Double-Stacked Bookshelves

Happy Monday, fellow A-Zers.  I hope everyone had a wonderful weekend and that you're all ready to get back in the swing of the challenge this week.  I know I am!  Today we move to the nearly halfway point of the challenge and the letter L.  And I bring you:  Lawson, Lee, and Levi. Jenny Lawson If you are looking for a writer who is laugh-out-loud hilarious, look no further than Jenny Lawson.  Her frank, open musings and honest reflections on life are wonderful.  Lawson does not shy away from aspects of herself that might not be "mainstream," instead preferring to air everything in the open in an effort to show people that, whatever their issues, they are not alone.  I remember seeing adverts for her first book, Let's Pretend This Never Happened , and thinking that it sounds good; it had been receiving excellent reviews.  I finally picked it up from the library and looked like a complete lunatic while reading it in public.  It...

"...by the time i got to the interview I was sweating my roommate's BO out of the suit.  The stench of every drink and every cigarette she'd had the last time she wore it filled the high-end office in which I interviewed.  Between the suit, its booze cloud, and my thick virgin eyebrows, I was deemed unfit to answer phones in plain view.  I was turning out to be college educated and unemployable in even the most basic way" (69). Oh man is Tina Fey a funny lady.  Bossypants , Fey's first autobiography, is quite hilarious.  I had been wanting to read this book for a while now and finally did over a week long Mexican vacation...the perfect place to get some much needed reading done along with some much needed sun on my pasty, white Oregon skin! Bossypants explains the trials and tribulations of Fey's life.  From her childhood mishaps to certain mishaps in college, from her portrayals of Sarah Palin and other SNL episodes to the birth of her daughter.  ...

Holy crazy pants!!!  I mean, you can tell that Steven Tyler is a crazy lyrical genius...or maybe just plum crazy...but his Does the Noise in My Head Bother You?: A Rock 'n' Roll Memoir really lays it out for you.  I really enjoyed this book for several reasons.  1) You get to see inside the dynamics of one of America's greatest rock bands, Aerosmith.  2) You get to see inside the twisted, drug-addled mind of Steven Tyler.  3) You get the inside scoop on the band's ups and downs.  4) It's freakin' entertaining as all get out!  "In courting Joan Jett while on tour with her, I would strip bare naked, put on a robe, pull the chair from near the elevator all the way over to the end of the hall, pushing it to right in front of her door.  I'd then take my robe off and, sitting spread-eagled, ring the doorbell and wait for her to open it.  She'd open the door and her jaw would hit the floor as I said, 'I hate myself for loving you.'  She gav...

This week's teaser comes from a book that I've been wanting to read since it first came out, Tina Fey's Bossypants .  There are multiple reasons for this desire to read her book:  she's hilarious...and I really like the cover ;) "The stylists like to figure out a few looks before hair and makeup begins, so you will try on twenty or thirty things.  Somebody will put up a makeshift wall by holding a full-length mirror next to an open loft window, and you will strip down naked.  You must not look in the mirror at your doughy legs and flat feet, for today is about dreams and illusions, and unfiltered natural light is the enemy of dreams" (148). Oh my!  How embarrassing!  This sounds like such a funny read.

Today's teaser comes from a book lent to me by a friend, J. Maarten Troost's The Sex Lives of Cannibals: Adrift in the Equatorial Pacific .  It's a travelogue, and we all know how much I enjoy travel and people who write about travel.  However, I don't think that the island of Tarawa, where Troost heads, would necessarily be my destination.  But who knows, it could be intriguing!  "But we had a few illusions and no one, certainly not Kate, a walking spout of bilious bile, was going to deprive us of what we wanted to see.  We had traveled far, uprooted our lives, moved to the end of the world, and there was no way we were going to concede that we had made a mistake." (35) Sounds fascinating...and comical!!! Tarawa, a remote South Pacific island in the Republic of Kiribati

"It seems to me that it's only since around 1970 that the concept of diet and exercise has existed in the way it does now, which is based on exertion and restriction being the key to weight loss, and yet since then, we have seen an increase in obesity in countries that have adopted it.  (These are also the countries where the fast-food industry boomed during that time.)  The diet industry is making a lot of money selling us fad diets, nonfat foods full of chemicals, gym memberships, and pills while we lose a little of our self-esteem every time we fail another diet or neglect to use the gym membership we can barely afford." (302) ~ Portia de Rossi It's interesting, but I've never really thought about dieting as an industry as the above except from Portia de Rossi's memoir, Unbearable Lightness:  A Story of Loss and Gain , declares it to be.  And, honestly, I have to say that I agree with her.  There are so many different fad diets out there that claim you...

Mary Karr's The Liar's Club was a very interesting read.  I started reading this book at the end of September (along with about two others) for YET ANOTHER book club I've joined (I think I'm becoming a book club junky).  This one is actually a campus book club made up of students and faculty.  We meet once a month or so to discuss the book and eat food (the bonus of this club).  That being said, the club started this book over the summer and I picked it up on September 19th after my summer department meeting.  Needless to say, I had a later start than everyone else. The book is actually a memoir about Karr's rather traumatic childhood.  This poor girl grew up with an alcoholic father, an alcoholic and CRAZY mother, and had some pretty horrific things happen to her.  From being raped by a neighbor boy to nearly being killed in a car accident with her mother, from being molested by a male babysitter to nearly being detained in Mexico for cro...

  Daniel Tammet meets Kim Peek (the inspiration for Rain Man) Absolutely fascinating.  Thought-provoking.  Interesting.  All of these describe Daniel Tammet's Born on a Blue Day:  Inside the Extraordinary Mind of an Autistic Savant .  I picked this up for my Page by Page online bookclub, after originally passing it by in the first place, and am glad that it was the chosen book for the month.  I learned so much about the mind of a high-functioning autistic and was enthralled from the beginning. In Born on a Blue Day , Tammet sets out to explain how his mind works.  He thinks in colors, numbers and shapes.  All aspects are unique and all hold a special place in his mind and heart.  To see (or read) exactly how he approaches life and different situations was eye-opening.  The process he has to go through every second of every day is mind-boggling and heroic! The parts of the book that made me most angry were those where Tammet de...

Excerpt from Mary Karr's The Liar's Club:  A Memoir ... "Daddy had instructed me in the virtue of what he called equalizers, which meant not only sticks, boards, and rocks, but having one hell of a long memory for mistreatment.  So I wouldn't hesitate to sneak up blindside and bite a bigger kid who'd gotten the better of me a week before.  To my knowledge, I never slouched off an ass-kicking, even the ones that made me double up and cry" (63).