Book 16: Still Missing

Last week I read:

I'm not the bravest person in the world. I can't even watch commercials for horror movies. Remember the trailer for The Strangers with Liv Tyler? Where the masked teenagers show up at their door? I'm still traumatized by that. I thought Scream was a legitimately scary movie. When the ice-maker rattles in my fridge, it sounds like burglars. When I take my trash out at night, I'm convinced there are bears and/or murderers lurking in the bushes. When I stay up past midnight to work, I worry about ghosts*.

Anyway. Long story short, my imagination is a little bit overactive, so I try to steer clear of anything that gives me new things to worry about. But for reasons unknown, I went on a kick of buying books with words like "thrilling" and "gripping" and "intense" on the back cover. So now I have a little section of my bookshelf dedicated to scary-ish books I've been too chicken to read. But I decided to suck it up and tackle one.

Still Missing is the story of a realtor who's abducted at an open house** and held captive in a remote mountain cabin by an abusive, controlling creepster. She recounts her escape -- and her attempt to reclaim a "normal" life -- through a series of therapy sessions. Meanwhile, she can't shake the feeling that someone is still out to get her. Suffice to say I read the entire book in about four hours and walked away feeling vaguely suspicious of everyone I know.

Someone else might describe it as "mildly suspenseful"; I don't know. Like I said, I'm not the best baseline. Great book, though. I'm going to go check the locks on my door again.

* Oddly enough, I'm not afraid of heights, snakes, flying, or change. 
**New thing to worry about!

Book 15: The Descendants

I finally finished:

...and it's my favorite fiction book I read all year.

It's not exactly a light read: Laissez-faire dad Matt King discovers his wife's affair while she's lying in an irreversible coma, and has to cobble together some semblance of a family structure for his two daughters -- one a recovering drug addict, the other an awkward preteen.

But it was actually really uplifting. I swear.

I rented the movie right after I finished reading this, but I found it infinitely more depressing than the book. George Clooney is amazing, obviously -- I read the entire book in his voice even before I saw the movie -- but it was like they struggled to squeeze the bummer plotlines into a two-hour movie, and didn't have any time left over for the optimistic subtext.

Anyway. If you didn't read this book back in 2007, go read it!

The 52 Project is Stuck.

I've been reading this...

...for the past three months.

The thing is, I'm loving it. It's funny and sad and it puts me back on Oahu for a few minutes a week. But that's the problem -- I've only had a few minutes a week to devote to reading.

I'm not complaining, though. The time crunch comes courtesy of a few awesome new clients, and I've gotten to nerd out on topics I'm actually interested in, which is always a bonus. So George Clooney* can wait. But I'm making it a goal to at least hit 20 books this year. Not a proper 52 project, but 20 is infinitely better than none, mathematically speaking.


* Well, Matt King. This is why I usually refrain from buying books with the movie tie-in cover. I can't stop picturing the movie actors as the main characters. Not the worst thing when it's George Clooney, so I just went with it this time.

Book 14: You're Not Doing It Right

This week's read:

My obsession with Michael Ian Black dates back to The State (Toothbrush! Pants! Barry and Levon!). I've seen him live twice (Stella and stand-up), read just about everything he's ever written (from McSweeneys to Purple Kangaroo), and pretty much use Twitter solely to follow him.

So it was no real surprise that I liked this book.

It was surprising that it made me cry.

In fairness, everything makes me cry, but still. Based on our two-decade stalkership, I was expecting the usual dark humor and dick jokes with the added bonus of snarky parenting stories. Which isn't inaccurate. But given that Black is fairly private and almost always in character, I was surprised at how unflinchingly honest his memoir is. He doesn't bare his neurosis in the calculated, cute way that an actress might "confess" that she loves video games and cooking shows. He bares it all in a very uncool way that kind of makes you (meaning me) want to punch him and then hug him, or hug him and then punch him. Getting his ass kicked by a fellow nerd in high school, exploiting his father's death to get unlimited access to sugary cereal, sobbing over a Creed song in his car, being the Judgmental Sober Guy at parties, threatening to divorce his wife over alarm clock settings, worrying that he's failing as a parent -- none of these stories are terribly redeeming, except in the bravery required to share them in the first place.

