Twilight, The Host is not written for teenagers, that's not to say that teenagers couldn't read it, although it is a bit thicker and psychologically complex. It deals with the same themes as Twilight, including what exactly defines a person as "human."

The Host takes place in the not so distant future, a world where a race of altruistic aliens calling themselves "souls" have invaded earth and taken up residence in our bodies. They believe that they are doing right, settling our beautiful and rich planet with their ideas of perfect harmony and balance will erase human war and destruction. However The Souls find themselves overhelmed by human emotions and desires.

Meyer takes similar characters to Twilight and inserts them in this different scenario and of course, this is the woman who gave us one of the best love triangles of the past ten years, she doesn't disappoint on that end.

Wanderer, our narrator is currently possesing twenty year old Melanie, who before she was captured was on the run with her thirteen year old brother Jamie and the love of her life, Jared. Wanderer has lived on eight planets before earth and is highly admired by the others in her community. Melanie is strong willed and determined to reunite with her brother and lover, and refusing to surrender her consciousness to Wanderer. Without giving away too much, they form an unlikely partnership and find a small pocket of human resistance where Jared and Jaime have been hiding out. Although the humans of this compound have a policy to kill any souls who come to them, Jared and Jaime refuse to let anyone kill Melanie, even though they believe her to be dead. Over time the community grows attached to Wanderer, especially one of the men Ian, who falls for her, much to Mel's objections. This twisted love square between four people in three bodies, grounds the story emotionally.

The story is slow to get started and the book is very long, over 600 pages, and for the first hundred I had a lot of trouble getting invested. But the pay off is absolutely there, especially when Wanderer starts to realize her feelings for Ian. The relationship between Melanie and Wanderer is extremely interesting, Wanderer acting as the Ego and Melanie as the Id. (See, I got something from Intro to Psych) until they start to come together. Meyer's requisite happy ending is there, and as usual there are incredible smaller characters to pepper the landscape and make the story something more than just some kind of science fiction melodrama.

Once again, I recomend it, but just be ready for the first 150 pages of introduction before the real story starts.

Summer Reading: Pretty in Plaid

Since it's summer and new TV that I actually like is restricted to HBO, the general focus of the blog is going to switch to summer related topics, books and movies.

First book I read this summer was Jen Lancaster's fourth, and to my opinion funniest memoir, so far. I've read all of Jen's books...and I follow her on Twitter and read her blog Jennsylvania. She's hilariously funny, and I always feel like we're on the same wavelength.

Pretty in Plaid chronicles the first thirty years of Jen's life as she remembers them, through her clothes. We see her life in her girl scout uniform, in her prom dress, in her sorority lavalier, in the first suit she bought before embarking on her journey through coporate life in Chicago. This is all punctuated by her razor sharp wit, her funny footnotes, and her pop culture references.

It ends on a lengthy epilogue where Jen espouses the philosophy that she put forth originally in her third book, Such a Pretty Fat. That as great as taking care of the outside is, it means nothing if you don't like the inside. In the end for all of her bitchiness, all of her whining, Jen is our friend. She's the best of us, and that's why I keep reading her stuff. And why you should all start.