A bookworm journalist blogs on literature and life
The host for December’s BAND discussion is Erin (Erin Reads) who is another new host for our discussion group. In her post, Erin writes about she is primarily a fiction reader, in part because with fiction she knows that she doesn’t have to assess validity as she reads.
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What It’s About: Mindy Kaling is an Emmy-nominated author and actress on one of my favorite shows, The Office. She’s also a comedian, playwright, and astute observer of what it’s like to be a female in comedy in Hollywood.
Why I Want to Read It: I love The Office, and I love Kaling’s Twitter feed, which makes me think the book will be right up my alley. I’ve been disappointed by some books by young, female essayists (Sloan Crosley’s I Was Told There’d Be Cake let me down), but I get sense this will be more astute.
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The Taliban Shuffle was a book that hit on many of my book weaknesses – journalism, the Middle East, foreign politics, and the role of women in all of those fields. So in that respect, I should have been completely in love with The Taliban Shuffle. Except I wasn’t, at least not as entirely as I expected, and I cannot figure out why.
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Review: Shauna James Ahern grew up in a family where boxed and processed foods were the norm. After years of feeling perpetually under the weather, always slow to recover from illness and generally feeling worn out and torn down, Ahern was diagnosed with celiac disease, an intolerance to gluten. After her diagnosis, Ahern began to explore food in a new way,
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Despite how much I’ve been writing here, I’ve actually been doing some posts in other places around the Interwebz, which I wanted to take a moment to share.
First up is a review of Jim Lehrer’s book about his time moderating presidential debates, Tension City. I thought this book was a delightfully nerdy and awesome look behind-the-scenes at an event so many people watch but few people understand.
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I’ve written a lot about my love of stunt memoirs. For our first BAND discussion, I called them the “candy in my nonfiction diet” because reading then doesn’t demand a lot out of me. They’re also my “genre kryptonite” — a type of book that I have a strange weak spot for reading. I’ve also thought that perhaps stunt memoirs are my nonfiction form of chick lit.
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What It’s About: Following in the wake of Joan Didion’s first memoir of grief, The Year of Magical Thinking, Blue Nights is about the loss of her daughter, Quintana Roo, and Didion’s “thoughts, fears, and doubts regarding having children, illness, and growing old.”
Why I Want to Read It: The Year of Magical Thinking is a beautiful, beautiful, beautiful book, and I think it’s impossible to think about Blue Nights without being reminded of that piece. I mean, even the covers are designed the same way.
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On some level, I think what The Impostor’s Daughter says it is about and what the memoir actually delivers are slightly different things. I picked up the book expecting a story about a woman uncovering the truth about her father, but the book ends up being more about author Laurie Sandell finding herself in the shadow of her larger-than-life father. Luckily, Sandell’s delivery (writing and drawing) in this graphic novel more than sold the second story to me.
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One Sentence Summary: An evolutionary biologist tries to apply lessons from his field in his community, opening up a wide-ranging discussion of evolution, scientific research, and the scientists who do the work.
One Sentence Review: Reading The Neighborhood Project is like sitting down for a conversation with a favorite professor, full of personal stories, research questions, gossip about other scholars, and a range of topics that are more- or less-interesting depending on the reader’s predilections.
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