I'm not saying I related to everything. In fact, I want to make a point of saying that I DIDN'T RELATE TO EVERYTHING! But it was still equal parts heart-wrenching and hilarious.

And the last four pages and the appendix are pure genius.

Loved it.

Book 13: Free-Range Chickens

This week's read:

Two questions: Why have I never heard of Simon Rich before, and how fast can I read everything else he's written?

I bought this book on a bargain rack and read it this morning, cover to cover, in an hour -- because it was awesome, and also because it was short. It's all McSweeneys-style conceptual humor (lists, imagined dialogue, and one fantastic Choose Your Own Adventure story) so it's easy to breeze through while, say, your toddlers are watching Doc McStuffins. 

Rich mines a lot of material from his awkward childhood and an obsession with bad TV shows, and consequently, I related to waaaaay too many stories. I think I dog-eared every other page. My personal favorite was "Worst Nightmare," in which he falsely confesses to a murder rather than admitting that he spent his workday watching back-to-back Nanny 911 marathons. (Oh, freelancing. I love you.)

"My top secret seventh grade diary" was quite possibly taken word for word from my own diary. "The only emails I could receive that would justify the frequency with which I check my email" was painfully true. And as someone who's paranoid about almost everything, I loved "A conversation between the people who hid in my closet every night when I was seven" (still true for me today) and "What I want on my tombstone when I die of encephalitis next week" (posthumous passive-aggressiveness for friends who underestimated his mosquito bite).

Is it weird if I list every story? I won't, but I liked them all. 

And now I'm only five weeks behind, and for that, I want to hug him.

Book 12 (Sort Of): Not So Funny When It Happened

This week's read:

One of my favorite Henry Rollins quotes is, "Read or don't, but you can't catch up."

That said, I'm a few weeks behind on my 52-week project. I blame my heavy workload the past few weeks, which is a good thing -- I'd rather be writing than reading.

But I also blame this book. The full title is Not So Funny When It Happened: The Best of Travel Humor and Misadventure but it should have been called Not So Funny When It Happened: And Still Not Particularly Funny Now. I bought it because it featured travel stories from Dave Barry, Anne Lamott, David Sedaris, and Bill Bryson, along with about 30 others. Guaranteed win, right?

As it turns out, the only stories I liked were the ones by...Dave Barry, Anne Lamott, David Sedaris, and Bill Bryson. And even the Dave Barry piece wasn't half as funny as anything in Dave Barry's Only Travel Guide You'll Ever Need or Dave Barry does Japan. Some of the stories, like "Close Encounters of the California Kind," read like a seventh grade summer-vacation report, or a lame bar story. Some were just boring. I really related to "Fear of Not Flying," an essay about arriving at the airport obscenely early -- and having a husband who casually wanders off to the bathroom during final boarding -- but I wouldn't call it funny. Just relatable, and slightly panic-inducing.

I was so unenthused that I only dog-eared two pages, and looking back, I have no idea why I dog-eared them. I can't find anything particularly funny or thought-provoking on those two pages. I think I just felt weird having all those unfolded pages in a book.

Oh well. I'm done, and I can move on to the next. I'm six weeks behind now, so I don't know if I'll be able to catch up -- but Henry Rollins says I can't anyway, existentially speaking. So I'll just keep reading :)

"It's a Major Award!"

No, it's not a leg lamp.

A project I worked on for the Women's Health website, Women's Health Guide to Your Breasts, just won the MIN Award for Best Microsite!

I worked on two sections of this project: the Best Bras Ever and the Best Sports Bras.

Congrats to all the writers on the project (whose health coverage no doubt was a wee bit more responsible for the win than my vast knowledge of lingerie!).